Mouse Utopia: Are We Living in the Human Version?

How much of our modern social ails can be understood by population pressures due to overcrowding?

Certainly we don't want for food, water, or things to do. Our economies are massive; massive enough to comfortably support everyone within them (and far more).

Yet, is this sufficient to produce a utopia... or have we run up on a physical limit that plunges us increasingly into dystopia?

In the 1960s, researcher John B. Calhoun coined the term 'behavioral sink' to describe the situation where behavior collapses due to overcrowding. Based on multiple studies performed by him and replicated by others, Calhoun discovered that mice in overcrowded situations tended to develop a series of pathologies that made them become increasingly dysfunctional socially.

Ultimately, the mice in the experiments became so dysfunctional that, despite plenty of food, water, and nesting areas, and despite being in perfect physical health, they became psychologically unable to reproduce, and completely died out.

What happened, and what can we learn?

 

The 1947 Rodent Ecology Project

Calhoun's first look at the behavioral effects of overcrowding occurred in the late 1940s during his work on the Rodent Ecology Project at John Hopkins University's School of Hygiene and Public Health. Beginning in March 1947, and for the next 28 months, until June 1949, Calhoun observed a population of Norway rats in a 10,000-square-foot pen with a superabundance of food at all times, plenty of water, and so much space it was never fully used by the rats.

The colony was constructed to easily sustain 5,000 rats. In theory, it likely could have supported 10,000. And indeed, for a while the population did grow... before it reached a population maximum, then contracted.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 28 months of observation, when the study ended, there remained, not 5,000 rats, or 10,000 rats, but far fewer than 200 rats.

In fact, the rat population never exceeded 200 individuals.

Based on the reproduction rate and lifespan of the rats, in a completely unlimited environment Calhoun and his associates estimated that by the end of the experiment there could have been 50,000 rats alive at once, descended from the original five female founding rats.

Yet there were never more than 200. Why?

In May 1952, Calhoun published his paper "The Social Aspects of Population Dynamics."

He observed three key social behavioral changes in his rats:

1. Local groups developed and staked out territory. The rats formed groups that then kept separate from other groups. Between the groups they established buffer zones. These buffer zones saw limited movement, as rats largely kept out of them. Calhoun observed the buffer zones seemed crucial to maintaining the separate group identities, and that the existence of the buffer zones limited how much of the space the mice could actually use.

2. A decline in social stability led to a collapse in successful reproduction. Calhoun notes that societies that are socially stable lead to more successful reproduction. Meanwhile, socially unstable societies see their reproduction rates successively collapse. A socially stable society (one that produces many pregnancies and high infant survival rates) consists of a well-developed dominance hierarchy, well-established relationships between all members of the group, and few behavioral disturbances plus high rates of growth. A socially unstable society (where rates of pregnancy collapse and infant mortality skyrockets) are opposite: the members have little in common and/or have experienced many behavioral disturbances and retarded rates of growth.

3. A decline in social stability led to an increase in mortality. The #1 direct cause of death of rats in Calhoun's 1947 study was predation from flies. Flies frequently lay eggs in the fur of young rats. The young rats that died most were those that had been punished the most severely by their peers (i.e., open wounds) or who had no permanent home. Flies also laid eggs in the open wounds of adult rats. Adult rats of low social rank tend to be bullied and attacked more, and thus have more open wounds and are more likely to be eaten alive by flies.

Calhoun noted some of the dysfunctional behavior that arose in the rats lower in social rank under overcrowded conditions.

High-ranking rats would simply eat their food right at the food hopper, where food was distributed. They didn't need to cart food off or secure it anywhere.

Rats that received 'mild punitive actions' from the other rats (i.e., rats that had been attacked and bullied a bit, but not excessively) learned to take food away from the food hopper and carry it to a burrow. Sometimes they ate it immediately on returning to their burrows. Other times they didn't, but left it in burrows they were likely to return to and eat again at later.

Rats that had been excessively punished, however, developed maladaptive, compulsive behaviors around food. These rats would also take food from the food hopper, but instead of take the food to a burrow, which was farther away, they would scatter the food around, typically no more than 15 feet from the food hopper. Once they'd scattered this food, these socially marginalized rats didn't eat it and never returned to it.

