This article, The Behavioral Sink, by Will Wiles caught my eye about a week ago (although the article itself is a little older). It’s kind of a rehashing of the research done by American ecologist John B. Calhoun, who focused much of his attention on population density. The focal experiment of this article is Calhoun’s Universe 25, a giant and very elaborate, disease free, temperature-regulated cage (very ala apartment complex) with unlimited resources available to the test subjects (4 breeding pairs of mice). In short, “the only thing in short supply was space” (Wiles). As you can imagine the mice began to reproduce and by day 315 there were more than 600 mice. The newborn mice were being born into an overcrowded world where there were more mice than there were social roles. When the mice of Universe 25 were literally shoulder-to-shoulder their attitudes and behaviors gradually began to shift:

Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed (Wiles).

By 18 months into the experiment population peaked at 2,200 and ceased growth entirely. Though many could still conceive, they did not. The ability to form social bonds had been almost completely deteriorated. “In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long before their death—a ‘first death,’ as Calhoun put it, ruining their spirit and their society as thoroughly as the later “second death” of the physical body” (Wiles).

Death, despair, doom, gloom. Nothing new. Nothing that I’ve never heard before from the pessimists and realists (sometimes I wonder if there’s really a difference) around me. It was not these sentiments that captured my attention, rather the last paragraph or so:

…The full span of Calhoun’s research had a more positive slant. The misery of the rodent universes was not uniform—it had contours, and some did better than others. Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell. As for the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative, exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, in order to survive. Later in his career, Calhoun worked to build universes that maximized this kind of creativity and minimized the ill effects of overcrowding. He disagreed with Ehrlich and Vogt that restrictions on reproduction were the only possible response to overpopulation. Man, he argued, was a positive animal, and creativity and design could solve our problems. He advocated overcoming the limitations of the planet, and as part of a multidisciplinary group called the Space Cadets promoted the colonization of space. It was a source of lasting dismay to Calhoun that his research primarily served as encouragement to pessimists and reactionaries, rather than stimulating the kind of hopeful approach to mankind’s problems that he preferred (Wiles).

Alright, so it’s still a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality but that beats doom & gloom any day of the week. The fact that research shows that creativity, innovation, and the insurmountable will to survive courses through our veins, even in the veins of mice evidently, is such a refreshing sentiment. I feel like everyone is being poisoned by the idea that our world is inevitably tanking and we’re all going up in flames, and if not by flames, by the murderous, morally bankrupt people around us. I haven’t crossed this possibility off my list of ways the world will end, but what I love about Calhoun’s research is that even though Universe 25 was at it’s worst, the subjects at eachother’s throats, and even considered dead in a moral sense, there were still a select few that chose to fight for life. I understand that these are mice in a cage we’re talking about and not Batman in Gotham city, but I think that it’s not too bold to say that if our world ever reached a point comparable to Universe 25 we wouldn’t fall as easily as the Nihlists and reactionaries assume we would.