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Universe 25

© Larry Winn

Imagine a group of humans, indeterminate in number, confined in a place of fixed dimensions, wanting for nothing. They have plenty to eat, plenty of water, plenty of places to live, and only the dimmest sort of apprehension of a larger world. They might even think of "the outside" as a kind of malicious fiction perpetrated by malcontents. It's a circumstance not unlike the one "sustainable development" is supposed to create for us. Also, not unlike the universes of John Calhoun's rats.

Laboratory animals often substitute for humans in tests of hazardous environmental factors. Their use in the study of cancer-causing and toxic chemicals is almost universally accepted. Their responses can, and do, give insight into human behavioral psychology. They are useful as models for humans precisely because their repertoire of behaviors is simpler than that of men and women, and so it is easier for scientists to control the variables. This also gives us the latitude to say, when we don't like the results of such tests, that humans and rats are different.

And that is why, when ecologist John B. Calhoun passed from the scene in September of 1995, The New York Times noted in his obituary that his work had often met with "studied disregard." He had spent his life studying the behavior of enclosed rodents.

The term "enclosure" has a specific meaning different from crowding. (See an earlier article, First Principles, for a more complete explanation.) Calhoun's animals were not just thrown together in a cage. They grew up in confinement, generation after generation, without the ability to imagine an escape.

The research began at Johns Hopkins in 1946 and continued through the '60s, when Calhoun, then a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, published a report of the work in Scientific American. What fascinated students and readers of this research, then and now, is that the rats in Calhoun's experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and cannibalism. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females - the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment - were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue.

Before going on, it is especially important to be clear on this point: None of Calhoun's experiments began with throngs. All of his populations started out small, with superabundant resources, and grew after many generations into a state of crowding without hope of relief.

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