In the late 1960s and early 1970s, ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments on mice. One of the experiments, known as ‘Universe 25’, attempted to understand the impact of overpopulation on behaviour and societal structures, using colonies of mice as his subjects, in a rodent Garden of Eden.
Universe 25 was a carefully designed enclosure measuring nine feet square with 4.5-foot-high sides. Within this space, Calhoun created what was essentially a mouse utopia. The enclosure was divided into four equal sections, each with a central nesting area connected by ramps to multiple food and water dispensers. There were no predators in this world, and disease was minimised due to regular cleaning. With an unlimited supply of food and water, the mice were provided everything they needed to flourish.
But, on day 600 in this mouse paradise, the last baby was born. By day 920 the last remaining mouse died. So what happened to this thriving population?
At the beginning of the experiment, Calhoun introduced eight mice — four pairs of males and females — into this environment. The initial days in Universe 25 were marked by exponential growth, a period Calhoun referred to as the “strive period”. The population doubled approximately every 55 days. By Day 315, Universe 25 was home to 620 mice. This might sound like a big number but it was a mere fraction of the 3,840 the enclosure was designed to house.
However, it was at this point that hierarchies began to form.
Despite the ample resources and having everything they required provided to them, around Day 315, the growth rate began to decline, slowing more than what was expected based on the enclosure’s physical capacity. It was at this juncture that Calhoun observed behavioural changes indicative of a deep-seated societal breakdown.
Male mice, devoid of any need to defend territory or compete for resources, began to display heightened aggression. Violent encounters became common, often directed haphazardly, not only at other males but also at females and juveniles.
Calhoun called this breakdown of social order a “behavioural sink”.
On the other hand, some males, referred to by Calhoun as “the beautiful ones”, opted for complete societal withdrawal. These were mice that had been born into the chaos. They ceased to mate or fight, instead spending their time eating and obsessively grooming. These mice remained healthy and sleek but contributed nothing to the continuation of their society, instead displaying an obsessive focus on self-maintenance. They no longer interacted with their peers, instead preferring to spend all of their time alone. This withdrawal can be viewed as a form of psychological retreat, a response to the stressful social conditions in their environment.
Females weren’t immune to these behavioural shifts either. They became hyper-aggressive, excessively protective of their offspring, and would sometimes attack other mice encroaching on their space, often leading to injury or death. Paradoxically, these hyper-protective females also started neglecting or outright abandoning their nests and offspring, which significantly increased the infant mortality rate.
Calhoun said the mice were “trapped in an infantile state of early development”.
Even though Universe 25 was merely half full, the society was on a downward spiral towards extinction. Calhoun identified this period as the “death phase”. Mice no longer wanted to mate and fertility dropped. The birth-rate fell dramatically and the society as a whole became listless and inactive. The final birth in Universe 25 was recorded on Day 600, and by Day 920, the last resident of this mouse utopia had died, marking the end of the Universe 25 experiment.
He repeated these experiments over and over again, always with the same result.
Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment sent ripples through the scientific community and beyond. It provided a stark picture of a society imploding due to overpopulation, leading to chaos, societal breakdown and ultimately extinction. Some interpreted it as a warning about the potential fate of humanity in the face of unchecked growth and resource consumption.
Some might argue, exactly what the neo-Malthusians wanted people to worry would happen!
Others argued that Universe 25 was less about overpopulation and more about a lack of social roles and stimuli. Calhoun’s mice had no challenges to overcome, no new territory to explore and no threats to unite against. Their existence was reduced to eating, drinking and grooming, devoid of any meaningful engagement or social structure.
Do you see parallels with today’s society? Are we living in Universe 25? Or could it be that neo-Malthusians, alarmed by the experiment’s outcomes, felt compelled to intervene and prevent a hypothetical societal collapse, one that, in reality would never happen in a far more complex society of humans?
