Escape from Universe 25

that we are experiencing. I know it's a diversionary tactic for really, because this is my last episode on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and I am leaving the podcast work on a couple of projects for How Stuff Works. So I just wanted to let you guys know, not going very far, but in the meantime, I am leaving you guys in the very capable hands of Christian Seger and Joe McCormick, who have been filling in for me over the last month, and they have been turning in

some really fine work. And I'm sure you guys have all had a chance to meet them by now. They are great guys. So yeah, indeed, for those who have been asking, you know, what's what's going on there? You have it and again, Julie's uh still very much part of the house stuff works team is gonna You're gonna see a lot of exciting stuff coming out. And uh and indeed, thank you for sharing the journey with me thus far and helping to to develop stuff to blow

your mind as we know it today. Yeah. Thanks thanks for making it so much fun. I can't believe that it's been three years I think now three and a half years or so that we first sat down with a spreadsheet and we tried to figure out all these different topics that we wanted to cover. Um, so it's been an absolute pleasure. And um uh you know, I can't say we'll always have Paris, but we will always have Cloeca. I mean, if you want. I mean that

sounds weird, We will always have Cloeka. You will, all right, Uh, enough of this stuff here, let's get to the topic at hand today. Yes, we're telling talking about Utopia. But as as as with any discussion of Utopia, we're gonna get into some pretty dark territory, right, I mean, because this is just the beauty of this You cannot have utopia without dystopia, right, you wouldn't even know what it

was without the negative side of that coin. And we're just gonna take you bits into a time capsule here. So just imagine that it's the sixties. You're scientists with just cads, a very fine rodents at your disposal, yes, top shelf, the best you can kind of rodents, and you have this desire to play out the drama of overpopulation.

In fact, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in nineteen seventy three, you describe the outset of your quest thusly quote, I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and evolution. And then you go on to name check the four horsemen of the apocalypse before you get onto the details of your overpopulation experiment. You are John B. Calhoun, Yes, who's a very very interesting individual. Um born in nineteen

seventeen died in the American Animal Behaviorist. And he was actually born in Tennessee, specifically Elkton, Tennessee, just the next county over uh from Lincoln County where I went to high school. Uh. He went to high school and Nashville.

He went on to earn his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and earned a doctorate in zoology from Northwestern University in nineteen forty three, and from there he embarked on a forty year career mostly at the National Institute of Mental Health or NIM, where he organized the Unit for Research on Behavioral Systems at the Laboratory of Brain,

Evolution and Behavior. Now he's best remembered for work that focused on the troubling effects of overpopulation on rats and mice, effects that miss might just paint a very bleak picture of humanity's future in an overcrowded world, right, and he goes on to create something called Universe twenty five, which we'll talk about, but at about the same time that his paper is published as a paper is called death squared, the explosive growth into mind of a mouse population. There's

a bunch of stuff going on in society. In fact, there's a kind of a zite iced about overpopulation playing out. Yeah, this is the post war period where everything is just getting built up. The populations coming back, people are are are booming, technology is booming, the cities are growing, swelling even and there are some growing pains associated with that. Yeah, And you even have bits of media that are being

consumed fictional that are reflecting this. For instance, something called Soilent Green, which was this movie that depicted a future of an overcrowded world where the pulation could only survive on soyland Green, a food handout from the government which turns out to be made from human corpses. Yes, or you know, pretty good supply. That was fueling people's imaginations and their fears. Yeah, and a lot of those fears

were related to resources. Right, there are this many people and we keep reading how are we going to feed everybody? How are are we going to have enough to maintain? So in the meantime, you've got John Calhoun who has been working with rodents for a number of years and has been preoccupied with this question of overpopulation, and he does turn to these rats because they're easy to observe, right, They quickly have successive generations, and there are similarities to humans.

They're they're clever little beings, and they're highly social. Yeah. As we discussed in our recent episode on on rats specifically, um rodents searches say a very handy reference point for any kind of scientific exploration of human psychology or human anatomy.

