Mouse Utopia Debunks Scientism | Hn 286

Adam Haman (0:07)

Hello, and welcome to Haman Nature. I am Adam Haman.

And today we're going to spend a little time, you and I, talking about mice. So they're rodents. So I thought I would invite my favorite rodent, Tyrone the Porcupine Hobo. How are you doing, brother?

SPEAKER_2 (0:22)

I'm going to Disney World.

Adam Haman (0:24)

You are?

SPEAKER_2 (0:25)

See my, see Mickey and Minnie.

Adam Haman (0:28)

Oh, that's right. You rodents are a tight-knit community.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

That's right.

Adam Haman (0:32)

That's right.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

We got our annual rodent convention down there.

Adam Haman (0:37)

It's weird that you only do it once a year because mice aren't that long lived as species.

Although what do I know, Mickey and Minnie have been around a while. I assume it's a title.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

They replace them. They've aged pretty well.

Adam Haman (0:51)

I miss Steamboat Willie.

Tyrone, why are we talking about mice? What's going on here?

SPEAKER_2 (0:58)

Good question, Adam.

All right, folks. Well, as I'm sure everyone watching this has already read your article that you write over at hamanature.com, hamanature.substack.com on our sub stack. You recently wrote an article titled, Remember that Mouse Utopia Experiment? That was a bunch of nonsense. And your subtitle was, The Mice Did Not Dive Utopia. They Died in a Box. Then we got a couple of tired and predictable sermons. And it was a good article. One of your, you know, like I said, you write on a variety of things. But for some reason, this one kind of blew up and got a lot of comments and engagement. So you then followed that up with a couple of subsequent articles related. One title, don't let that idea log in the lab coat fool you.

Calhoun's mice and the pretense of knowledge.

And then a third article, remember that hungry judge study? Sorry, it's nonsense too. For some reason, we love to delude ourselves with fake science. It's an epidemic. So because this one got a lot of engagement, thought it was an interesting topic.

We'll recap sort of all three of those articles into one bundle. And then I thought it would be fun to read through some of the comments that people had and sort of have a free form discussion based on that. So Adam, why don't you give us an overall, we're not going to read through all the articles. People can go check those out if they haven't read them already. But why don't you give us a five, ten minute summary of what this is all about.

Adam Haman (2:45)

You got it. We'll start with a picture for those of you watching the video. This here is a picture of Calhoun and what did he call it? Universe 25, his 25th iteration of this mouse experiment. In 1968, he dropped four pairs of mice into this thing.

There's plenty of food, there's plenty of water, it's temperature-controlled. And then he just watched what happened. And the mice fairly quickly exploded in population up to 2,200 individuals, I think. Which according to Calhoun was nowhere near the carrying capacity of this little prison he built. And then they started exhibiting antisocial behavior of various kinds. And after four or five years, I forget which. They stopped reproducing and eventually the entire colony just died. And Calhoun himself thought that this was a stand in for human population.

He said, quote, for an animal so complex as man, there's no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events could not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented, and the acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial, cultural, conceptual, technological society will have been blocked.

He goes on and on. He titled a paper he came out with in 1972 or maybe 73, Death Squared, The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population. So he was sort of careful with his rhetoric, but the people that latched on to the ideologues that latched on to this thing were not at all. This was, if you recall, the 60s, the height of Paul Ehrlich, a warning of Malthusianism and the Club of Rome, talking about the limits to growth, and the humans are going, are a cancerous plague upon the earth, and we're going to quickly overstrip, overpopulate, overrun our resources, and we're all going to die. And so scientists latched on to this mouse thing, or scientists didn't, ideologues did, and said, see, this proves that we need to address the population problem. There's even some clown in the Senate who brought up this mouse thing on the floor of the Senate and said, see, we need to do something about it.