The excessively punished, marginalized rats were only about 5% of the population in this study. Along with the compulsive food scattering behavior, they had a few other common traits:

1. Higher competition with older siblings before they weaned
2. They did not grow as much across their entire lives (smaller/shorter)
3. Would 'freeze' when cornered in a trap or harborage
4. Failure to successfully reproduce

Interestingly, Calhoun notes that the dysfunctional rats' food scattering, while it did not help themselves and they failed to reproduce, did increase the overall availability of food (i.e., other rats did not have to compete as hard for food at the food hopper, since food was already scattered around elsewhere by the dysfunctional mice). Therefore these dysfunctional mice, while behaving sacrificially toward themselves, actually played a role in increasing the welfare of the overall group.

Calhoun notes that survival rates follow a bell curve as populations increase -- with survival rates being highest at a middle population level, physiological efficiency then dropping off at either end of the curve (both too-low and too-high populations).

Calhoun's rats had reached a population cap, one far lower than what their environment could sustain, due to social/behavioral reasons alone.

 

The 1958 Rat Utopia Experiment

Calhoun had one more major study with rats before he began his mouse utopia.

This was his series of studies, begun in 1958 and concluded in 1962, that examined the behavior of rats kept in close quarters as the population was allowed to expand or artificially lowered.

Calhoun removed infants that survived birth and weaning to keep rat populations at 80 individuals per enclosure. As the experiment went on, the rats became increasingly dysfunctional.

Female and infant rats died more and more as the experiment progressed. At the experiment's end, there were still enough births to offset deaths... yet Calhoun projected that based on the reproductive failures of the colonies, they would eventually have died out.

At the end of the first series of experiments, Calhoun selected the four healthiest males and the four healthiest females to survive. These eight lucky rats, selected in the prime of their lives, were permitted to live in a no-longer-overpopulated environment.

The result?

They produced fewer litters over the next six months than expected. And none of their offspring survived to maturity.

During the earlier phase of the study, Calhoun noticed unusual behaviors.

First, an explanation: four pens were set up, all together, in a row. Two pens were thus at the end, with only a single ramp connecting them to the other pens, while two pens were in the middle, with ramps on two walls connected to adjoining pens. The way the rats lived in the end pens was different from how they did in the middle pens.

Though there were four pens of connected rats, each with its own food hopper, the rats gradually began to gather around a single food hopper in a middle pen for food. By the end of the study 75% of rats ate at just this one food hopper. Eating became a communal activity, and rats would not eat alone.

A dominant male in each end pen took advantage of this situation to monopolize that pen's female rats for himself. The lower status males, having left the end pens to eat, would try to return. But the dominant male would be waiting for them, and would fight them on the entry ramp, preventing their reentry to the pen. Each mouse would try a few times, but after his defeat would ultimately give up and return to the middle pen. The dominant males thus banished the lower status males from the pens with females, with the lower ranking males forced to remain together in the food pens.

Once he'd established his dominance, an end-pen dominant male could typically maintain it. He'd sleep at the foot of the ramp, waking up any time another male set foot on the entry ramp. According to Calhoun, the dominant male had only to open his eyes and glare at the mouse trying to enter, and that mouse would see him looking and retreat.

Some of the dominant males permitted subordinate males into their pens if they respected the top male's dominance. These weak males would spend most of their time hiding in the burrows with the females (the dominant male almost never entered the burrows; the females came out to him). However, the subordinate males never tried to engage in sexual activity with the females. Rarely, the subordinate males would venture out into the pen, and if they encountered the dominant male, they'd repeatedly attempt to mount him. Calhoun noted that the dominant males "generally... tolerated these advances."

Harem females in the end pens controlled by dominant males were the healthiest. They made good mothers, and both female and infant survival rates were higher. Half the infants born in these 'brood pens' survived.

