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A scientist created a 'utopia' for mice and then they all started dying

The results are fascinating, but are they relevant to humanity?

Canva Photos

How could Mouse Heaven go so terribly wrong?

In 1968 John Calhoun, a scientist and animal behavioralist, decided to create a "utopia" for mice. It would have unlimited food and water, with beautiful nesting spaces and plenty of materials for the mice to make cozy homes with. Sweet experiment! the mice were probably thinking. Much better than the Maybelline trials we're used to.

However, there was a catch, of course. There was one thing the utopia would be lacking, and that would be physical space. As the mouse population grew, overcrowding would become an issue, and Calhoun wanted to study the problems this would potentially cause. That sound you hear is the collective sigh of the disappointed mice who were stoked about the 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffet.

The experiment, dubbed Universe 25, began when Calhoun introduced four mouse "couples" into the utopian complex. A year or so later, it was overrun and the conditions had turned hellish, even though the mice had not run out of food or water.

mouse, mice, animals, science, research, studies"The conditions had turned WHAT?"Giphy

Initially, for just the eight original mice, the square box Calhoun built included 256 nesting boxes (or apartments) stacked on top of one another. Water bottles and food dispensers were located all along the nesting spots, and mice could travel throughout the complex at will via mesh tunnels. The starter mice were also screened for diseases and the population was obviously protected from predators. The climate was controlled and comfortable. Conditions were perfect.

The first mouse pups showed up a little over three months later, with the population of the colony doubling every 55 days. Nineteen months later, there were 2200 mice living inside the box. With such perfect surroundings, the infant mortality rate was practically zero, leading to the rapid rise in numbers.

mice, mouse experiments, scientific research, animal experiments, overpopulationJohn Calhoun poses with his rodents inside the mouse utopia.Yoichi R Okamoto, Public Domain


By month 19, this rodent utopia had become an overcrowded hellscape. Calhoun noticed three alarming trends, in particular.

In short, everything was devolving into chaos and the very society of the mice began to collapse at a rapid rate.

The "Beautiful Ones" and the "Dropouts": Mice have a complex social hierarchy ruled by dominant alpha males. Sam Kean of Science History Institute Museum & Library notes that, in the wild, non-dominant males (the ones who lose macho showdowns) can skip town and start over somewhere else. But in the close quarters of Calhoun's experiment, with nowhere to hide, they were forced to hang around and viciously battle with each other over scraps. Eventually, non-dominant male mice, which Calhoun called the "Beautiful Ones," withdrew from society completely and only ate, slept, and groomed themselves.

Though resources were unlimited, certain aggressive males hoarded them anyway: The alpha males ruled over everything in the once-utopian mouse society. They kept harems of females in the apartments to mate with and fought fiercely to defend their territory. But new waves of hungry young male mice kept coming and coming, and eventually even the most dominant alphas abandoned their posts. This led to more attacks on nursing females, which in turn led to more mothers kicking their pups out of the nest early.

Birth rate declined dramatically: With the non-dominant males giving up completely and focusing on #SelfCare, dominant males too exhausted from endless battles, and females sick and tired of it all (many became asexual hermits by the end), stopped mating and giving birth entirely. Once this happened, the society was doomed. Even with plenty of food still available, cannibalism was rampant.

Calhoun was not shy about drawing parallels between his research and humanity. "I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution," he once wrote.


mice, mouse experiments, scientific studies, universe 25, sociology, overpopulationAlpha male mice, anyone? Photo by Kanashi on Unsplash

There are aspects of his wild experiment that certainly sound familiar.

We live in a world with plenty of resources for everyone, but a few select people hoard more than their fair share. When you think of the rodent "apartments," it's hard not to picture densely packed urban environments where people are stacked on top of each other at every turn. Maybe on some level some of us can relate to the “Beautiful Ones” and their urge to not participate in all the ugliness and just sequester and groom themselves. You can make an argument that when the mice stopped having to worry about food and shelter, it removed the element of challenge from their lives and left them lost–like many of us are lucky enough to not have to wonder where our next meal comes from, and maybe that has something to do with our never-ending search for meaning. Some even go so far as to link more people choosing to delay having children, or not have children at all, with the collapsing society of the mice.

