[HN Gopher] Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experim...
___________________________________________________________________
Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments
Author : mitchbob
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-09-30 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/7VcTh
| scoofy wrote:
| Nonsense
| gojomo wrote:
| Gwern's done a deep dive into some of Calhoun's work & how it's
| popularly interpreted - the abstract:
|
| _> Did John Calhoun's 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal
| (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities,
| creating socially-driven pathology and collapse? Reasons for
| doubt._
|
| https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia
| philipkglass wrote:
| This New Yorker piece shares skeptical takes too, though it
| waits until the end to include them:
|
| _Then there's the question of what Calhoun was actually
| observing. The pathological behavior of his rats was, it seems,
| a product less of their natural tendencies than of his
| experimental design. "No evidence" for behavioral sinks has
| ever "been found in wild populations of animals--rat, mouse, or
| otherwise," Dugatkin writes._
|
| _And, even if Calhoun's experiments did reveal something real
| about rodents, it's unclear what relevance this would have had
| for humanity. A textbook titled "Forty Studies that Changed
| Psychology," by Roger R. Hock, contains a section on Calhoun's
| work. It cautions, "We must always be careful in applying
| animal research to humans." In 1975, the textbook reports,
| researchers attempted to "replicate with people some of
| Calhoun's findings" by analyzing statistics like birth rates
| and mental-hospital admissions among New Yorkers: "No
| significant relationships were found between population density
| and any form of social pathology."_
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "been found in wild populations of animals"
|
| But, his experiment wasn't natural was it?
|
| He provided infinite food at no cost. That doesn't really
| happen in the wild.
|
| This is the interesting finding I'd think, by putting the
| subject in un-natural settings, to see what can happen at
| extremes.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Probably closer to what would happen with universal UBI.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| That is one of the spins that is put on it.
|
| But if we take rats/nature as the example.
|
| Then what is the counter proposal? That men are best in a
| state of constant warfare and conquering or being
| conquered. People should fight for their lives or starve.
| These aren't hyperbole, they are arguments being made.
| It's just not a great place to live, unless you are rich
| with your private army.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't necessarily think that constant warfare is
| required (though certainly that has been the state of
| humans until the last century or so) but I do think that
| they are best when they are occupied with providing for
| their own and their families' survival. People
| (especially men) who have nothing to do are generally not
| mentally or socially healthy.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Sure, if we lived on the savanna and we could survive
| with hunting/gathering. But if there aren't jobs, even if
| someone wants to work, what do they do? Or the jobs they
| can get don't pay enough to eat. The number of people,
| wal-mart employees that have full time jobs, and also on
| food stamps is pretty incredible.
|
| So if we want to not have UBI, but also want people
| working. Then, need to either raise minim wage, or
| provide big government work projects or something.
|
| So, I'm agreeing, but also saying in modern world, we
| cant hunt/gather, and since we don't want to have roving
| gangs fighting for food, or calling for revolution, we do
| need something to give that meaning. Some task.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > Having observed the rats so closely, Calhoun now had a
| pretty good idea of what was limiting growth. The rats
| had divided themselves into eleven clans. Four had
| burrows conveniently located at the center of the
| enclosure, near where Calhoun had placed the food bins.
| In these privileged clans, a few dominant male rats mated
| with (and protected) a larger number of females. Although
| the high-status mothers successfully raised many pups,
| this wasn't enough to offset the losses in a population
| that was aging and, increasingly, brawling.
|
| > The rats from the banlieues, for their part, lived
| under constant stress. When they attempted to get to the
| food bins, the fat rats in the middle tried--often
| successfully--to repulse them. Along the edges of the
| enclosure, packs of low-ranking males roamed from burrow
| to burrow, harassing the females. The outer-burrow
| females were so exhausted that they rarely conceived,
| and, when they did give birth, they often abandoned their
| pups.
|
| Not unless there was a group of people who had somehow
| figured out how to legally steal other people's UBI
| checks. The rats did not actually have access to infinite
| food. _Some_ of the rats did, and they figured out how to
| monopolize that food source and exclude other rats.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > his experiment wasn't natural was it
|
| Depends on what you mean by natural. There are probably
| situations that were similar, at some point in time. Rats
| that got into in a grain storage container, or were trapped
| there, or who knows. That was natural mouse behavior, for
| the lack of/constraints provided.
| VulgarExigency wrote:
| > This is the interesting finding I'd think, by putting the
| subject in un-natural settings, to see what can happen at
| extremes.
