Does Mouse Utopia Exist?

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2024-11-01 16:00:04

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.

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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? I give reasons for doubt about its replicability, interpretation, and meaningfulness.

One of the most famous experiments in psychology & sociology was John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments in the 1960s–1970s. In the usual telling, Mouse Utopia created ideal mouse environments in which the mouse population was permitted to increase as much as possible; however, the overcrowding inevitably resulted in extreme levels of physical & social dysfunctionality, and eventually population collapse & even extinction.

Looking more closely into it, there are reasons to doubt the replicability of the growth & pathological behavior & collapse of this utopia (“no-place”), and if it does happen, whether it is driven by the social pressures as claimed by Calhoun or by other causal mechanisms at least as consistent with the (minimal) reported evidence, such as disease or mutational meltdown.