Geriatrix

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Seeing as Reddit killed the original site, I'll link to Reddit instead
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearn..._there_was_an_experiment_with_overpopulation/
In the late 20th Century, John B. Calhoun decided to make Utopia; it started with rats. In 1947 he began to watch a colony of Norway rats, over 28 months he noticed something, in that time the population could have increased to 50,000 rats, but instead it never rose above 200. Then he noticed that the colony split into smaller groups of 12 at most. He continued to study rats up until 1954. Then in 1958, he made his first lab.

He bought the second floor of a barn, and there he made his office and lab. For four years he had Universe 1, a large room hosting rats and mice alike. It was split into four spacious pens connected by ramps, each filled with rats. The thronging mass of rodents produced an odour so strong that unaccustomed visitors took several minutes until they could breathe normally. In 1963 he produced his most famous creation, Universe 1. The worlds first mouse mortality-inhibiting-environment.

2.7 metres square with 1.4m high walls. The ‘Universe’ was surrounded by 16 tunnels leading to food, water and burrows. No predators, no scarcity, the mice would have to be blind to not see the utopia around them. At least it began as Utopia. Four breeding pairs of mice were introduced into Universe 1. After 104 days they adjusted to the new world and the population began to grow, doubling every 55 days. By day 315 the population reached 620. Then is stopped. The population grew much more slowly as the mice came against the limit of space, their only limiting frontier.

Society broke. Young were expelled before they had been properly weaned and were arbitrarily attacked by excessive aggressive male mice. Females became more aggressive, non-dominant males became passive, not retaliating to attacks. The last healthy birth came on the 600th day. Then there were no new mice. Then there were none.

The purpose of the experiment for Calhoun was to examine a pressing problem, overpopulation. In the post-war 1940′s the world population was rising extremely quickly and in the 1970′s this continued. The question was, what happens next? So he tested it, and tested again. Just 9 years later, in 1972, he produced Universe 25, similar in design but so precise as to keep the temperature at a constant 20 degrees. No matter how he adjusted the ‘Universe’ the results were consistent, the mice moved from perfect to appalling.

After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. These gangs would burst into pointless and sporadic violence. Females stopped reproducing and even started attacking their own young. Mortality rose phenomenally. Roaming mice either attacked or attempted to mount others, irrespective of relation or gender, cannibalism and other acts of depravity consumed them. These were the feral ones. Then there were the ‘beautiful ones.’

The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. Solitary pursuits began to define them; eating, drinking and grooming among others. No scars on their back or hairs out-of-place, these mice behaved like a separate race. They saw the world through their narrow scopes, as they tossed, turned and tried to cope.

In the end the population sank, even when it was back down to a tolerable level none of the mice changed back. The change was irreversible, the mice were different now. The secluded females could still bear offspring and the beautiful ones had the capacity to help produce them yet it never came. This tipping over into irreversible societal collapse came to be known as ‘The Behavioral Sink.’ John Calhoun called it the first death. Death of the mind and soul, leading eventually to the second death, of the physical form. What he meant was that after the first death, the mice were no longer mice and could never be so again.

In a time where people worried about the dangers of people gathering in cities it confirmed their worst fears. The paper, when published, was a massive hit as papers go, it fed into the public consciousness and seemed to match up with the worst of the worries. In 1973, the same year in which the paper was published, the film Soylent Green was released. It depicted a future, an overcrowded world where the population could only survive on Soylent Green, a food handout from the government. The source it turns out, was the more than plentiful supply of human corpses. This change, this innovation was reflected in his experiments. From the cannibalism to the behaviour in desperate mice, John Calhoun noticed that some mice, feral though they were, had to innovate to survive, they became creative.

This purpose of the experiments was not to portend some imminent doom for humanity, in fact Calhoun was trying to be positive. He wanted to change cities, his remedy to the behavioural sink was creativity. By changing society and changing how we designed our cities we could avoid becoming mired, stagnant, and eventually, dead as a dormouse. Over 100 Universes were designed after he published the paper in 1973, these ones designed with the aim of promoting creativity and reducing stagnation.

The fact that nearly everyone who read his research used it to draw out doom caused John Calhoun to become distraught. They missed his point, but still he pressed on. Regardless of what was said, there was science to do. He and others promoted space colonies as a way of advancing human societies and he convinced others to change the way they thought of cities. Bringing in the idea that the places in which people lived could affect their lives in the way they were designed.

For the first time in history, over 50% of the world population exists within cities, and they are safer than ever before, due in part to the ideas drawn from John B. Calhoun and his pungent rodents. His 1973 paper has been classed as one of the 40 most influential psychology papers of all time, and with good reason, it may have indirectly saved thousands of lives.

