Volume 66 January 1973, pp80-88 [Copy of this work] Some of the papers are personal, such as bibliographies and resumes. For the mice, everything truly was “free.” No mouse was taxed so another mouse could benefit. John Calhoun was an ethologist and animal behaviorist who had had a long standing interest in how rodents interact and create societies. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. The life skills necessary for survival faded away. For contemporary audiences, that rapid escalation to annihilation might have brought to mind what nuclear theorist and Kennedy advisor Herman Kahn had recently called “spasm war” (On Escalation, 1965)—the endgame of the US-Soviet détente, the point at which everyone pressed all of their buttons. The document that was scanned was a copy and the quality was not good. These are also the survivors of a societal collapse. Because in the post-apocalypse, nobody plays by the rules. Calhoun’s rodents had been through the Mad Max period: they had experienced their orgy of ultraviolence, sexual predation, incest, and cannibalism. The utopian and the dystopian osculate here. John Bumpass Calhoun was born May 11, 1917 in Elkton, Tennessee, the third child of James Calhoun and Fern Madole Calhoun. “Employee’s contribution to the Performance Assessment of his Scientific Service. Aberrations included the following: females abandoning their young; males no longer defending their territory; and both sexes becoming more violent and aggressive. To what extent do the mouse utopia lessons apply to we humans? But these survivors are third- or fourth-generation descendants of those original specimens. [7], Mike Freedman directed a documentary drawing heavily on this work, Critical Mass, that was released in 2012.
The "tunnels" gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. For what might happen aboard the airlocked Spaceship Earth; see Universe 25. That suggests that a human welfare state with its seductive subsidies for some and punishing taxes for others delivers a double blow not present in mouse welfarism.
National Library of Medicine, Series 1: Personal and Biographical, During the summers, he worked for Alexander Wetmore, head of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., doing ornithology work. FOIA > History of Medicine Finding Aids The second copy, dated May of that year, appears to be Calhoun’s recollection of the talk. For now, it’s enough to know we’ve arrived late in the game.
The individual dies in spirit.
Perhaps the human/pet welfare state works because one of the parties has a brain the size of a golf ball or a pomegranate. Yet if this mouse enclosure modelled our own eventual demise, then it turns out the post-apocalypse of popular culture was only a transitional phase, a station on route to this strangely calm dystopia. A Mrs. Laskey, distinguished for her work in bird banding and in the study of the chimney swift, was a pivotal influence on his developing interest in birds and bird habits.
Below you will find a selection of his writings spanning his working years. The interviewer stays outside. He then earned his M.S. It was at Northwestern that he met his future wife, Edith Gressley, who was a biology major and a student in one of his classes. Explore the Finding Aid to the John B. Calhoun Papers at NLM Research data, audio and video tapes and film, photographs and negatives, charts and graphs, and reprints document Dr. Calhoun’s research activity at NIMH’s Section on Behavioral Systems. The NLM Archive list does mention a CBS film. The rules went away with the society they formed, everything now is pure id. The Life & Works of Population Researcher John B Calhoun.
Maybe, just maybe, personal growth in each mouse was inhibited by the welfare-state conditions in which they lived. All will be illustrative, and most likely the fourth millennium will still have two of those things left to finish.” – Paul Calhoun Change ). The habitat was a 9-foot (2.7 m) square metal pen with 4.5-foot-high (1.4 m) sides. Or, if nothing else, ponder these prophetic words from one of the otherwise short-sighted, opportunistic architects of the American welfare state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1935: The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. In Calhoun's own words: "Our success in being human has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Some of the papers are personal, such as bibliographies and resumes. This can assure us an open-ended future toward whose realization we can participate.” – John B Calhoun “The new millennium leaves us with space, the ocean, and the human mind to explore. In Mouse City, Calhoun provided his research subjects food, water, bedding, protection from predators–all that they needed except adequate space. They are no longer capable of executing the more complex behaviors compatible with species survival.”, Sartre: L’ enfer, c’est les autres.
Even at the peak of the population, some 20 percent of nesting beds were unoccupied.
MS C 586. I report, you decide. This video is a reading of an essay written by Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams. Some were proposals for a program of study and were never published anywhere. My two rat terriers get free food and free health care, though I am not only their provider, but I am also their “master” too. After graduating from Northwestern, he taught at Emory University and Ohio State University. Calhoun, J. ( Log Out / ( Log Out / "[4], During the 1960s, he and Leonard Duhl formed an informal group, the Space Cadets, which met to discuss the social uses of space. The Mouse Utopia Experiments: Down the Rabbit Hole (video), The War on Poverty Wasn’t a Failure—It Was a Catastrophe, by Louis Woodhill, Thomas Sowell on the Legacy of the Welfare State, (video), 12 Reasons to Oppose the Welfare State, by Bryan Caplan. I can think of one big difference between Calhoun’s mouse utopia and the human welfare state, and it does not weigh in humanity’s favor. Mounted on the wall in the corner of each quarter was an artificial burrow, which could be accessed via a spiral staircase. Hi! To what extent do the mouse utopia lessons apply to humans? n.p.
Issue published: January 1, 1973. What is your deadline? Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. One of the more famous ethologists in recent decades was John B. Calhoun, best known for his mouse experiments in the 1960s when he worked for the National Institute for Mental Health. The only adversity was the limit on space. In the film, Calhoun describes their arrested development: “They never learned to be aggressive, which is necessary in defense of home sites. For the fictional universe about the Disney character Mickey Mouse, see, CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of October 2020 (, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, "Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population", John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment and Reflections on the Welfare State, "Behavioral changes due to overpopulation in mice", "J. > Archives and Modern Manuscripts Finding Aids, National Library of Medicine 8600 Rockville Pike
These are fascinating questions that I am certainly not the first to ask. Extent: 196.27 linear feet (170 boxes + oversize) Abstract: Research data, audio and video tapes and film, photographs and negatives, charts and graphs, and reprints document Dr. Calhoun's research activity at NIMH's Section on Behavioral Systems. Demographers warn that humans might succumb to similar aberrations if world population should ever exceed some imaginary, optimal “maximum.” Others like Kubań point out that the mice utopia fell apart well before the mouse enclosure was full. Let us avoid hasty conclusions. During this period females ceased to reproduce. John B. Calhoun’s interest in animal behavior when Mrs. Laskey of the Tennessee Ornithological Society taught him to band birds.
These variations in environment led to differences in behavior patterns and ultimately to the concept of "behavioral sinks.". Calhoun and his researchers came to call them “the Beautiful Ones.”. Hypertrophy of the adrenal glands. Please, enable JavaScript and reload the page to enjoy our modern features.