But Calhoun's work has also been heavily scrutinized, with some claiming it's based on shaky science. And in the end, there’s the small matter that humans are not mice. We are infinitely more complicated, and so much better suited to adapting to our environments. Kean writes, "Ultimately Calhoun’s work functions like a Rorschach blot—people see what they want to see."

It's fascinating and thought-provoking nonetheless.

Photo by Adelin Preda on Unsplash

A multinational study found that bystanders intervene in 9 out of 10 public conflicts.

The recent news report of a woman on a Philadelphia train being raped while onlookers did nothing to stop it was shocking and horrible, without question. It also got people discussing the infamous "bystander effect," which has led people to believe—somewhat erroneously, as it turns out—that people aren't likely to intervene when they see someone being attacked in public. Stories like this uninterrupted train assault combined with a belief that bystanders rarely step in can easily lead people to feel like everything and everyone is horrible.

But according to the most recent research on the subject, the Philadelphia incident appears to be the exception, not the rule. A 2019 multinational study found that at least one bystander (but usually more) will actually intervene in 9 out of 10 public conflicts.

The idea that people in groups aren't likely to intervene stems largely from research on the 1964 story of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old woman who was stabbed to death outside her apartment in New York, while dozens of onlookers in surrounding apartment buildings allegedly did nothing. However, further research has called the number of witnesses into question, and it appears that several did, in fact, call the police. Someone reportedly shouted out their window and scared the attacker away for a few minutes, and someone did rush to Genovese's aid after the second attack.


The bystander effect is real in the sense that people are less likely to intervene if there are other people around than if they are the lone bystander. But that doesn't mean that more people equals less intervention. The 2019 study by psychologist Richard Philpot and his four co-authors found the opposite, in fact—the more people who witnessed a conflict, the greater the likelihood that someone would step in. The study, which included observations of video footage from real-life public conflicts in the Netherlands, South Africa and the United Kingdom, found that one or more witnesses made a prosocial intervention in 90.7% of public conflicts, with an average of 3.8 witnesses intervening each time.

"We record similar likelihoods of intervention across the 3 national contexts, which differ greatly in levels of perceived public safety," wrote the authors. "Taken together these findings allay the widespread fear that bystanders rarely intervene to help. We argue that it is time for psychology to change the narrative away from an absence of help and toward a new understanding of what makes intervention successful or unsuccessful."

We all like to think we'd intervene if we saw someone being harmed in public, but it's easier to imagine acts of heroism than to actually do them. When witnessing a conflict or attack as a group, people often think someone else is more suited to stepping in or assume that someone else will do it. In some circumstances, someone might determine that intervening is too risky, especially if weapons are involved. Add in the real-time nature of an unexpected event where a person might be shocked or confused about what's happening, and it's not surprising that many people end up not intervening.

The Philadelphia train rape story is horrific, and the police in the case are right—someone (or several someones) on that train should have done something to stop it. But that case is not the norm. It's far more likely that someone will help you if you are being harmed and people are witnessing it.

Everything and everyone is not horrible, truly. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but we shouldn't let the heinousness of a single story or two lead us to believe the worst about humanity. Most of the time, someone will do the right thing. Most of the time, in a public conflict or attack, someone will intervene. And perhaps with better education about how to successfully stop someone from being harmed, we could make the odds even greater than 9 out of 10.

Photo: Canva

We're nearly a year into the pandemic, and what a year it has been. We've gone through the struggles of shutdowns, the trauma of mass death, the seemingly fleeting "We're all in this together" phase, the mind-boggling denial and deluge of misinformation, the constantly frustrating uncertainty, and the ongoing question of when we're going to get to resume some sense of normalcy.

It's been a lot. It's been emotionally and mentally exhausting. And at this point, many of us have hit a wall of pandemic fatigue that's hard to describe. We're just done with all of it, but we know we still have to keep going.

Poet Donna Ashworth has put this "done" feeling into words that are resonating with so many of us. While it seems like we should want to talk to people we love more than ever right now, we've sort of lost the will to socialize pandemically. We're tired of Zoom calls. Getting together masked and socially distanced is doable—we've been doing it—but it sucks. In the wintry north (and recently south) the weather is too crappy to get together outside. So many of us have just gone quiet.

If that sounds like you, you're not alone. As Ashworth wrote:


You're not imagining it, nobody seems to want to talk right now.

Messages are brief and replies late.

Talk of catch ups on zoom are perpetually put on hold.