So Calhoun, who first becomes obsessed with this idea, creates something called rat City on a quarter acre of land adjacent to his home in Tows in Maryland in ninety seven, and he sees that the population in this pen peaks at two hundred and he's kind of confused by it because he knows that they could far exceed that, and in fact he begins to see the delectarious effects of

overpopulation at just eighty. So for three decades he at the National Institute of Mental Health, he creates iterations of this, and in fact, you could say these are twenty four iterations of what is now known as universe. Yes, so I will I'll describe Universe twenty five for you, and this will give you a good idea of the various iterations that came before as well. So essentially you're talking

about a large, industrial looking square tank. Uh, imagine in a miniature building designed by hr Gear for some set designs. You know, it looks kind of like a medieval fortress too. Yeah, it doesn't not Yeah, it doesn't look cozy at all. It's it's it's quite intimidating, especially in some of the pictures we're looking at that are a little little grainy,

a little dark, right. Um, the square tank was a hundred and one inches square or two point six meter square, enclosed by fifty four inch high or one point four meter high walls. Now, the first thirty seven inches of that that wall, from from bottom towards the top, those are designed so that the mice can scale it willy nilly. But above this the remaining seventeen inches or bare wall that they can't scramble up. Um. So you can think of it as a walled city again, but with no

access to the battlements. I mean, it's essentially more like a prison, I guess. Um. In addition, you have sixteen vertical mesh tunnels or stairwells that are soldered to each wall. Four horizontal corridors lead off of each stairwell, and each of these lead to four nesting boxes. And in total, we're looking at two hundred and fifty six boxes, each

sizeable enough for about fifteen rodents to live inside. And that's one of the things that Calhoun found out quickly when he did this other iterations, is that that the mice would typically not go over twelve within each group. So he did create an apartment to house up to fifteen mice because he knew that was part of their behavior, so he did try to mirror some of the things that he saw in those uh, those different versions. Now this, uh, this universe does uh does have quite a few amenities.

There is no infinity pool, um, but there's a lot of abundant clean food and water and nesting materials which would be really important. The universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks, and of course there were no predators, and the temperature was kept at a steady sixty eight degrees fahrenheit. So all in all, if you had to create a utopia for rodents, this might be what it

looks like without really knowing intimately what rodents want. Yeah, seemingly it provides the necessary space, the necessary resources to both feed yourself and to carry out your basic genetic mission. Right, yes, sounds good, right Alright, So moving day arrives. Uh. He kicks off with just four breeding pairs of mice uh, and they are moved in on day one, and these

again are disease free, top shelf just elegant mice. So eate mice total, and these are the individuals that are going to reproduce and populate this little city, this little universe with all their furry offspring. And this is ideal. As we mentioned, mice or small short generation time accelerated lifespan that we can study. One mouse year equals about thirty human years. Each mouse lives about two to five years.

The gestation period and female mice is less than a month, and the female mouse has an average litter size of about six baby mice and breeding onset is about fifty days. So yeah, now imagine these four breeding pair um the top shelf, as you say, entering this enclosure, and what do they do. Well, if you've ever moved into a new house as a little kid, then you know probably

what this looks like. They would go into that enclosure and go into the apartments and they were trying to find every single food source and really just get a feel for that environment, right, which would make sense. They didn't care about breeding or eating mainly at first because they just want to get the lay of the land. And individual mice were kept track of with color markings and therefore, which was true of successive generations as well. Yeah.

So this first phase is the strive phase. That's the term Calhoun used for it. Um first a hundred and four days, where the mice are just getting accustomed to the new environment. They're establishing their territories, they're creating their nests, just moving in business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary. It's it's kind of it's kind of like the utopia set up in any film, and like having a Utopia

in your your fiction. It's kind of like bringing a cannon on the stage, Right, you bring a cannon on the stage, you have to fire it. You introduce Utopia into your fiction. That Utopia has to fall into chaos and madness. This is the period in which you just have Utopia business as usual, with no concerns about the resources or predators. Yeah, I'm just imagining the kind of whimsical,