Alexandre R.D.M. Coates, "Death By Utopia." Mostly Odd.
Very, very interesting study.
I can't help but notice similar behaviors developing in high density human populations, especially places like Japan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/24/AR2010102403342.html
 
I used to keep rats for feeding snakes.

I found that I had to move them around every couple of months or they would die out.

By moving them around I mean I would clean and sterilize cages to the point where there is absolutely no smell left then mix them up so that there are very few from the same batch in the same cage and they would thrive again for another few months.

I found the same with Madagascan hissing roaches as well.
 
Great read... I watched a movie called idiocracy, a comedy that really made you think it may be possible. If the dumb breed and the smart not. Will we get less intelligent over time?
 
After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. These gangs would burst into pointless and sporadic violence. Females stopped reproducing and even started attacking their own young. Mortality rose phenomenally. Roaming mice either attacked or attempted to mount others, irrespective of relation or gender, cannibalism and other acts of depravity consumed them. These were the feral ones. Then there were the ‘beautiful ones.’

The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. Solitary pursuits began to define them; eating, drinking and grooming among others. No scars on their back or hairs out-of-place, these mice behaved like a separate race. They saw the world through their narrow scopes, as they tossed, turned and tried to cope.

Describes South Africa quite well.
 
[video=youtube;xqovGKdgAXY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqovGKdgAXY[/video]
 
More on the parallels with Japan;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as people who refuse to leave their house and, thus, isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.[1] The psychiatrist Tamaki Saitō defines hikikomori as "A state that has become a problem by the late twenties, that involves cooping oneself up in one’s own home and not participating in society for six months or longer, but that does not seem to have another psychological problem as its principal source."[2] More recently, researchers have suggested six specific criteria required to "diagnose" hikikomori: 1) spending most of the day and nearly every day confined to home, 2) marked and persistent avoidance of social situations, 3) symptoms interfering significantly with the person’s normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, 4) perceiving the withdrawal as ego-syntonic, 5) duration at least six months, and 6) no other mental disorder that accounts for the social withdrawal and avoidance.[3]

While the degree of the phenomenon varies on an individual basis, in the most extreme cases, some people remain in isolation for years or even decades. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals, or futōkō (不登校) in Japanese (an older term is tōkōkyohi (登校拒否)). The Ministry of Health estimates that about 3,600,000 hikikomori live in Japan,[4] about one third of whom are aged 30 and older.
 
And
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug10/Japan-lost-generations08-10.html
Japan's stagnating economy and society are still operating on a postwar model which no longer makes sense. In response, its young generations are opting out of workaholic career paths, marriage and having children.

We in America are already getting a taste of the social costs of grinding economic decline. Young people who are graduating from college find a world of greatly diminished opportunities for full-time employment.

Many of the jobs that are available are free-lance/contract or other temp jobs, or part-time positions which pay one-third of what their parents earn.

Lacking sufficient income, young people are moving back home or staying at home because that is the only financially viable option open to them.

Much more likely is an "end to (paying) work" of the sort I have described here many times:

What happens to the social fabric of an advanced-economy nation after a decade or more of economic stagnation? For an answer, we can turn to Japan. The second-largest economy in the world has stagnated in just this fashion for almost twenty years, and the consequences for the "lost generations" which have come of age in the "lost decades" have been dire. In many ways, the social conventions of Japan are fraying or unraveling under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

While the world sees Japan as the home of consumer technology juggernauts such as Sony and Toshiba and high-tech "bullet trains" (shinkansen), beneath the bright lights of Tokyo and the evident wealth generated by decades of hard work and the massive global export machine of "Japan, Inc," lies a different reality: increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity for the nation's youth.

The gap between extremes of income at the top and bottom of society-- measured by the Gini coefficient -- has been growing in Japan for years; to the surprise of many outsiders, once-egalitarian Japan is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The media in Japan have popularized the phrase "kakusa shakai," literally meaning "gap society." As the elite slice of society prospers and younger workers are increasingly marginalized, the media has focused on the shrinking middle class. For example, a bestselling book offers tips on how to get by on an annual income of less than three million yen ($34,800). Two million yen ($23,000) has become the de-facto poverty line for millions of Japanese, especially outside high-cost Tokyo.

More than one-third of the workforce is part-time as companies have shed the famed Japanese lifetime employment system, nudged along by government legislation which abolished restrictions on flexible hiring a few years ago. Temp agencies have expanded to fill the need for contract jobs, as permanent job opportunities have dwindled.

Young Japanese, their expectations permanently downsized, are increasingly opting out of the rigid social systems on which Japan, Inc. was built.

The term "Freeter" is a hybrid word that originated in the late 1980s, just as the Japanese property and stock market bubbles reached their zenith. It combines the English "free" a nd the German "arbeiter," or worker, and describes a lifestyle which is radically different from the buttoned-down rigidity of the permanent-employment economy: freedom to move between jobs.