|
| Interesting, maybe. Deeply unethical, certainly. I'm not
| against animal experimentation (although I'd never have the
| stomach for it myself), but it's hard to see what could be
| learned from these experiments except for how rats behave
| when placed in these strange prisons.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's quite a takedown. In particular the existence of an
| apparently better run attempt to duplicate the result, which
| returned not much, seems like quite a nail to put in that
| coffin.
| mangosteenjuice wrote:
| https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
|
| This is an issue for all sorts of studies.
| jerf wrote:
| As well as the issue that, to a first approximation, nobody
| cares.
|
| The correct response to the replication crisis was for
| every affected science to immediately stop all funding and
| new experiments, if not pausing the ones in progress,
| review the situation with a series of intense conferences,
| and figure out how to allocate a lot more resources to
| replication. If that sounds extreme, well, the response to
| "vast quantities of the science you're doing is effectively
| worse than useless and you lack the ability to tell which
| is which" _should_ be extreme!
|
| But, hey, I can put my realist hat on too. I know that was
| never on the table. A lesser response was all we could ever
| hope for.
|
| But what we got is effectively _no_ response. Or if you
| prefer, the bare minimum that can be just barely called
| more than nothing. Nobody cares. The science goes on being
| cited, both in the field and in popular magazines, because
| that 's just so much more _fun_. And an indeterminate, but
| assuredly large percentage, of science money is worse than
| wasted, but used to generate false science instead. And the
| prestige of "science" will continue wearing away until it
| is all spent.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Not really. Replication is where you do exactly the same
| experiment as someone else and see if you get the same result
| or not. _Nobody_ has tried this with Calhoun 's universe
| experiments (they would probably cost too much, be hard to
| get through IRB as it could be argued that it is too cruel to
| the rats, and wouldn't be really fashionable these days as
| they are seen as part of the out of favor "behaviorism"
| movement). Simply saying that nobody has seen this behavior
| in nature or among humans isn't at all the same thing as
| replication.
| alwa wrote:
| The interesting thing to me is the way natural rat populations
| self-regulate once they reach their equilibrium density. Maybe
| some of it is the benefit of hindsight, but why would it follow
| that human populations, any more than rats, would continue to
| reproduce and expand beyond the natural limits where things get
| too crowded?
|
| I thought the notion of demographic transition--that is, birth
| rates declining as societies modernize--was already circulating
| by mid-century when this work started. I also was of the
| impression that that idea or something similar continued to
| inform credible estimates like the UN's WPP [0].
|
| [0]
| https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/1_Demographic%20Profile...
| fwip wrote:
| One reason that humans might not self-regulate population is
| because we are less in direct contact with our ecosystem. A rat
| knows if food has been scarce lately, or the nest crowded. Your
| average human has no intuitive idea if the soil in the big
| AgriCorp farms has been depleted, or if the oil reserves are
| about to run out, and the price of housing in the suburbs only
| a intellectual consideration.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Human population is going to decline, soon, and quickly.
| Should be really exciting for those doomed to witness it
| firsthand.
| netbioserror wrote:
| No intuitive idea of the direct issue, but a VERY intuitive
| idea of the downstream resource scarcity: Prices. Or, in the
| case of house prices, the downstream result of money printing
| and interest rate suppression.
| neom wrote:
| As a rat obsessed rat owner. Picky eater isn't quite right - Rats
| practice food neophobia and have a (oddly) highly developed
| vomeronasal organ, their olfactory receptors are the highest
| density among animals, and their olfactory bulb is significant
| for an animal of their size and strength. It's thought the food
| neophobia simply comes from centuries of us trying to kill them.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1840504/
| (https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/0092-8674(91)90418-X.pdf)
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1233365/
| cheschire wrote:
| > It's thought the food neophobia simply comes from centuries
| of us trying to kill them.
|
| This must have been the issue my toddler was having too.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Ah, but toddlers are indeed threatened by a subset of
| humanity known as _themselves_ , so it's technically true! :p
| encoderer wrote:
| They seem pretty careful all around. When I was just starting
| out I'd work all nighters in an office with a rat problem. One
| thing I tried was to trap them in a garbage can with a trap I
| devised and some good smelling food scraps. He took one look at
| it and never went near it again.
| neom wrote:
| Yeah good luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
|
| :D :D :D :D
| encoderer wrote:
| Yeah YouTube has unlocked a lot of niche knowledge that in
| that era was on like page 27 of a pinned thread in a
| specific web forum.