Females in the middle pens, where all the subordinate males were clustered, competing for mates, became pregnant at the same rate as females in the brood pens. Yet in the second series of experiments 80% of infants died before weaning, and in the first series of experiments it was 96% who died. The females in these middle pens simply did not make good mothers, and often left their children to expire.

The males in the middle pens also experienced pronounced social pathology. Like the females, it was worse in the first series of experiments than in the second, but there was pathology among the males in both studies.

In the middle pens, in Experiment 1, a behavioral sink developed, where rats clustered around the food hoppers, which slowly distributed small, hard pellets of food kept behind wire mesh. Because of how the food hoppers were constructed, eating took time, and became a communal behavior. Eventually this behavior became determinant: rats would rarely eat at a food hopper unless other rats were already eating there.

This led to a vicious circle: rats eating at less popular food hoppers would find themselves deserted, then move to the more popular food hopper. By the end of the first series of experiments, half the rat population was sleeping as well as eating in the popular pen. Because of all the individuals around, rats had to constantly make behavioral adjustments to accommodate all the others.

In the second series of experiments, the researchers changed how food was offered, setting out powdered food in an open hopper. Rats could thus eat quickly, and no communal behavioral sink developed around eating. Drinking fountains were added to each pen, which kept rats more to their pens, since rats generally drink on first waking up. Because no behavioral sink arose, the social pathology in the second series of experiments was less extreme than in the first experiment.

Yet, compared to normal, uncrowded rats, even in the second experiment the social pathologies exhibited were severe.

So what were these pathologies affecting the rats?

They were:

• Females became worse and worse at keeping house. They grew worse and worse at building nests, then eventually stopped altogether.

• Females became worse and worse at rearing their young. They eventually took to dropping their young off anywhere, abandoning and neglecting them. The abandoned young subsequently died.

• Females got swarmed by thirsty males. When a female was in heat, she was relentlessly mobbed by thirsty males. She would try to retreat to a burrow to get away from them, but some males would follow her even into the burrow.

• Deadly pregnancy complications exploded. Nearly half of first- and second-generation females living in behavioral sinks had died during pregnancy or childbirth by the end of the study. Even without behavioral sinks, 25% of females died. In contrast, only 15% of males in both experiments died.

• Half of males gave up struggling for dominance. They quit trying to win the dominance struggle and instead became rat homosexuals, rat incels, or rat pick up artists (see below).

• The other half of males regularly fought for dominance. Rats formed groups of 12+ males, in which one male would be dominant. Periodically, dominance fights erupted in which all the males fought each other, and the previous leader was unseated. A new male then took the dominant spot... at least until the next dominance struggle.

• Dominant males were healthiest, yet still dysfunctional. Calhoun notes that "the aggressive, dominant animals were the most normal males in our populations. They seldom bothered either the females or the juveniles. Yet even they exhibited occasional signs of pathology, going berserk, attacking females, juveniles and the less active males, and showing a particular predilection - which rats do not normally display - for biting other animals on the tail."

• Homosexuals emerged. Calhoun notes these males, lower on the dominance hierarchy, were better described as pansexual than homosexual. They were unable to tell the difference between appropriate and inappropriate mating partners. They made sexual advances to juveniles, males, and females not in estrus. Most males, including both dominant and other pansexual males, accepted their sexual advances.

• Incels emerged. Some males completely dropped out of the dominance struggle and were later (in a subsequent study by Calhoun) dubbed 'The Beautiful Ones'. About these beautiful rat incels, Calhoun notes "They ignored all the other rats of both sexes, and all the other rats ignored them. Even when the females were in estrus, these passive animals made no advances to them. And only very rarely did other males attack them or approach them for any kind of play. To the casual observer the passive animals would have appeared to be the healthiest and most attractive members of the community. They were fat and sleek, and their fur showed none of the breaks and bare spots left by the fighting in which males usually engage. But their social disorientation was nearly complete."

