Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments | Hacker News Reader

Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments

newyorker.com

109 pointsmitchbob59 comments

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

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.”

"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.

Probably closer to what would happen with universal UBI.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

It was infinite food, resources, then the rats organized around 'capturing it', or holding it for themselves. So developed an Us/Them groups, and the have-not's didn't have access.

But isn't this itself a result to study. That they organized around hording resources and letting others starve. Not all animals do this.

In a lot of ways, this is what we have in todays society isn't it? Resources are owned by just a few billionaires, while others starve.

So UBI arguments aside, the rats do seem human, or humans do seem like rats.

> 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.

Trapped with infinite vital resources (food, water...)? It seems quite difficult to imagine.

> 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.

> birth rates and mental-hospital admissions among New Yorkers

New-Yorkers are moving around, however in Calhoun's experiment the rodents were stuck in the barn. I wonder how the 1975 study takes this into account.

> What did all this amount to? Neither “Rat City” nor “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery” seems quite sure. In the preface to the former, Ramsden and Adams explicitly say that they are not going to “evaluate the merit” of Calhoun’s work. In the epilogue to the latter, Dugatkin tries to explain why this work has “fallen off the map.” His explanation largely has to do with shifting norms in academia. The study of population dynamics and behavior, he writes, has “changed radically since Calhoun undertook his experiments.”

These are extraordinary statements about the scientific value of Calhoun's work, coming from the 3 people in the world who are presumably now the best acquainted with Calhoun's work and have gone through his archived papers and all followup research etc.

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.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

This is an issue for all sorts of studies.

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.

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.

Gwern notes Calhoun hardly piblished anything formal (much less peer-reviewed) about his research - mostly interpretation-heavy summaries of what he wanted to emphasize. Not enough detail rigorously 'replicate'!

But Gwern does mention a few followups that tried similar setups - and didn't really see the same major takeaways. So "nobody has tried" isn't really accurate. Nobody has succeeded!

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...

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.

Human population is going to decline, soon, and quickly. Should be really exciting for those doomed to witness it firsthand.

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.

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)

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/

> 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.

Ah, but toddlers are indeed threatened by a subset of humanity known as themselves, so it's technically true! :p

Jokes based upon denying the antecedent are among the best ones!

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.

Yeah good luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA

:D :D :D :D

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.

That is one very food-motivated, and chonky, rat.

Rats (and other rodents) physically cannot vomit. If they're not careful about what they eat, they don't get a second chance.

"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.

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.

Are you including the silicon valley titans in your population of intellectuals?

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.

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...

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?

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.

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.

Hypothesis: the more social the living being is, the more space becomes a major factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#The_Breakdown_of_...

The Secret of NIMH anyone?

Was thinking the exact same thing. Surprised the Wikipedia makes no mention of Calhoun.

The page for the novel mentions it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_...

> He and his assistants trapped rats on the streets and marked them, usually by clipping off some of their toes.

What nasty people.

Man-- that was confusing.

I was wondering why a Golang book author would be doing experiments on rodents.

Is that the same John Calhoun who wrote "Glider" and "Glypha"?

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.

"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

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.

"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 coöperate 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.

So could one say incels are a result of overpopulation?

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.

I can't speak to technology but the errosion of community stems from...?

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.

Incels are a result of all of our mate-pairing institutions having failed with no new institutions that could take up the slack.

Perhaps. Look at Japan and their huge Hikikomori population. No desire to have a job, a significant other, or really do anything in life. Which, in turn, is causing havoc on their population numbers and making it decline.

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