This piece was originally published on the Naked Emperor’s Substack. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It most certainly does have implications. Indeed, with corners of the west now the most densely populated in the world, the correlation with low birth rates is obvious. Stuffing more and more people – often alien, badly educated, and (thanks to their own cultures and histories) innately hostile people – into those corners is a triumph of ideology over reason. Indeed, that ideology may itself be a pathological symptom, an expression of the bewildered self-hatred of an unpurposed population. Look at the ideology’s own symptoms: childishness, over-sensitivity, obsession, despair and self-mutilation. The west is sick and its red politics are a disgusting rash.
According to Stephen Shaw – writer and director of Birthgap: Childless World film – 70% of the world’s population lives in a country where the birth rate is less than 2 per couple, based on World Bank data 2020 (GB News clip). The command in the beginning, when the earth was empty, was “Be fruitful and multiply”. It is now full, and man, spiritually sick, and blind to the existence of his Maker, no longer wants to multiply. We now really are at the end of the road.
Except birth rates also are falling in non-crowded, non-West societies.
The correlation is between increased prosperity which increases number of live births, lowers infant death rates and therefore reduces requirement to keep having children to replace the dead ones. Plus more prosperity reduces need for children as a source of labour in the family economy.
That is why birth rates have declined in the West – correlating with increased wealth.
If it were a matter of overcrowding, families outside of areas of dense population would be large with birth rates unaffected – that is not so.
This Malthusian nonsense persists no matter how often the end of days due to overpopulation fails to materialise despite World population increasing.
This is all true – the “classical” position, indeed. But it does not mean that there is not another set of circumstances and imperatives at the other end of the spectrum, does it? Because we are not dealing with simple “prosperity” any more, are we? The west is “prosperous” but in what way, for how long and – in which case – why so unhappy? The old riches were experienced in beautifully built cities with green spaces and grand monuments at a time of cultural self-confidence and deep social solidarity brought about by national religions and broad ethno-cultural homogeneity. Our fag-end wealth is declining to start with, funds poverty and takes place in over crowed, concrete, polyglot slums in which vigilante justice is taking over from flabby misdirected policing and social solidarity has evaporated. These are the circumstances of the mice; and these are the circumstances which are inducing us to behave like the mice.
The factor that characterises this mouse environment is the lack of external threats and the lack of predators. I would argue that is why the mice turned on themselves and stopped reproducing. The UN, WHO and WEF are eagerly preparing such a protected and supposedly risk-free world for humanity.
Doesn’t the religion of evolution preach that ‘isolated communities’ will produce new functionality and species? So where are the super mice from this experiment? Or the reptile? Or does the Darwin religion need other factors inside their isolated utopia to take the shrew to us, like say the god of trillions of years, or the spirit of the shit happens.
I have often thought of this experiment…I saw a programme on TV about it many years ago…one of the things I remember clearly is that in the later stages, many of the mice became ‘homosexual’..and before the end..the mothers killed and eat their babies!!
Some of the recent stories about men using hormones and drugs, dangerous to infants they might ‘chest feed’…the numerous clinics offering trans-surgery to toddlers, and of course the parents who offered up their babies and children for the ‘not safe and not effective experimental goo’..makes me think we might be in the ‘baby eating stage!!?
Having said that, was it simply because of over-population?….or did the experiment just point out what always happens in societies that become in-cohesive and broken, for myriad reasons…..and the experiment just ‘sped-up’ the results?
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that folk are waking up to the very real & present danger posed to children by the aggressive trans agenda, school sex education & the huge numbers of single migrant males an external threat to unite a growing proportion of society to fight for the community rather than the individual may be a positive rather than a destructive thing.
I’m a very hopeful person BB…I just think we have to be….