• Pick up artists emerged. Calhoun calls these males "Probers." Despite attacks by dominant males, Probers (the most active of all males) persisted in their activities. They were always on the lookout for females in heat. If there were none in their pens, they would post up at the ramps that led down into the brood pens and peer into them. They'd flee if a territorial rat chased them, but even if attacked, they'd soon be back waiting for females. They were also much more aggressive in their mating rituals. In the normal rat mating ritual, the male courts the female, who then enters her burrow alone to make her decision. The male might peek into the burrow occasionally, but never enters it. Finally, the female emerges from the burrow and accepts the male's advances. But Probers were too busy moving faster for this usual ritual. They would not tolerate even a short period of waiting, and instead would follow the female into the burrow as soon as she entered it.

Even in the second set of experiments, which did not have behavioral sinks, Calhoun notes that "the pathology exhibited by the populations in both sets of experiments, and in all pens, was severe."

But this wasn't Calhoun's last, or even his most popularly remembered, experiment (though it was his study with the highest number of citations).

 

Calhoun's Mouse Utopia and the Mice of NIMH

Calhoun's most famous study, his 'Mouse Utopia', came when the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) acquired rural property in Maryland to house Calhoun's experiments. Here he constructed his longest-lived utopia, one that demonstrated the inevitable end of a dysfunctional society.

To construct his environment, Calhoun endeavored to build a utopia free from all the traditional causes of mortality in the wild:

• There would be no emigration to suboptimal areas, because the utopia contained abundant resources for everything, and no mouse could leave

• Resources would be supra-available: wildly abundant nesting boxes that could comfortably sleep 15, food hoppers everywhere that could feed 25 at a time, water bottles all over, each capable of watering two mice at once, paper strips in total abundance to be used for nesting. There was food enough for 9500 mice, water enough for 6144 mice; the nest boxes could comfortably house 3840 mice. Yet even when the mouse population reached its zenith in the experiment, at 2200 mice, 20% of all nest sites usually remained unoccupied. There was always more space to spread to

• The habitat was kept indoors, climate controlled, to eliminate the influence of weather

• The mice were carefully selected to be disease-free; food and water used was kept disease-free; and the ground corn cob flooring of the nest boxes and habitat, along with accumulated feces, were removed every four to eight weeks, keeping the habitat disease-free

• No predators were present in the habitat

Thus, it was a utopia.

There remained no external pressures keeping the population down.

Yet, mouse behavior emerged to do the work regardless.

 

Explosive Initial Population Growth

Four pairs of 48-day-old mice (four males and four females) entered the habitat after each mouse had been isolated 21 days following weaning. The first 104 days consisted of "considerable social turmoil" among the mice until they adjusted to each other and their far larger surroundings. At the end of the 104 days, the first litters were born.

After this, the population began an exponential increase.

Roughly every 55 days, the mouse population doubled. The population size went from around 20, to 40, to 80, to 160, to 320, to 620.

Different groups reproduced at different rates, with higher ranking groups of mice producing more offspring faster, mirroring the activity of individual males (the most dominant males being the most active, and the least dominant males being the least active).

 

Population Growth Slows

Once the mouse population hit 620 individuals, at Day 315, population growth slowed.

For the next 245 days, the population continued to grow, but now took 145 days to double.

Social behavior began to become more complicated as the social and mating environment became more complex (due to all the mice crowded together, with emigration impossible). This overlaps with the reproduction-dampening effect of complexity I've discussed on Girls Chase before:

Read more: As Mating Complexity Increases, Do Reproductive Returns Diminish?

Male mice who failed to win in the dominance struggles during this period retreated to large pools of failed male mice in the center of the habitat. They became both physically and psychologically withdrawn. The withdrawn male mice:

• Stopped initiating interactions with acquaintance/friend mice

• Stopped provoking attacks by territorial males (who saw them as not a threat)

• Attacked each other over minor provocations, all of them developing wounds and scars as a result

• Would not fight back or flee when attacked, staying mostly immobile when another withdrawn mouse attacked

• Such attacked withdrawn mice would later themselves become attackers in turn

Some female mice also withdrew. However, these females would withdraw to emptier nest boxes, the ones not preferred by females with litters, and did not have the kind of violent aggression of the withdrawn males.

Because there were so many mice, it grew harder and harder for territorial males to defend their territory. Over time, territorial mice came to defend their territories less, and the size of their territories shrank. This led to frequent invasions of nursing females' nest sites.