This absence of loyalty to a company is totally alien to previous generations of driven Japanese "salarymen" who were expected to uncomplainingly turn in 70-hour work weeks at the same company for decades, all in exchange for lifetime employment.

Many young people have come to mistrust big corporations, having seen their fathers or uncles eased out of "lifetime" jobs in the relentless downsizing of the past twenty years. From the point of view of the younger generations, the loyalty their parents unstintingly offered to companies was wasted.

They have also come to see diminishing value in the grueling study and tortuous examinations required to compete for the elite jobs in academia, industry and government; with opportunities fading, long years of study are perceived as pointless.

In contrast, the "freeter" lifestyle is one of hopping between short-term jobs and devoting energy and time to foreign travel, hobbies or other interests.

As long ago as 2001, The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimates that 50 percent of high school graduates and 30 percent of college graduates now quit their jobs within three years of leaving school.

The downside is permanently downsized income and prospects. Many of the four million "freeters" survive on part-time work and either live at home or in a tiny flat with no bath. A typical "freeter" wage is 1,000 yen ($8.60) an hour.

Japan's slump has lasted so long, a "New Lost Generation" is coming of age, joining Japan's first "Lost Generation" which graduated into the bleak job market of the 1990s.

These trends have led to an ironic moniker for the Freeter lifestyle: Dame-Ren (No Good People). The Dame-Ren get by on odd jobs, low-cost living and drastically diminished expectations.

The decline of permanent employment has led to the unraveling of social mores and conventions. Many young men now reject the macho work ethic and related values of their fathers. These "herbivores" reject the traditonal Samurai ideal of masculinity.

Derisively called "herbivores" or "Grass-eaters," these young men are uncompetitive and uncommitted to work, evidence of their deep disillusionment with Japan's troubled economy.

A bestselling book titled The Herbivorous Ladylike Men Who Are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity, claims that about two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters. "People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing," says Ms Ushikubo. "So the men who came after them have changed."

This has spawned a disconnect between genders so pervasive that Japan is experiencing a "social recession" in marriage, births, and even sex, all of which are declining.

With a wealth and income divide widening along generational lines, many young Japanese are attaching themselves to their parents, the generation that accumulated home and savings during the boom years of the 1970's and 1980's. Surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of freeters live at home.

Freeters "who have no children, no dreams, hope or job skills could become a major burden on society, as they contribute to the decline in the birthrate and in social insurance contributions," Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor wrote in a magazine essay titled, Parasite Singles Feed on Family System.

This trend of never leaving home has sparked an almost tragicomical countertrend of Japanese parents who actively seek mates to marry off their "parasite single" offspring as the only way to get them out of the house.

An even more extreme social disorder is Hikikomori, or "acute social withdrawal," a condition in which the young live-at-home person will virtually wall themselves off from the world by never leaving their room.

Though acute social withdrawal in Japan affect both genders, impossibly high expectations of males from middle and upper middle class families has led many sons, typically the eldest, to refuse to leave the home. The trigger for this complete withdrawal from social interaction is often one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure: that is, the inability to meet standards of conduct and success that can no longer be met in diminished-opportunity Japan.

The unraveling of Japan's social fabric as a result of eroding economic conditions for young people offers Americans a troubling glimpse of the high costs of long-term economic stagnation.

There is even a darker side to this disintegration of the social fabric and convention: child abuse is on the rise as well. Sadly, people under long-term stress often take out their multiple frustrations on the weakest, most marginalized people--including children:

Record 44,210 child abuse cases logged in '09

Japan hit by huge rise in child abuse

Both Japan and the U.S. alike desperately need a peaceful revolution in expectations, financial justice (i.e. the absence of fraud, collusion, looting, gaming the system and parasitic leeching by financial and political Elites) and in the social definitions of wealth, security, community, "growth" as a measure of well-being and prosperity, and ultimately, what constitutes meaningful "work."

In effect, postwar Japan grafted a mercantilist export economy based on insane work-hours onto a traditional patriarchal society in which women were expected to sacrifice their autonomy and ambitions for the good of their children, husband and the husband's parents.

These extremes of sacrifice might have made sense or seemed necessary to rebuild the nation after World War II. But now, 65 years and three generations after the war, these sacrifices make no sense and are destroying the social fabric of Japan.

Men who work 70 hours a week have no real role in their children's lives, nor are they able to be husbands and fathers in any meaningful day-to-day sense. Understandably, many young Japanese men are opting out of that life of absurd, fundamentally meaningless sacrifice to corporations or the government.