| user982 wrote:
| Rats (and other rodents) physically cannot vomit. If they're
| not careful about what they eat, they don't get a second
| chance.
| debacle wrote:
| "When the compassionate revolution came, he wrote, it would 'mark
| the termination of the past 50,000-year epic of evolution.'"
|
| This is one of the scariest sentences I think I've read in recent
| memory. We are living it today.
|
| The problematic sentence is here: "I propose to make an ape out
| of a rat,"
|
| What intellectuals (in my experience, almost all intellectuals)
| fail to realize is that they are a tiny sliver of the human
| population. And they are relatively insular. And they deign to
| design social frameworks that service only their small, insular
| sliver of humanity.
|
| Most people have more in common with the ape and the rat than the
| intellectual. Even the intellectual, though he doesn't know it,
| is mostly driven by the same motivations as the ape and the rat.
|
| Design a framework that works for single moms, burn out high
| school football players still reliving the glory days, and people
| working dead-end jobs squirreling away for their short, dismal
| retirements.
|
| Every time you try and treat the whole of society like
| intellectuals, you will create a system the falls short.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Literally this. The reason I like night skies and tall heights
| is that they serve as a grounding rod of sorts, a reminder that
| I am not the whole, and the whole is not me. That beyond a
| single degree of separation, I cannot hope to reliably guide
| the lives of others. No system exists independent of others,
| nobody lives in a vacuum or on an island, and everything we do
| is of monumental import to someone else's existence even if
| neither party realizes it.
|
| To assume the intellect of others is folly when designing
| solutions or systems. Instead, a more reliable and scalable
| indicator of outcomes are actions, not words, and that is
| something we can shape or control with sufficient stimuli.
|
| Or to be more blunt: we should cease assuming that if we
| enlighten others that the world will be better, and instead
| build a better world absent the requirement for enlightenment.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| So could one say incels are a result of overpopulation?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't think so. I think the social dysfunction driving it is
| tied more directly to other factors like technology and the
| erosion of traditional community.
| voidpointercast wrote:
| I can't speak to technology but the errosion of community
| stems from...?
| giantg2 wrote:
| It stems largely from technology eliminating the need to
| directly depend on each other and increasing geographic
| mobility that tends to disintegrate community bonds. It's
| also in how technology has been used to communicate, both
| in reducing in-person experiences and in how the mass media
| can influence populations. It also provides alternative
| entertainment compared to previous entertainment which
| usually included other people.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Incels are a result of all of our mate-pairing institutions
| having failed with no new institutions that could take up the
| slack.
| trescenzi wrote:
| A fun listen is this episode from If Books Could Kill about The
| Population Bomb which covers some of the absurdities of the study
| like the fact that if the numbers panned out "the body heat of
| all the people would exceed the melting point of iron".
|
| https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/11875391-the-pop...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Been a long while since I read it, but isn't the UK supposed to
| be a ravaged wasteland populated sparsely by a few surviving
| cannibals, ever since the 1980s?
| mullingitover wrote:
| If you take out London the UK GPD per capita has fallen below
| every single state in the US, so the doomsayers might not be
| entirely wrong, just inaccurate with their timeline.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Love this experiment.
|
| Has it ever been duplicated?
|
| I'd like to see if Universe 25 was an outlier. Since it is so
| often cited in any number of different prediction of a dystopian
| future. Would be good if there was some follow up.
| the_decider wrote:
| "Universe 25 was called Universe 25 for a reason. The study had
| been carried out on 24 other Universes, each one inevitably
| leading to the complete collapse of rodent society". This is a
| quote from a very amusing online lecture on the subject, which
| explores the cultural impact of the experiment, as well as ways
| that it can't be applied to humans.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG2Xh2JCoMY
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Sure, he had other experiments. But isn't part of replication
| is to have others do it, so they can poke any holes in it,
| view with fresh set of eyes.
| jandrese wrote:
| So the upshot of the study is that space is as much of a resource
| as food. Once the population hit the maximum density it stops
| growing. If the rats wanted to increase their population they
| needed to build more housing, and build it vertically since they
| were literally boxed in. Is this relevant to humans? Probably,
| but not to the apocalyptic degree that people seem to be reading
| it as.
| lasermike026 wrote:
| The Secret of NIMH anyone?
| ioblomov wrote:
| Was thinking the exact same thing. Surprised the Wikipedia
| makes no mention of Calhoun.