Nursing females are not normally aggressive, instead letting territorial males protect their nursing sites. Yet as the territorial males became less aggressive and policed their territory less, the nursing females were forced to become aggressive themselves, taking on more and more of the male role.

Aggressive females also became increasingly aggressive toward their own young, whom they would attack, wound, and force from home several days before young mouse pups would normally finish weaning.

Females became increasingly dysfunctional. Increasingly they:

• Became pregnant less and less
• Self-aborted / resorbed fetuses when they did become pregnant
• Wounded their own young during birthing
• Moved their young around often, leading to the abandonment of some pups

Yet things would only grow worse from here.

 

The Utopia Dies

On Day 560, population growth of the mice utopia ceased.

Until Day 600, several newborn mice managed to survive past weaning. Between Day 560 and Day 600, deaths slightly exceeded births.

Then it completely fell apart.

After Day 600, no newborn mouse survived past weaning. Pregnancy among female mice rapidly declined, with no newborn mice surviving, until around Day 920, when the final mouse pregnancy occurred.

Mice continued to die of old age, but no new mice were born to replace them.

Calhoun notes that "By March 1 1972, the average age of survivors was 776 days, over 200 days beyond menopause" (the average female mouse reaches menopause at 560 days; on average mice in the study lived to 800 days). Calhoun continues that "On June 22 1972, there were only 122 (22 male, 100 female) survivors. Projection of the prior few months of exponential decline in numbers indicates that the last surviving male will be dead on May 23 1973, 1780 days after colonization."

As Calhoun states, "This demise of a population contradicts prior knowledge which indicates that when a population declines to a few remnant groups, some individuals will reinitiate its growth."

The mouse society simply gave up and collapsed. Why couldn't it, in a resource-rich environment with no predators or external stressors, bounce back?

 

What Caused the Death of the Mouse Utopia

As the population growth had slowed, mothers began prematurely abandoning their young en masse. The young mice had not developed the ability to bond adequately early in life. As they moved out into the crowded population, their attempts to socialize were disrupted by other mice.

Calhoun notes that as a group's size exceeds the optimal size, individuals are gratified by increasingly shorter and less intense social interactions. This leads to increasing social fragmentation, and precipitates later problems.

As a result of three (3) main causes, namely:

1. Failure to develop early social bonding

2. Disruption of attempts to learn socialization

3. Shortened, de-intensified, fragmented social behaviors

... mice failed to develop more mature complex social behaviors, such as courtship, mothering, and aggression.

The mice became passive, socially stunted loners unable to interact socially, unable to mate, afraid of confrontation. Then, they died out.

In one subsection of the study, the mice of one nest box were killed 300 days after the shift into the death phase of the mouse utopia. Among those killed were 148 females born in the last 50 days before the death phase began. These females had a median age of 334 days.

In a normal population, nearly 100% of the euthanized 334-day-old females would've already birthed five or more litters. However, among these euthanized born-just-before-the-utopia-death-spiral-started females, only 18% had ever conceived, and a mere 2% were pregnant.

The involuntarily celibate 'Beautiful Ones' of Calhoun's 1958 rat experiment made their appearance among mice too, gaining their 'Beautiful Ones' name here. About these Beautiful Ones, Calhoun says:

They never engaged in sexual approaches toward females, and they never engaged in fighting, and so they had no wound or scar tissue. Thus their pelage remained in excellent condition. Their behavioural repertoire became largely confined to eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, none of which carried any social implications beyond that represented by contiguity of bodies.

Toward the end, only incel 'Beautiful Ones' male mice and non-reproducing females remained. The older mice that were still functional had passed the point of being reproductively viable, and ultimately died off. A colony of sterile, socially stunted, passive young mice, physically capable of reproduction but mentally unequipped for it, was all that remained.

You can watch John B. Calhoun's original video interview, with lots of footage of the 1970 mouse utopia, here:

As one further experiment, Calhoun's colleague Dr. Halsey Marsden removed a small number of mice from the habitat during the mid-part of the utopia's spiral toward extinction.