Me and Mr Gum have had a few weeks touring in the caravan…and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the conversations I’ve heard or have had with people…(usually in the pub..obs!!) lots of people talking about how crackers the Covid and green stuff are especially….had a cracking conversation with a total stranger last night about Covid, WEF WHO..with a couple of locals throwing in their two-penn’orth….very reassuring…
This whole men ( trans women ) ”chest-feeding” babies is just next level sick, in my opinion. This isn’t so much men in fantasy land, having some sort of psychotic episode where they actually believe that they are women producing and feeding a baby milk, it’s just out and out child abuse. It’s pure fetishism and these extremely mentally ill individuals are being enabled, even supported and encouraged, to go right ahead and use a baby like some prop in their psychotic, warped fantasy. Makes me want to puke. Well I don’t want to regurgitate on my own so here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Fortunately no baby, just a breast pump, FFS!
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1677458895206318080
My thoughts exactly, Mogs. Mental illness combined with child abuse, pure and simple.
OMG- is this ‘chest feeding’ thing for real!- please tell me someone hasn’t said it would actually work! Trans ‘women’ can have t*ts stuck on, but they will be made of silicone or chicken fillets- no mammary tissues at all.
. I think these Trang’s are actually xx women haters.
As a bird, I know this to be absolutely , biologically impossible . Grotesque and really taking the wiss out of xx women
I think my biggest concern is wtf is that stuff coming out of their nipples in the first place? Probably closely followed by what kind of woman would give birth to a baby then hand it over to some warped, demented caricature of a female to get their kicks anyway? I mean, who in their right mind wants a partner that’s that f*cked up? It’s just nasty.
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1677462740472872961
..absolutely..it’s come to something when a picture of a sad deluded man shoving a nipple at a poor innocent baby is seen as breast feeding…while actual real women feeding their babies are birthing people!! FFS!
Totally bonkers, and I will never accept it, or stay quiet about it……
A clear case of Something happened and we don’t know why, Watson!
Considering that the experiment was repeatable, about the only certain thing which can be gathered from it is that Calhoun managed to construct an 100% lethal environment for mouse populations, his belief to the contrary notwithstanding. Nobody ever bothered to follow up on that, hence, we don’t even know what killed all these mice.
Science at its finest.
The day mankind turned its back on manned space exploration, the human race turned inwards. Eco-loons took over governments, the left wing ‘we’ve got too much to sort out here before we go into space’ social engineering brigade got into positions of power, Concorde was ditched and supersonic flight passenger flight abandoned, just as people were looking at suborbital slingshot aircraft, historical grievances were exhumed and new grievances created. The human race, encouraged by science and many of its religions – including Christianity – used to look to the horizon and wonder what was beyond. Now it looks at its feet or its navel and nurtures new grievances.
All things considered, deep-sea exploration, something nobody ever really tried, seems much more likely to result in something useful to me than space exploration. With the technolology we currently possess, we cannot realistically reach anything beyond the moon and the moon seems pretty useless as a planet.
End of the day, lunar bases offer a launch pad to the rest of the solar system. Lower gravity offers experimental scientific benefits, not to mention being able to keep dangerous substances off-planet. All biological and disease research could be taken off-world, for example. And, if lunar cities are eventually built, older people and disabled people have the chance to live happier and more productive lives without the burden of full gravity on their bodies.
In time, if we really do run low on resources on Earth (which is open to question) there’s an entire solar system around us with everything we need to sustain the human race pretty much forever from fuels to elements to essential minerals.
Deep sea research is certainly something we need, but the matter of water pressure, for starters, makes it very difficult.
The most obvious aspect to me is only starting with four males and four females. Sounds pretty inbred to me. Can’t imagine that helped.
I don’t think it’s a problem rats have in general….I think they breed within families naturally, and all the time….I read somewhere that two rats can produce half a billion baby rats if left unchecked for three years! But lack of food, shelter and disease usually stop these kinds of numbers….and in laboratories they are not considered to be inbred until around the 20th generation…
…I believe they added new rats in different stages as well in the study.
But..it is just one study and you could be right…!
Except basic freedom and the existential purpose that comes with it.
Most animals breed worse in captivity than in the wild. No doubt if they’re stuffed together like sardines, worse so.
