In the mid-twentieth century, the rampant population growth worried many who feared imminent overcrowding, overpopulation, and societal collapse.Ĭalhoun’s early experiments involved a 28-month study of a colony of Norway rats in a 10,000-square-foot outdoor pen. It was the stuff of nightmares – at least to the nervous 1970s audience. He coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe the so-called aberrant behaviors resulting from overcrowded population densities. Known as the neo-Malthusians (after 18 th-century scholar Thomas Malthus), they predicted a terrifying future if the rollercoaster of human population growth rose ever higher they dared to look down.Įthologist John Calhoun’s Rat Utopia experiments fueled these fears, pointing towards a spiraling degradation of normal social interactions. Short stories like Billennuim warned of a world of box-like apartments and pedestrian congestion lasting days, where every inch of land is devoted to housing or farming. In the mid-twentieth century, the rampant population growth worried many who feared imminent overcrowding, overpopulation, and societal collapse. The soaring trajectory of human population growth over the past two centuries is now an accepted fact – an ascending rollercoaster without any sense of down. Surely, such a startling statistic should be front-page news. That’s more people than have ever existed! In fact, a jaw-dropping 7pc of people who have ever lived are alive today. Global population estimates exceeded 8 billion people in November 2022. Researchers, geneticists, scientists and sociologists in recent weeks have pointed out that the Universe 25 experiment could provide the window into the demise of the humankind while others have also questioned the experiment itself, as it was conducted in a manufactured environment.John Calhoun Inside Universe 25 – The Biggest Mouse Utopia. The Universe 25 experiment started in 1968 and by 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population crashed from a high of 2,200 to zero. Soon, due to no interest in mating, or building a sustainable society, the mouse population began to die. Instead, they spent all time feeding, drinking, grooming, and sleeping.Įventually, the beautiful ones outnumbered the more aggressive mice. Later, a new category of mice titled ‘beautiful ones’ developed, which were segregated from the others.īeing separated from the rest of the Universe 25 mice, the beautiful ones made no contributions to the society, gave no help in mating, mothering, marking territory, etc. Males who failed, withdrew physically and psychologically became inactive and aggregated in large pools near the centre of the floor and did not interact with other rats. With not much space available, the excess mice had nowhere to emigrate and had no social role to fill and became isolated. The mice split off into groups, and those that could not find a role in these groups found themselves with nowhere to go. When the population of the mice hit 620, the doubling slowdown around every 145 days, as the mouse society began to hit problems. However, this is where, things started to change. As a result, about every 55 days, the population doubled. Since it was paradise, the rats did not have to forage, which resulted in excessive sexual intercourse. On his 25th iteration of mice reproduction (dubbed as Universe 25), Calhoun placed four pairs of mice that in a short time began to reproduce. Today, researchers worldwide believe that the end-results of the Universe 25 experiment provided a model of how societies can potentially collapse in the future. The experiment was to observe behaviour of rats in the paradise and even perhaps understand human behaviour. They were placed in a huge enclosure that was divided into multiple chambers or small apartments. The researcher created a utopia for rats wherein they had access to unlimited food, water, nesting supplies and no predators. The mice experiment of Calhoun, who was a researcher in US-based National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), was essentially aimed at creating a perfect paradise for rats. The reason for sudden interest in Calhoun’s work, which was titled by him as ‘Universe 25’, is due to the eerie resemblance that the experiment has to the present-day society. Calhoun on mice has suddenly started receiving attention across multiple social media platforms. In the last few weeks, however, a medical experiment that was conducted between 19 by an American researcher John B. Even today, animal model experiments play a vital role in advancement of medical technology. Hyderabad: For centuries, laboratory experiments on mice have been the foundation based on which scientists and researchers worldwide have achieved significant medical breakthroughs and developed their research hypothesis.
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