Marsden placed the mice in spacious, uncrowded conditions. Yet, it became clear they had experienced "nearly total loss of capacity for developing a social structure or engaging in the full repertoire of reproductive behaviors."

Even when Marsden gave these mouse utopia transplants access to opposite sex mice that had developed normally in uncrowded conditions, he discovered they had retained next to no reproductive behavior.

Even with normal mate choices, they still could not reproduce.

They were too mentally broken.

 

Lessons for Man from the Mouse Utopia

Calhoun concludes by noting that as the society becomes more crowded, functional younger members of society are forced to compete for social roles with older established members of the community. This competition becomes so fierce that it "simultaneously leads to the nearly total breakdown of all normal behaviour by both the contestors and the established adults of both sexes. Normal social organization (i.e. 'the establishment') breaks down; it 'dies'."

Calhoun's next conclusions are straightforward enough and potent enough I'll post them in their entirety:

Young born during such social dissolution are rejected by their mothers and other adult associates. This early failure of social bonding becomes compounded by interruption of action cycles due to the mechanical interference resulting from the high contact rate among individuals living in a high density population. High contact rate further fragments behaviour as a result of the stochastics of social interactions which demand that, in order to maximize gratification from social interaction, intensity and duration of social interaction must be reduced in proportion to the degree that the group size exceeds the optimum. Autistic-like creatures, capable only of the most simple behaviours compatible with physiological survival, emerge out of this process. Their spirit has died ('the first death'). They are no longer capable of executing the more complex behaviours compatible with species survival. The species in such settings die.

Calhoun then notes that for an animal with social organization as complex as man, there is no reason to believe similar events as what occur in the mouse utopia mightn't also lead to species extinction.

"If opportunities for role fulfilment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles," Calhoun notes, "and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow."

He notes that individuals born into such a society will be so "out of touch with reality" they will be "beyond alienation."

We saw from Calhoun's 1958 experiment that the behaviors of rats as the society became more crowded came to reflect what we see in modern human urban society. Half the males 'got out of the game' of competing for social dominance with other males, and instead became incels, homosexuals, or pick up artists. The other half of the males still engaged in dominance struggles found themselves continually having to deal with challengers, often frequently trading places with the latest upstart dominant male.

Indeed, when I read the rat and mouse utopia experiments, I find myself struck by the parallels. For years on Girls Chase I've told men that competing with other men for status is a 'losing game' and a waste of time, and advised men to learn the habits and psychology of women and methods to pick them up.

Most men will never bother with this, I know; it requires a level of energy and dedication most men won't put into reproduction. Instead, they either stay in the struggle of trying to differentiate themselves in their social circles and careers, trying to 'reach the top of the dominance pile', and hope to net and keep a woman that way, or they retreat to the ever-swelling ranks of incel-dom or one of the many unconventional sexual orientations available to them these days.

(even in the 1958 study, the pickup artist 'Prober' mice are described as the 'most active' mice -- and indeed, that's what a human seducer is. While most other men are coasting along, working to gradually elevate their status in groups and fend off attackers and hope to court women that way, the playboy is out actively courting a variety of women, moving fast, and eschewing all the slow paths of 'normal' men. Nor is he sitting around preening all the time like 'Beautiful One' incels. His focus is on maximizing his mating opportunities with females)

The real question for man is, "Do these behaviors emerge only in cities, or large towns, or do they encompass entire countries?"

For me, as a teenager growing up in the suburbs, I was 100% a Beautiful One (what would now be called an incel... though we didn't have that term then). I obsessed over my appearance; I used to spend 15 minutes combing my hair trying to get my part just right. I had to be dressed impeccably at all times. I never initiated conversations with anyone else and was fixated on how people thought of my appearance. It didn't take a big city to produce this behavior in me; when it first emerged in me, I attended a class of perhaps 30 students, in a grade of perhaps 60, in a town of 40,000.

When I shifted to pick up artistry, again, I wasn't in a city. I was rather in a college town of about 40,000 students and some 20,000 townies. It was not a big town. I'd simply concluded I was not going to get anywhere with women by sitting around by myself looking pretty, and that I was going to have to start putting myself out there, taking my lumps, and keep at it.