For their part, young women are opting out of the burdens of being in effect a single parent who carries the immense responsibility of guaranteeing the academic success of her son(s) and the marriageability of her daughter(s). Further, as in standard traditional societies, she essentially leaves her own family and throws in her lot with her husband's family, as she is expected to care for his aging parents as a daughter-in-law.

click link for rest
 
Seeing as Reddit killed the original site, I'll link to Reddit instead
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearn..._there_was_an_experiment_with_overpopulation/

Very, very interesting study.
I can't help but notice similar behaviors developing in high density human populations, especially places like Japan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/24/AR2010102403342.html

You dont see the same type of killings in high density Japan that you see in lower density Columbine. In fact, I would say the majority of those huge attacks in America happened in much lower density places than say... in NYC.

I lived in Manila for a couple of months. Incredibly high density, and the people were way more chilled and less prone to violence in my own low density South Africa.

My conclusion. Humans are not rats. (I should get a Nobel Prize for that or something).
 
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You dont see the same type of killings in high density Japan that you see in lower density Columbine. In fact, I would say the majority of those huge attacks in America happened in much lower density places than say... in NYC.

I lived in Manila for a couple of months. Incredibly high density, and the people were way more chilled and less prone to violence in my own low density South Africa.
How was the competition for resources like in Manilla? Inequity? How many rats? :D
 
How was the competition for resources like in Manilla? Inequity? How many rats? :D

Almost 2 million people in Manila. Low levels of inequality though. Most people are the same kinda poor with only a few very wealthy people. The malls there stay open till 12 at night. When I went to a mall at 11 the one evening there was a sea of Asians walking around me at all times. Those islands really have a population control issue (Thanks to the Roman Catholic Church).
 
Almost 2 million people in Manila. Low levels of inequality though. Most people are the same kinda poor with only a few very wealthy people. The malls there stay open till 12 at night. When I went to a mall at 11 the one evening there was a sea of Asians walking around me at all times. Those islands really have a population control issue (Thanks to the Roman Catholic Church).
Yeah I don't get the contraception ban thing. Suppose they want to rule by numbers. Anyhoo. They still get by, I take it. If malls stay open till 12 I suppose it isn't really doing to bad :wtf:
 
You dont see the same type of killings in high density Japan that you see in lower density Columbine. In fact, I would say the majority of those huge attacks in America happened in much lower density places than say... in NYC.

I lived in Manila for a couple of months. Incredibly high density, and the people were way more chilled and less prone to violence in my own low density South Africa.

My conclusion. Humans are not rats. (I should get a Nobel Prize for that or something).

Interesting that even though they are poor they are not prone to violence, makes you wonder what is in the water there. Edit: Just noticed that 90% of the people there are Christians, perhaps that's the reason for low violence?

Although 2 million is not that much for a capital city in the east.
 
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Yeah I don't get the contraception ban thing. Suppose they want to rule by numbers. Anyhoo. They still get by, I take it. If malls stay open till 12 I suppose it isn't really doing to bad :wtf:

Its not to bad, and the malls there are way bigger and way more modern and way cheaper than ours. To give you an idea, I paid roughly R5 for for a KFC zinger meal.

Though back on topic. Humans are different from rats as in so far as they can manipulate their environment far more.
 
Though back on topic. Humans are different from rats as in so far as they can manipulate their environment far more.
Sure, but we are still subject to our environment. Humans will start behaving differently when they are faced with limited resources, be it space or food or water or whatever. Look at Greece at the moment. That's not the same Greece of 5 years ago.

This study, although done with rats, yes, shows some interesting behavioral changes when living beings are faces with absolute limited space. This study has lead to other forms of psychology, notably urban sociology and some say that it has resulted in more humane city planning in general.

Humans can also still adapt because we haven't run out of space yet. But it's interesting to think, what would happen when and if we do?
 
Living space is one issue but I think the main issue is a lack of employment. Nothing can drive a person crazy faster than being unable to occupy their time meaningfully.
 
Sure, but we are still subject to our environment. Humans will start behaving differently when they are faced with limited resources, be it space or food or water or whatever. Look at Greece at the moment. That's not the same Greece of 5 years ago.

This study, although done with rats, yes, shows some interesting behavioral changes when living beings are faces with absolute limited space. This study has lead to other forms of psychology, notably urban sociology and some say that it has resulted in more humane city planning in general.

Humans can also still adapt because we haven't run out of space yet. But it's interesting to think, what would happen when and if we do?

Yup I agree.... but hopefully by the time this planet runs out of resources... we can aim for the skies. There is basically an infinite amount of resources just waiting for us when we figure out how to live off this rock. I personally think people ignoring climate change will force us to build habitats that can keep us safe from hospitable environments. Which is going to be an important step for when we leave here one day.
 
I personally think people ignoring climate change will force us to build habitats that can keep us safe from hospitable environments. Which is going to be an important step for when we leave here one day.
That would make a cool concept for a movie...
 
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