flowing music that usually accompanies these scenes of utopia. Really, any scene that's being set up is like, oh, this is wonderful, life is great. And then you hear the minor piano key like bearer, and that would be the exploit phase kicking in. Now. This phase lasted about two hundred and fifty days in the population of the mice doubled every sixty days. And even though there was identical allotments of food and space throughout universe, twenty five, food

was being consumed more in certain areas. That's because the mice began to associate eating and drinking with being with others, and the population started to gravitate towards certain compartments where all of the eating took place. And this made some apartments and compartments crowded well beyond their capacity, while other

apartments remained completely empty. And now you can hear those other minor chords coming into play, right, Yeah, things are starting to seem a little bit, a little bit weird. But but then we enter a phase the Calhoun called the equilibrium phase, which sounds great, right, things are going to even out. Things are, But the equilibrium in question here is that the population number, which means that the the population is evening out. Uh. And he also referred

to this as the stagnation phase. Um, why is population evening out? Because there's less reproduction going on. There's less successful reproduction going on, and there is a lot of violence that flares up. And we're gonna get into the details of that violence. Uh. Here in a bit but essentially you see a divide between the sexes and you

see some rather graphic displays of violence on both sides. Yeah, pretty spectacular displays of it, particularly when you get into the next phase, which is the die phase, and the population begins to decline at hundred, even though universe could accommodate up to three thousand mice, and Calhoun notices that animals become a lot less aware of each other, even though they're enclosure contact than before, I mean their side

by side, stacked in with each other. And by day five sixty, the population increase plunges next to nothing, and a few mice survived passed winning until day six hundred. After that, there's a few pregnancies that don't come to fruition and there are no surviving young, which seems odd because you would think that as the population decreases and territories are regained, that there would be some sort of stasis enacted, right, Like there would be some sort of

return to normal activity. He's like mating, Yeah, yeah, I mean you'd think that after this equilibrium period where all this bad stuff goes on, and you see the birthrate plummeting and infant mortality rates reaching in some areas that some reason would restore it. So if it's kind of like we you know, we see in the various ups and downs throughout history, things get bad but then things even out, but not so in the universe, right, and

this becomes something known as the behavioral sink. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will define behavioral sink. We will talk about the details of the violent downfall of universe, and not to mention the beautiful ones. All right, we're back. So behavioral sink this is Calhoun's name for the point past which the slide into breakdown becomes irreversible. Uh referred to it as a para pathology of shared business. And I like

to think of it in terms of of a black hole. Right, It's a black hole of pathological behavior. It forms out of the collapsing mass of an overpopulated society. It's the it's the event horizon. You know that once you you pass that event horizon, there's no escaping the mass of the black hole. And this is the point of no return for civilizational downfall, at least with the rodents, if not with humans. Yeah, and John Calhoun called it the

first death. UM. He said, that's it's sort of akin to like the death of the mind in the soul of the creature, not really implying that they have a soul, but basically saying there are two types of death here. There's a body death which eventually happens, but the sort of like non striving, not not living for anything, not mating,

not really caring about your environment. And so you can see how this behavioral sank and this um the second death and first death, all these terms are being thrown around, and you could see how they would have a really big impact with people who are cluing in on his paper. Yeah, yeah, I mean we're talking about the existential apocalypse u A,

theeleological apocalypse. So that kind of leads to this whole other aspect of Universe twenty five that really came to define what happened and why it happened, and that is this aggression that came out of it. And this was largely because of the overcrowding and certain areas, particularly the feeding areas. It meant that the newer generations born into universe, the chaotic version, they didn't have the kind of social

conditioning that would allow them to form bonds. Uh. So, in addition, you have the constant stimulation, the screring for food and space, and this means that some of the rodents became exceedingly aggressive, and this spiraled off into different

factions of behavior for other rodents. So the reaction to that sort of aggression is that you had some rats who are excuse me, mice who retreated, and then you had those who try to retreat, but then they were sought after to actually be attacked over and over again. And then those who were attacked a lot then became attackers, and then you had what I call the super bullies. Yes,

