How Mice Turned Their Private Paradise Into A Terrifying Dystopia

blakep267 said:

You give people too much credit. In s perfect world you don't need it but the worlds not perfect. Before you know it the person who gets guns first will become a warlord and start terrorizing people

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doublemesh96 said:

I did. How does the behavior of mice correlate to human beings? I must've missed the part where he explained that.

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You will notice that the title of the article of discussion in this chapter uses the phrase population density
rather than crowding. While these may seem very similar, psychologists draw a clear distinction between them.
Density refers to the number of individuals in a given amount of space. If 20 people occupy a 12-by-12-foot
room, the room would probably be seen as densely populated. Crowding, however, refers to the subjective
psychological experience created by density. That is, if you are trying to concentrate on a difficult task in that
room with 20 people, you may experience extreme crowding. Conversely, if you are at a party with 20 friends in
that same room, you might not feel crowded at all.
One way behavioral scientists can study the effects of density and crowding on people is to observe
places where crowding already exists, such as Manhattan, Mexico City, some housing projects, prisons, and so
on. The problem with this method is that all these places contain many factors that can influence behavior. For
example, if we find high crime rates in a crowded inner-city neighborhood, there's no way to know for sure that
crowding is the cause of the crime. Maybe it's the fact that people there are poor, or that there's a higher rate of
drug abuse, or perhaps all these factors combine with crowded conditions to produce the high crime rates. 250
Another way to study crowding is to put human subjects into high-density conditions for relatively short
periods of time and study their reactions. While this method offers more control and allows us to isolate
crowding as a cause of behavior, it is not very realistic in terms of real-life crowded environments, since they
usually exist over extended periods of time. It should be pointed out, however, that both of these methods have
yielded some interesting findings about crowding that will be discussed later in this chapter.
Since it would be ethically impossible (because of the stress and other potential damaging effects) to
place humans in crowded conditions over long periods of time simply to do research on them, there is a third way
of addressing the effects of density: Do research using animal subjects.

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Main Entry: uto·pia  [img]http://www.wordcentral.com/images/audio.gif[/img]
Pronunciation: y

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t

-p

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Function: noun
Etymology: from Utopia,  name of an imaginary ideal country in a book Utopiawritten by Sir Thomas More 1478-1535 English statesman and author; from Greek ou  "not, no" and Greek topos  "place"
1  often capitalized  :  a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions
2  :  an impractical scheme for social improvement 
- uto·pi·an  [img]http://www.wordcentral.com/images/audio.gif[/img]  /-p

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n/ adjective or noun
Word History  In 1516 the English statesman Sir Thomas More published a book that compared the condition of his England to that of a perfect and imaginary country, Utopia.  Everything that was wrong in England was perfect in Utopia. More was trying to show how people could live together in peace and happiness if they only did what he thought was right. But the name he gave his imaginary country showed that he did not really believe perfection could ever be reached. Utopia  means, literally, "no place," since it was formed from the Greek ou,meaning "no, not," and topos,  "place." Since More's time, utopia  has come to mean "a place of ideal perfection." Over the years many books similar to Utopiahave been written, and many plans for perfect societies proposed, most of them impractical. Utopia  has also come to mean any such scheme or plan.

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Smangalang said:

[h1]How Mice Turned Their Private Paradise Into A Terrifying Dystopia[/h1]

http://io9.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-into-a-terrifyin-1687584457

In 1972, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a mouse paradise with beautiful buildings and limitless food. He introduced eight mice to the population. Two years later, the mice had created their own apocalypse. Here's why.

Universe 25 was a giant box designed to be a rodent utopia. The trouble was, this utopia did not have a benevolent creator. John B. Calhoun had designed quite a few mouse environments before he got to the 25th one, and didn't expect to be watching a happy story. Divided into "main squares" and then subdivided into levels, with ramps going up to "apartments," the place looked great, and was always kept stocked with food, but its inhabitants were doomed from the get-go.

Universe 25 started out with eight mice, four males and four females. By day 560, the mouse population reached 2,200, and then steadily declined back down to unrecoverable extinction. At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They'd move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they'd drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.

The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, "the beautiful ones." Generally guarded by one male, the females—- and few males — inside the space didn't breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young.
In 1972, with the baby boomers coming of age in a ever-more-crowded world and reports of riots in the cities, Universe 25 looked like a Malthusian nightmare. It even acquired its own catchy name, "The Behavioral Sink." If starvation didn't kill everyone, people would destroy themselves. The best option was to flee to the country or the suburbs, where people had space and life was peaceful and natural.

Today, the experiment remains frightening, but the nature of the fear has changed. A recent study pointed out that Universe 25 was not, if looked at as a whole, too overcrowded. Pens, or "apartments" at the very end of each hallway had only one entrance and exit, making them easy to guard. This allowed more aggressive territorial males to limit the number mice in that pen, overcrowding the rest of the world, while isolating the few "beautiful ones" who lived there from normal society. Instead of a population problem, one could argue that Universe 25 had a fair distribution problem.
The fact remains that it had a problem, and one that eventually led to its destruction. If this behavior is shared by both mice and humans, can we escape Universe 25's fate?

further reading
http://www.edmondschools.net/portals/3/docs/terri_mcgill/read-crowding.pdf
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php

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Smangalang said:

 
I'm unfamiliar with Asian culture of today. Do tell.

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BLASTERCOMBO said:

Yes a utopia would be boring thus heaven would not exist thus Christianity and all other religions with a final "heaven" like destination has a fundemental flaw

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silkboi said:

You don't need logic if you have faith.

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Tr1ll said:

Theres a loop hole yall messing but its Saul Good, another thread another day.

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WorldGoneMad said:

 
He's not really talking about the culture. He's saying that India and China are over populated right now just like the mice.

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