But that, too, is unusual behavior. Most ordinary men will never do a cold approach. Even most naturals won't cold approach. It's simply too high risk. To become a pick up artist, a man has to accept, internally, that he is going to face social disapproval and negative feedback, and inure himself to it.

Just like those mice that get harassed by the territorial males or (one might guess) spurned by some of the females they follow into their burrows, yet they keep at it anyway, still staking out the ramps to the brood pens, still following the females into their burrows. They accept the negative feedback, shrug it off, and keep at it regardless.

All these behaviors are products of relatively crowded, dysfunctional societies. But what makes a society crowded or dysfunctional? Is it the size of the people in a given area? Or is it the way that area is constructed?

Would I still have been a Beautiful One had I been with 30 (or 60) classmates in an agricultural setting? I don't know.

Would I have needed to learn to pick up girls in a different kind of community of 40,000 classmates? Perhaps, or perhaps not. All I really wanted then was a girlfriend, but since I couldn't seem to get one, I turned to approaching women as a skill set to learn instead.

Male fashions are becoming increasingly feminine.

More and more men are becoming 'Beautiful Ones', who focus on looking as attractive as they can while being completely withdrawn from women and sex. There's a phenomenon called 'Looks Maxxing' where guys become totally obsessive about their appearances. They get plastic surgery, obsess over penis length and face shape, and engage in a thing called 'mewing'. There's a forum on looks maxing that is as popular as our forum on seduction. All these guys talk about is making themselves beautiful enough to attract good-looking women. If it was actually working, and they were getting laid they wouldn't care. Ask me how I know (the better I got at getting laid, the less obsessive about my appearance I became, to the point where today I will try to look good, but I'm not really going to worry about it a huge amount).

(we certainly do tell guys to upgrade their fundamentals here. It's an important thing to do! But focusing too much on appearance, and especially on aspects of your appearance that are hard or impossible to change, is futile if the goal is actual results with girls. It is you redirecting time, focus, and energy you could spend meeting women and developing game into, instead, being more beautiful. You can be a seducer who sleeps with good-looking, available women, OR you can be an involuntarily celibate Beautiful One... but you cannot be both...)

Homosexuality, transsexuality, and every other kind of non-reproductive sexuality, like the late stages of the 1958 rat study, is everywhere in Western societies. In many ways it is the chief differentiator between progressive and non-progressive societies: does the country fly rainbow flags, promote homosexuality in its diplomatic missions, and push homosexuals to the forefront of its media or does it not?

The first transsexual I ever met, a tall Thai dressed up like a woman whom I encountered in a Washington, D.C. nightclub, showed me a picture, once he'd gotten to know me a bit, of himself and his boyfriend. "He got used to it," he told me, 'it' presumably referring to the fact that his boyfriend, who I guess considered himself straight, was boinking a man, just before offering me a blowjob (I declined). From what I can tell today, more and more guys are indeed 'getting used to it' and dating dudes dressed like girls (or even just dudes dressed like dudes).

The observations on female rats and mice in the studies also seem quite familiar, looked at in isolation. They consist of females:

• Becoming less and less domestic
• Having fewer pregnancies and more abortions
• Being increasingly disinterested/worse mothers
• Getting chased around by thirsty males everywhere they go
• Becoming increasingly masculine, aggressive, and territorial

I don't think it's reaching to say these parallel much of what we see among the women of 21st Century Western society.

Our societies, too, have all the hallmarks of the socially unstable societies Calhoun notes in his first two studies:

• They are filled with people highly dissimilar to each other

• Due to crowding, people are dealing with totally new people all the time

• Due to rising polarization (from all the social dissimilarity) plus the inability to get away from dissimilar others (due to all the crowding), people are under constant criticism and interference in their socializing coming from others around them

So the question is: where is it all headed?

Are we headed for a mouse-utopian-style total population collapse, to the point of, even, extinction?

The fact remains that the real world is quite a bit different from a mouse utopia, no matter how big the habitat.

