The featured video is a recent video from Whatifalthist entitled "How Degeneracy Will Kill Civilization" (50 min.). It examines the research performed by ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior) John B. Calhoun--particularly his "Universe 25" experiment--and applies the results to our civilization and probable outcomes.
Calhoun studies have long been used to illustrate the dangers of overpopulation and/or high population densities. Although not mentioned in video--which concentrates on his mouse studies--Calhoun's initial research was using colonies of rats and then he switched to mice when he increased the rodent populations in his experiments. What his experiments showed was that as he went through several generations and populations grew (although never reaching a state of overpopulation) the rats or mice would suffer a social and behavioral breakdown (what Calhoun called a "behavioral sink"). To quote from the cited Wikipedia article (footnotes omitted):
In the 1962 study, Calhoun described the behavior as follows:
Many [female rats] were unable to carry the pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation [homosexuality] to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. ...
The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.
... In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.
In 1968, he constructed his famous "Universe 25" experiment using mice (footnotes omitted):
Following his earlier experiments with rats, Calhoun later created his "Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice" in 1968: a 101-by-101-inch (260 cm × 260 cm) cage for mice with food and water replenished to support any increase in population, which took his experimental approach to its limits. In his most famous experiment in the series, "Universe 25", population peaked at 2,200 mice and thereafter exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive, behaviors including refusal to engage in courtship, and females abandoning their young. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction. Though physically able to reproduce, the mice had lost the social skills required to mate.
When I was but a wee lad (I think in junior high school but it may have been as early as the 5th or 6th grade)--and at the height of the overpopulation scare--my fellow students and I were shown a documentary of Calhoun's work with the emphasis being "this is what happens when you have a high population density." But Calhoun really was never able to reach a condition of absolute overpopulation--although his rats and mice might naturally congregate together, sometimes at high densities, they never even came close to making full use of their physical environments. Rather, the behavioral sink appear to have been the result of living in an environment with resource abundance (i.e., all their needs taken care of) and a complete lack of predators. Thus, the lesson seems to be that a life of resource abundance where the population does not have to strive to survive leads to a behavior sink--or, as Whatifalthist terms it, "decadence".
I've written about this topic before, although not in any great detail (see here and here, for example); and I've linked to others discussing Calhoun and his theories (see here--linking to an article from Peter Grant--and here--linking to an video by the History Guy). John Wilder also discussed Calhoun's experiments in an article entitled, "Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia."
And, finally, here is the video:
No comments:
Post a Comment