the outcast, Yes, the the outcasts. Uh. This and this is very much in line with with any any kind of like Mad Max post apocalyptic scenario where you have these warlords that rise out of the disorder and they're they're just the most awful, heinous people possible that just ruled by sheer brutality. And that's what we see popping up in the universe five. After about day three fifteen, male mice without social roles stop trying to defend territory,

or they stopped trying to breed. Instead, they just end up wandering congregating in the middle of the universe with other loaners. And it's here that you see particularly dominant, paricularly aggressive males rising to the top through just sheer brutality attacking their fellow mice. Uh, just roaming around, assaulting, raping other members of the universe and asserting their dominance. Yeah.

And I love this mad Max analogy that you make because it really helps you to understand why the breeding stopped, because within this environment, you don't have a couples saying, oh, let's mate, let's do this, let's let's um, let's really spend an ordent amount of time caring for young. You don't have those kind of resources available if you're worried that you can't survive. Right. So that's what you're seeing in terms of the kind of reaction or fallout from

from the outcasts as Calhoun talks about them. But you're also seeing another subset emerged from this, and the die phase sees this new subset at a new generation of mice emerge that had never been subjected again to any sort of normal conditioning, and they showed absolutely no interest in fighting, courtship, mating, raising young, or really anything that

had to do with one another. Um, they did all group together, and one of the things that they did the most was groom, So they were constantly preening themselves and eating. Just just imagine these sort of you know, fat mice with these beautiful coats, and as Kyle Hun describes, some alert eyes in their ivory towers, the chaos and apocalyptic warfare going on. Yes, that's that's beautifully described. That is what he termed the beautiful ones who occupied this

ivory tower of space. And while they were together, none of them would actually interact with one another. And of course they had no interest in MA And so Calhoun and the researchers thought, well, what if we were removed them from universe and we put them in an enclosure that has all of the benefits of universe twenty five. In other words, um, you know, all the food that they wanted, Um, you know, cages that were cleaned, so on and so forth. They would probably return to normal, Right,

that was the idea with these alert eyed mice. They did that, and of course the beautiful ones just continued to groom themselves and eat and had absolutely no interest. And that was very surprising for the researchers, and it further underscored that there was a kind of behavioral sink that happened. Is that that first death right. So they were already just existentially dead inside, right, It didn't matter that they had changed geography. They were who they were now.

And so of course all of this taken together, you can see how the public would take the details of this is sort of like pan sexualism, this cannibal of him that it would occur, um this extreme violence, and then began to try to make these apples to apples comparisons with human populations. Yeah, I mean, well, we we

couldn't help. Even as we were going over notes before the episode, I've mentioned that I couldn't help, but think of wells, the time machine and the more Locks, the horrible Morelocks had had lived underground and in the beautiful surface dwellers who just kind of wandered around and it drugged out haze on the surface. And then of course you brought up Kardashians. I did, I said, Unfortunately, when when I read about the beautiful ones, I thought, oh,

there's the Kardashians. I get it, with their beautifully quaffed hair. Um, maybe you took them out of their environment and you put them on a desert island. What would happen? They would continue to groom themselves. I'm pretty sure of it. Perhaps that's an unfair assessment however, Um, But one of the things that I think is really striking about this experiment, and we kind of touched on it at the beginning, is the way that Calhoun paints the picture for his

reading audience. Yeah. So often with scientific papers and studies, you uh, and anyone who's ever read through one of these can can certainly certainly know what I'm talking about, is that, you know, oftentimes everything is very clinical and straightforward, and it's not un till the the conclusions at the end and the or maybe the suggestions where they start making comparisons to humans and start looking into the future for for our own development and in our own progress.

But with with Calhoun's work, it's there from from the get go. It's in the very fabric of the paper. Uh, He's just right off the bat. He's referring to the dwelling places as tower blocks and walk up apartments. Easy again, he's talking about the beautiful ones, the juvenile to link what's the dropout? So everything's very just heavily anthropomorphic. Um

and uh. And it's in all this language meshes perfectly as we discussed with the cultural fears that are out there in the six season and the seventies to follow, you know, full of fictionalman propolises and degenerate societies, the world of solid green, of clockwork, orange, um taxi driver air in New York City, you know where we just see the modern city is just this. Ah, this is uh the sewer of of of the link win activity. Yeah.