For all we know, the chemicals used for the cleaning could have been slowly poisoning the mice or the act itself could have robbed them of something essential for a healthy mouse existence. In the real world, mice don’t live in dwellings regularly cleaned according to some humans idea of hygiene. But this is really all just idle speculation. Someone killed of lot of mice to generate a lot of scientific headline noise. And nobody knows why they died.
Good point on cleaners possibly poisoning the mice. Why repeat this experiment without changing parameters? Why conduct experiments with no purpose? Whose taxpayer money was wasted on these repeated experiments? Perhaps the creatures’ lives were too easy and unfulfilling. Do we need challenging times to boost Western malaise and lowered childbearing? Overcrowding and less-than-hygienic conditions don’t seem to reduce human population elsewhere.
I’m not sure I agree with that reading.
Why did the blokes not exhibit the ‘aggressive’ behaviour on days 1 – 314?
Surely they were exposed to the same conditions of comfortable, effortless abundance during that interval?
It seems to me like their reaction to over-population. Their cage is said to have far higher capacity – but did anyone ask them?
Regardless, humans are far more sophisticated in their social structures and social narratives, so I doubt one can extrapolate based on this experiment.
Good point – a quick look online reveals that a free-ranging mouse’s territory is around 25 ft, and that males are very territorial – and thus would willingly meet far less than in their cage, where normal behaviours would be thus be readily subverted.
All that being said, I can’t see how it relates to what’s going on at the moment, which is being coldly and calculatedly manipulated by a small and frankly evil cohort of psychopaths to the detriment and demise of the vast majority of humanity. Mice wouldn’t be so wicked.
This experiment bothers me on many levels.
Why consider this a utopia? It’s still incarceration. And people are not rats ffs.
It suits malthusians a little too well and one would be hard pressed to reasonably conclude the earth is overpopulated.
I recall that there was an institution associated with this experiment NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health… I remember as the name was taken for that Old Disney cartoon The Secret of Nimh, a film about rats in a dark and scary world.
There are rabbit holes associated with this experiment and it’s application to the control of human society.
https://youtu.be/NgGLFozNM2o
Good points. I note the reference to the TV series Utopia near the beginning of of the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQPQsUiaaEc
Yes Utopia. Some believe it to be predictive programming.
The parallels with the British version and the C19 Plandemic are impressive.
Indeed, a gilded cage is still a cage.
Poor Miserable Meeces.————-Liberal progressives would claim the miserable meece never had enough to do and want to build them a Community Centre.
I’m sure that if the mice had been given the benefit of a telly showing endless game shows, Bellenders, Strictly come Prancing, footy and all the rest, things would have worked out excellently!
There was a view sixty years ago that if man gained enough leisure time he would sit around discussing philosophy and enjoying the life of the mind with maybe a bit of wrestling. Mundane chores would be taken care of by machines. I think it is a delusion of the intellectual class that the life most worth living is one of contemplation. Human souls are at different levels of development it is important to bear in mind that the needs of the masses are what they are and should be respected because this represents the highest number of incarnated souls. When you see people in this way you are more able to apply your energies for the best results. There is no real heirarchy in terms of human endeavour at this point in time.
Lack of threats to unite against?
That’s precisely why the Club of Rome invented the Climate Change Scam.
The welfare (parasite) state is the Human parallel. When from cradle to grave, the Nanny State will take care of all and there must be no need to strive, to struggle, to go without, there will be equality for all. This robs the individual of autonomy, sovereignty, self-respect, self-discipline, self-responsibility, self- sustainability, motivation to progress by personal endeavour – why bother when the State will do it?
It was certainly an interesting experiment. But it was also a poorly designed one, that prevents anything useful being learned from it.
There were no controls. There was no way to tell why the mice started behaving as they did. The conditions were very unnatural in numerous ways, so there is no way to tell which of the unnatural characteristics of the environment caused the social breakdown, or whether it was a combination of all of them.
I guess there must have been significant inbreeding as well, with such a small initial number of mice. Would be interesting to repeat the experiment with say 600 mice as the starting number.