Group chats are no longer pinging all night long.

It's not you.

It's everyone.

We are spent.

We have nothing left to say.

We are tired of saying 'I miss you' and 'I can't wait for this to end'.

So we mostly say nothing, put our heads down and get through each day.

You're not imagining it.

This is a state of being like no other we have ever known because we are all going through it together but so very far apart.

Hang in there my friend.

When the mood strikes, send out all those messages and don't feel you have to apologise for being quiet.

This is hard.

No one is judging.

- Donna Ashworth

Those of us who find ourselves feeling this way certainly hope that no one is judging. We hope that our friends understand, either because they're in the same boat or because we all get that we're all handling this weird time differently.

It's not that we don't care or that we don't miss people outside of our household desperately. It's more that we miss people so much that we can't stand this half-baked way of being with people anymore. Personally, I'd rather just wait it out until we get enough people vaccinated over the next few months. I'm holding out for the hugs, man. Going into hermit mode in this final stretch feels more doable than straining to make socializing work with all the limitations and the exhaustion on top of it.

There are exceptions, of course. People who live alone probably need whatever socializing they can get. And checking in with people, especially loved ones you know struggle with mental health issues, is important. Some of this pandemic wall can be veiled depression, so we need to look out for one another and touch base sometimes. It's also good for us to make connections even when we don't necessarily feel like it. Sometimes the desire might be lacking, but we're happy to have connected once we've done it.

And of course, there are people who have just pretended that the pandemic isn't happening this whole time. Maybe those people aren't feeling this, even while they're making life harder for the rest of us who are trying to follow the guildelines.

It's all just hard. There's no right or wrong way to make it through a pandemic, as long as we're not actively harming ourselves or other people. Everyone has different needs, and those change as we go through different phases of this thing. It's just nice to see a common feeling in this phase put into words so eloquently.

Donna Ashworth has published a whole book of poems about the pandemic called "History Will Remember When the World Stopped." She also has a book of poetry for women, "To The Women: Words to Live By."

The arts are always a gift, but they can be especially powerful during tough times. Thank you, Ms. Ashworth, for using your words to give voice to what so many of us are experiencing.

We all know that millennials are entitlement-oozing, spoiled, special snowflakes, who need to grow up, get over themselves, and get a damn job.

[rebelmouse-image 19533104 dam="1" original_size="700x364" caption="And need to cool it with those damn selfie sticks. Photo by Marco Verch/Flickr." expand=1]And need to cool it with those damn selfie sticks. Photo by Marco Verch/Flickr.

But ... science just won't stop telling us we're wrong about that.

A new study, which will be published in the journal "Psychological Science," found that even after all those participation trophies, helicopter parents, selfies, Insta-pics, and snappy chats, young people these days are ... basically no more self-absorbed than young people 30 years ago.


Or, most likely, young people 30 years before that, according to the study's authors.

The researchers surveyed the scores of tens of thousands of college students who took the Narcissism Personality Inventory test between 2000 and 2017. The average student scored between 15 and 16 on the 40-point scale, a slight decrease from their peers in the 1990s.

"There never was a narcissism epidemic, despite what has been claimed," lead researcher Brent Roberts, psychology professor at the University of Illinois, said in a news release.

Recent research has increasingly found that elevated self-regard is simply a developmental hallmark of adolescence.

"We have faulty memories, so we don’t remember that we were rather self-centered when we were that age," Roberts explained.

A 2013 study found that a common teenage brain process that increased self-centeredness also boosts information retention, allowing young people to learn faster and hold on to memories better than adults.

While we were busy self-esteem-shaming them in the pages of magazines, millennials were getting up to some pretty selfless stuff.

[rebelmouse-image 19533105 dam="1" original_size="700x479" caption="Photo by The All-Nite Images/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by The All-Nite Images/Flickr.

The Millennial Impact Report, published in 2015, found that 70% of that generation volunteer, and more than 80% report giving to charity.

Some of them are criss-crossing the United States trying to make it easier for people to vote.

Others are breaking new ground in infectious disease research and bringing award-winning science and medicine to rural regions of the world.

Still others are campaigning for racial justice and attempting to build a more equal, less violent society.

If that's where being lazy, entitled, and self-absorbed leads, perhaps other generations should follow. Getting a selfie stick would be a good start.