| davidnc wrote:
| The page for the novel mentions it: https://en.m.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_...
| uhtred wrote:
| > He and his assistants trapped rats on the streets and marked
| them, usually by clipping off some of their toes.
|
| What nasty people.
| akomtu wrote:
| "The experiment got under way in January, 1958. For the first few
| months, the rats seemed content in their apartment-like
| dwellings. But then, once again, things took a dystopic turn.
| Calhoun had laid out the rooms asymmetrically. The two cells in
| the center each had two entrances; those on the ends had just
| one. Dominant males assumed control of the easier-to-defend cells
| and allowed only a select group of females to enter them. This
| forced the other rats into the central cells, where order
| gradually broke down. Dispensing with the courtship rituals that
| usually precede mating, mid-cell male rats took to simply trying
| to mount females, or even other males. Aggression increased; at
| times, Calhoun wrote, "it was impossible to enter a room without
| observing fresh blood splattered about." Central-cell females
| basically gave up on mothering. They built inadequate nests or
| none at all. When disturbed, they would start to move their
| babies, only to then abandon them. The pup mortality rate in the
| crowded cells rose to as high as ninety-six per cent. Calhoun
| came up with a new term to describe the process he had witnessed.
| The rats, he said, had fallen into a "behavioral sink.""
|
| "Calhoun imagined "thinking prostheses" that would connect "more
| and more individuals in a common communication network." When the
| compassionate revolution came, he wrote, it would "mark the
| termination of the past 50,000-year epic of evolution.""
|
| "He decided to try to engineer the "conceptual evolution" of rats
| with an experimental setup that would force the animals to
| cooperate to get at food and water."
|
| "The agency had been restructured and had a new focus on
| practical results. It cut his funding and eventually evicted him
| from his rat-experiment space."
|
| ""No evidence" for behavioral sinks has ever "been found in wild
| populations of animals--rat, mouse, or otherwise," Dugatkin
| writes."
|
| IMO, the bureaucrats were scared by the eerie parallels to our
| lifestyle. Dugatkin said that no such degenerate behavior was
| observed in the wild animals, but he forgets to say that wild
| animals don't live packed in concrete hives.
|
| Calhoun is also right about that compassionate revolution, that
| will create a united humanity and will mark the end of the human
| evolution and the beginning of the post human evolution, just
| like the development of mind separated the animal and human
| evolutions. At the moment, humanity is a lot like a brain in
| which neurons form coalitions to fight each other. If humanity
| was a person, it would say "we are many and we are at war with
| ourselves," but when it says "I" it will be the end of this age.
| Calhoun was wrong, though, that the existing society can be
| forced to unite. Such a force would create a tyranny at best.
|
| All these futures are possible simultaneously. First, a large
| part of the existing population will gradually slide into that
| behavioral-sink. Then a large part of what's left will form a
| tyranny. Finally, the remaining part will create the free union.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910792 - July 2024 (57
| comments)
|
| _How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of
| Humanity (2015)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40001884
| - April 2024 (1 comment)
|
| _Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell? (2022)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214486 - June 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31905218 - June 2022 (163
| comments)
|
| _1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of
| Humanity (2015)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572253
| - Sept 2021 (49 comments)
|
| _The Behavioral Sink (2011)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22649914 - March 2020 (4
| comments)
|
| _What Was the Mouse Utopia? (2017) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366270 - Oct 2019 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504271 - Sept 2016 (103
| comments)
| bitbasher wrote:
| Man-- that was confusing.
|
| I was wondering why a Golang book author would be doing
| experiments on rodents.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Is that the same John Calhoun who wrote "Glider" and "Glypha"?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not related to the guy at all....
|
| Loved the book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" when I was a
| kid.
|
| I see echoes of his work everywhere from my childhood though. Or
| was overpopulation just in the 70's Zeitgeist with movies like
| "Soylent Green", etc?
|
| I remember a traveling demonstration presented to us in grade
| school. Some guy arrived with a kind of computer (this being the
| early 70's). He set it up on a desk (and if I am remembering
| correctly, it may have been kind of vertical ... and say the size
| of a Pachinko machine). I believe it was some kind of custom,
| single-purpose, machine. In my fuzzy recollection it had knobs
| that could control rates of population growth, perhaps controls
| on resources, etc. The operator would adjust the knobs and the
| machine then seemed to give dire predictions of the future.
|
| Now go and enjoy recess, kids.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-30 23:00 UTC)