Mouse Utopia: Are humans following the same path? By Lance Welton.
Between 1968 and 1973, a fascinating experiment took place at the University of Maryland. Led by the startlingly creative scientist John B. Calhoun (1917-1995). Its aim was to understand what would happen if Darwinian selection massively weakened.
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.
The results were horrifying: increasingly bizarre behaviour patterns, a collapse in reproduction, eventual extinction. Are we in our own “Mouse Utopia” in which Darwinian selection has collapsed? …
[A paper by Michael Woodley in 2017] 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. 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.
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. 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. As a result, there came a point where no more mice were born, and the colony gradually died out.
Obviously, the parallels to the modern world are striking: Effeminate men, masculine women, the breakdown of the traditional order.
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. 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. 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% …
Insomuch we have no John Calhoun to maintain our utopia, we won’t die out. We’ll simply become more like the Fierce People as our IQ declines and our lack of empathy — our autism — increases.
Some food for thought. Leftism and PC likes to pretend that natural selection and evolution don’t apply to humans anymore, because the implications upset their political fantasies. But they do.