And you have a lot of authors at that time who are specifically looking at New York City and looking down, you know, from the heights of their building from you know, the people below and um, and describing them like rats. Right Like there's that's not a coincidence. A lot of um, what Calhoun is looking at is starting to really steep

out into popular culture. Now. Post Calhoun, of course, people kind of sort of straighten themselves up a little bit and look at it a little bit more dispassionately, and they began to say, Okay, this is not an apple

to apple situation. Um, you can't say that the humans in New York City are rats in the enclosure of universe, because first of all, humans have agency, meaning that we don't, as far as we know, have this giant hand who is like picking us up and putting us into places and feeding us and giving this us an endless supply of resources, which is of course the second problem of this experiment. This is um about a utopia with everything that you would need, whereas in human life we do

not have the resources always at our disposal. We have to strive for them. Uh. Moreover, you have psychologist Jonathan Friedman who tries to create as as well as he can universe humans, but within the limits of law, of course, and having some sort of integrity. He tries to recreate this among high school and university students, and he finds that the population density is not creating this sort of aggression that you would expect, and he does a series

of these experiments. He measures their stress, their discomfort, aggression, competitiveness, and just their general unpleasantness, and he finds that individuals employed to carry out tasks under varying conditions of density, they display very few pathologies. So it's not this kind of situation that yields a clue that, oh, yes, humans, humans could uh. Befall the same sort of tragedies if

overpopulation happens in earnest. Yeah. Freeman ends up suggesting that the moral decay that you see in the universe twenty five wasn't the result of population density itself, but more about excessive social interaction, because they hadn't all gone crazy, they didn't all turn into uh, you know, insane warlords. Are the ones who managed to control their own space actually led normal rodent lives, uh, you know, amid the madness.

So it's all about the the balance, right though, the appropriate levels of privacy and community, um, but unwanted and unavoidable social interaction that's what Friedman believes lead to all the horror. Yeah. And there's also something called contra freeloading which we should consider within the whole context of this. Now, this is from Dan Ariali, who is a behavioral economist, and he said that it is a tendency for animals to prefer earned food rather than free food. So this

is again part of that resources question. And for instance, a really's parrot was described as having a propensity to self mutilate if it was just kept in a cage and fed without keeping its mind engaged. So that's why when you go to a zoo and you see a polar bear eating fish, that polar bear actually had to make its way through a block of ice in order to get to the fish. There was some sort of

challenge for obstacle there. Yeah. I mean the organism has evolved with a purpose and a design line, and if you just give it the resources that its whole system is game to achieve naturally and with a struggle, Uh, there's going to be a disconnect. Yeah, And now to go back to your point though about how um within the Universe twenty community there were some mice there were

actually fearing. Okay, this is something that is underplayed, right because you hear about all the terrible things going on, but you don't hear a lot about the actual I guess you could call it creativity and innovation that was happening, which is kind of kind of crazy because you know, we love the idea of an apocalypse and clearly everyone absorbing this study like it's easy to just focus on

the doom aspect of it. But you look at any bit of post apocalyptic media, be the you know, the Walking Dead or Mad Max, like the heroes are the individuals that more or less are able to thrive in this environment, you know. Yeah, and I think that speaks to us because we want to learn how to do this thing right, right, Like that's why it's so compelling, because like, how are you surviving? What sort of grit

do you have? What sort of creativity? Yeah? So, of Calhoun found that animals that were better able to handle high numbers of social interactions, which is key because we just discussed like that it's about all that unwanted social interaction. He found that the rodents who could handle all of

that unwanted social interaction UM, actually did pretty well. And he dubbed them high social velocity mice, which I like to think of as the you know, the real extroverts of the of the mouse population, you know, the kind of the kind of mouse who goes home in the evening and then really has to get back out there and socialize at the like the nearest pub or or