For one, we have a variety of different societies around the world, many of which are in totally different phases of the 'utopia lifecycle'. Western society is at present the society most advanced along the civilizational lifecycle.

But for another, we know that societies around the world throughout history have repeatedly gone through these cycles. They grow, often exponentially, then stabilize, then decline dramatically. After an empire declines, the cities become depopulated, yet the countryside, too, is emptied out (fertile, arable land abandoned as rural people flee from heavy taxation from the city-states, and from raiders making inroads into the weakened, declining empire).

After a time, new societies eventually come to flourish where the old ones have fallen.

Obviously, today, mice and rats still live. They are commonplace, and not extinct. So while they might have crashed and gone extinct in a box (even a large box), they haven't on Planet Earth.

However, we do see these behaviors in the people around us that we saw in the utopias.

We see them everywhere.

It would seem to presage the same kind of continued social breakdown and eventual population collapse the mouse/rat studies experienced.

Nevertheless, the human race won't progress to extinction. These phenomena are only occurring right now in heavily urbanized Western societies. Outside these societies things are quite different. Travel to the third world and notice how many poorly-dressed, unattractive men have beautiful women on their arms, and see how hard many of those women work to keep house, and how fecund are the families there.

It's the opposite of the mouse utopia... or the West, where most men must learn some amount of seduction to acquire a decent chance with women.

What can you do in the meantime if you are in the West?

My top recommendations are these:

• If you can get to the top of a dominance hierarchy (at work, in social circle, etc.), good. Get there. It'll be useful

• If you can't, become a seducer. You can still enjoy sexual success without needing to maintain dominance over a harem of women or a bevy of subordinate men

• Be aware of the tendency for men who give up competing to slide into homosexuality or 'beautiful inceldom'. Be wary of this in yourself. Aim to be either the top dog dominant man, if you can, or the energetic, active seducer

• Keep in mind you don't need to be the energetic seducer forever. Humans aren't mice. You can spend a few years as an active seducer, secure a high quality mate, and have a settled relationship from thenceforth if you wish (and most guys, I think, sooner or later, do seem to wish)

Further, if you know a young guy, make sure he understands all this. A lot of this is getting set in men's minds when they're young. Certainly it happened to me, with me settling into a 'Beautiful Ones' paradigm at 13 I couldn't get out of until I hit age 22.

You should also be pointing it out to young women you find yourself in substantial conversations with and who seem like they're open to good perspectives and advice.

A lot of folks are coming from messy family backgrounds, just like the mice in the studies, where the mother is not giving them enough affection (because she feels too put-upon herself to have the mental resources to properly care for her offspring), and may even push them out of the house too young or force them to take on responsibilities before they're ready to. I read a lot of stories to this effect during my Reddit binge a year ago. Honestly I was somewhat shocked how bad some people's relationships are with their parents, and how prevalent these bad relationships seem to be. Again, this is all reducing social development and the ability to bond, and guys must be aware of this and seek to cultivate these qualities actively on their own later.

There is also the issue where people are facing interference in their early social development, same as the rats and mice did in overcrowding situations. There are so many rules people are expected to know and follow now, and if they fail to do so effectively they get bullied, targeted, demonized, and ostracized. Societies are polarized, people are angry, and it can feel difficult to maintain normal relationships. Again, you must be aware of these forces, and figure out ways around them.

One advantage that you as a man have, that mice do not, is you can study these trends, know these forces, and seek to counter them in your own life.

For every social force that opposes you or makes your life more difficult, there are ladders to climb over it or paths to walk around it.

Knowing these phenomena exist might be a little depressing at first.

But once you realize they are a part of your environment, that you are in a socially unstable environment and must adapt, and that you understand them better than 99.999752% of people (which you do, if you've read this article and you read this site), you are far better equipped to combat the effects they have on you, and to recognize your own mental responses toward these social factors -- and adjust those responses where adjustment is needed.

As society continues in its social fragmentation, let yourself be the one who sees what is happening around you and steps back enough to calm himself, keep his head, and maintain as normal and healthy a development path for himself and those he cares about as he can.

Chase