![]() ![]() John Calhoun looked like the action-movie star Charles Bronson. Because he also knew just how quickly mouse heaven can deteriorate into mouse hell. And by this point, he knew not to expect a happy ending. Officially, Calhoun called this setup the “Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice.” Unofficially, it was mouse heaven.īut the thing is, this wasn’t the first rodent heaven that Calhoun built. ![]() A mouse could live to ripe old age there, and never worry about a thing. He also kept away all predators, and screened the mice to eliminate all disease. Plenty of food and water a perfect climate reams of paper to make cozy nests. In short, Calhoun’s colony was a mouse utopia-a giant pen with everything a mouse could ever desire. Now, what sort of experiment could justify such thundering rhetoric? A colony of mice. Calhoun titled his most famous paper “Death Squared.” And in it, he quotes from the fiery Book of Revelations and invokes the dreaded Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Most scientific papers are bland-even bloodless. CreditsĪudio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer Transcript These topsy-turvy science tales, some of which have never made it into history books, are surprisingly powerful and insightful. The Disappearing Spoon tells little-known stories from our scientific past-from the shocking way the smallpox vaccine was transported around the world to why we don’t have a birth control pill for men. The Science History Institute has teamed up with New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean to bring a second history of science podcast to our listeners. But they do.John Calhoun’s colony was a mouse utopia-a giant pen with everything a mouse could ever desire: plenty of food and water, a perfect climate, and reams of paper to make cozy nests. But the thing is, this wasn’t the first rodent heaven that Calhoun built. Leftism and PC likes to pretend that natural selection and evolution don’t apply to humans anymore, because the implications upset their political fantasies. We’ll simply become more like the Fierce People as our IQ declines and our lack of empathy - our autism - increases. ![]() Insomuch we have no John Calhoun to maintain our utopia, we won’t die out. Among the Yanomamö of Venezuela - one of the most violent tribes in the world, called “The Fierce People” by other tribes - the rate of left-handedness is an astonishing 22.6% … So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that in warm, unpredictable environments - where basic needs are met - left-handedness is much higher, because there is less selection against the correlates of left-handedness like autism, psychopathology and low IQ. ![]() In our harsh, predictable ecology, Europeans have been selected to cooperate and create strongly bounded social bonds, because groups with these characteristics are more likely to survive. Obviously, the parallels to the modern world are striking: Effeminate men, masculine women, the breakdown of the traditional order. As a result, there came a point where no more mice were born, and the colony gradually died out. Eventually, the majority of mice were mutants of these kinds, meaning that the “normal” mice weren’t socialised properly and so never learnt “normal” behaviour among these relatively complex social animals. The bizarre behaviour patterns the Calhoun team began to observe: highly aggressive females expelling their offspring from the nest before they’d learnt how to socialise, celibate masculinized females, and groups of effeminate males - known as “the beautiful ones” - who spent all their time grooming each other, with no interest in fighting for territory or in females. Then, just as has happened to us, growth started to slow down, in part because, according to Woodley’s team, more and more surviving mutants no longer had the inclination to breed. argues that in Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia - in the absence of predators, food shortage or adverse weather conditions - the population skyrocketed, just as happened after the Industrial Revolution. Are we in our own “Mouse Utopia” in which Darwinian selection has collapsed? … The results were horrifying: increasingly bizarre behaviour patterns, a collapse in reproduction, eventual extinction. In creating this “Mouse Utopia” the experiment replicated post-industrial conditions in the West, where child mortality has fallen from 40% to about 1% since 1800, due to dramatically improved medicine and living conditions. Its aim was to understand what would happen if Darwinian selection massively weakened. Led by the startlingly creative scientist John B. Between 19, a fascinating experiment took place at the University of Maryland. ![]()
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