hang out right in conversation. UM. And I think about this in the context of how stuff works, like, if we were all mice high velocity mice, UM, Holly Fry would be our leader. Yes, she is definitely a high velocity mouse that. Yeah, she would survive, right, Um, and and she would still manage to sew something or have some sort of project that she's working on the side. Yeah, I mean, as long as she can stay away from

the warlord Ben Bolan and his roving band. Well that is true today, Like, that's not hypothetical when you say that, we're actually talking about that right now. Yeah, he needs to stop wearing those skull shoulder pads around. Those are intimidating. Well. And also I think that eventually they're going to lose some of their impact, right, especially when he keeps putting his googly eyes on them. Um. Here's the thing about

Calhoun and his paper Death Squared. He was really dismayed at the direction that all of this took, that his findings took, because he might have been a little bit immune to all of his findings and that three decades he'd been doing this right like that, the violence and

this so one and so forth. He was more concerned with the actual creativity and innovation, and he thought he thought Universe was like this really good model or could potentially be a good model of how cities could actually become competent and creative and avoid this kind of violence and aggression, and he actually went on to make one hundred more versions of Universe twenty five to try to take all those negatives and turn them into positives and have the rodents work in a way that was creative

and innovative. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't just saying, Hey, the apocalypse is coming, let's market on our calendars. He was he was ultimately all about, let's let's figure out how to reschedule the apocalypse or just postponent and definitely find ways to correct course and actually live effectively in these large, high population, high population density environments. Um. One of the other positive things that came out of Universe inadvertently, I guess you could say, is Mrs Frisbee in The

Rats of NIM. Oh Yes, yeah, children's book that later became the Secret of NIM the nine two film, and NIM, of course, is the acronym for National Institute of Mental Health, and the plotline of the story, at least one of the plotlines, is that they're see super intelligent rats that escape from NIM. Yeah. I never read the book, but I fondly remember the film. Seen the film many times as a child. It's a beautifully darkly animated Don Blue film with a whole host of various voice actors that

really bring it to life. I will say to you, the scariest and most intense part is, of course in the lab when you see the rodents being preyed upon. I say preyed upon because you know it's depicted in that way, and of course you've got these syringes that they're being injected with. Uh. And it is kind of dark, but it's a it's a lovely film, yeah, And in a way it really harkens back to the source study, right.

I mean, there's a lot of darkness in it, but ultimately his aim was to say, hey, how can we how can we grow around this? How can we how can we achieve where the where the rodents of universe failed? Right? Maybe we don't have to be super intelligent rats that have to escape them, but maybe we could approach the way that we design our environments in a way that actually helps us to interact better and to deal with what are actually some real consequences of overpopulation. Now we're

not trying to discount out at all. Um. I did have to say, though, I think that this topic, like all others, all roads lead to singularity, to the singularity. Because we've talked about this before, there's this idea that the future will be so automated that well will maybe create our own sort of universe twenty five where it's always sixty eight degrees fahrenheit and there's always food available and you know, everything is being done for us well.

And in that I think the hope is that our AI masters will will have to figure out ways to make sure everything remains arresting for us. And hey, maybe they already have. Maybe we're already living in a simulation right, all of the matrix. Yeah, and this is all just all the struggles in our life are just there because our computer overlord said they're not really handling this utopia thing all that. Well, make them think that this is uh five hundred a thousand years ago, and then they

they they'll have a decent struggle. You know, the next time I miss a deadline, I'm going to use that. I'm gonna say, you know, we're inside of the matrix right now, it's just one of the obstacles to keep it interesting. I think it should be a vout excuse, right, this is my ice block guys, thanks for let me hang out in your ear holes for the last couple of years. I've really enjoyed it and I've loved hearing

from you. Guys. We've said this before, but your feedback and just your thoughts on you know, an array of topics have really helped to define what Stuff to Plow your Mind is, so we appreciate it. Uh. I'll see you on the flip side. In the meantime, you can visit us a couple different places, right Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter, We're on Tumbler. Check out all those places and you

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