Stephan Molyneux Interviews Michael Woodley Of Menie

An interesting discussion on the effects of no natural selection on intelligence, prosociality, and civilization.

VDare sums Woodley’s hypothesis up well by likening it to Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia:

It’s a re-interpretation of a much older study involving mice, carried out by American ethologist (animal behaviorist) John B. Calhoun. Calhoun’s arresting research—Death squared: The explosive growth and demise of a mouse population [Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January 1973]—charted the rise and fall of a mouse population living under conditions in which there was no Natural Selection. Woodley of Menie’s team argues human beings are living under the same conditions today.

… Woodley of Menie and his team aver that Calhoun’s experiment–which created a “Mouse Utopia”–will provide a good indication of what will happen to us.

In Calhoun’s “Mouse Utopia” at the University of Maryland, there were no predators, no bad weather, no possibility to escape, and no epidemics, because the mice were ensured to be healthy when they entered. There was a huge amount of space. It was, in other words, paradise for mice.

In July 1968, the experiment began… By day 315, Calhoun started to notice interesting behavior changes in the mice. More and more males became what he called “the beautiful ones.” These effete males would make no attempt to fight or copulate with females. They simply spend their time washing each other and eating.

By contrast, female behavior became increasingly aggressive: they would attack males, throw their offspring out of the nest too young, attack their young, and actively avoid sex.

By day 600, fertility was not only at below replacement levels (as it is now in the West) but no new-born mice survived beyond weaning, because their mothers weren’t looking after them properly.

The last conception was on day 920. Autopsies on females aged 334 days or over revealed that only 18% had ever conceived whereas wild mice would have had at least 5 litters by that age. In May 1973, 1720 days after colonization, all of the mice were dead.

One thing I have never liked about Calhoun’s mouse experiment was the conclusion that Calhoun’s mice were experiencing an accumulation of deleterious mutations which were not removed, and that it involved genetic changes to the mice. That may have played a small role, but I do not think that is it entirely, for two reasons.

One, the mice went into extinction, despite food being present, and the ability to reproduce. If the mutations were random, I would think at least some mouse would have retained the ability to mate, and reproduce, and would have. If mice were being culled by mutation, they would have been selecting for those that would continue to reproduce, just as if owls were killing off mice instead of mutations. These mice all, to a one, followed almost a programmed path which led to extinction in every mouse. That makes no sense from a genetic, biological perspective.

Second, the path of behavioral changes followed the changes you see in r/K, as a reproductive strategy heads ever more r. Pretty males. Manly, aggressive females. Lack of rearing urges leading to child abandonment. It would not surprise me if the lack of conception was due to amygdalae going so far r that you first had homosexuality, leading into even more amygdala-shocking sexual practices, as degraded amygdalae came to require ever more stimulation to reach sexual arousal until the stimuli required for arousal were not even related to reproduction.

My very strong assumption is that what happened in the experiment is that a mouse machine, which was designed to exist in balance with a certain amount of harshness, and adapt reproductive behavior very slightly, within a very narrow range of variability in that harshness, was given a constant stream of r-stimuli which first pushed all mouse brains into very r-behavior, and which then carried it over into a brain structure so r that it became maladaptive as epigenetic shift added to epigenetic shift generation after generation.

Small diminutions in rearing urges became so great offspring were abandoned. Males needs for slightly more aggressive female mates to attain sexual arousal turned into male needs for shocking things like savagery and pain to attain arousal, combined with grotesqueness in sexual preferences, and that led to a lack of conception. Females who were supposed to get slightly more aggressive and masculine became too masculine and aggressive, and that interfered with mating as well.

In short the mouse, which was perfectly designed to shift slightly r intermittently to optimize reproduction in nature had that adaptive mechanism pushed to its absolute extreme generation after generation, by conditions it had never encountered in nature, and which it was not designed to encounter. The result was a mouse robot whose programming was not designed for that environment, and the programming thus failed.

It is all so clear to me. This was the design. This was the mechanism, just it was pushed beyond what the reality it was designed for would produce. But without r/K Theory being known everywhere, people just can’t grasp that the environment is modeling brains and reproductive strategies, through environmental adaptation, through epigenetic adaptation, and even through genetic selection over the very long term. Moreover they are not seeing that the clearest evidence for this is that the shift can be pushed to a point where it will actually break the organism, and cause it to actually go extinct.

It is a shame, because it would seem that given we are doing exactly this to our own species in real life, that information could be useful somehow as we plan our way forward.

I suppose it is just one more reason to be thankful for the coming Apocalypse.

Spread r/K Theory, because everything is coming apart, and it isn’t by chance

This entry was posted in Amygdala, Decline, Economic Collapse, Liberals, Morals, Pedophilia, Politics, Psychological Manipulation, Psychology, r-stimuli, rabbitry, Rearing Differences, Sexual Deviance, Sexual Dimorphism. Bookmark the permalink.
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Cecil Henry
6 years ago

I saw this case of a rabbit in office: The blindness is disturbing
Self-hatred is SICK!!

Virtue Signalling is no virtue. Its theft: of people’s lives, their past and future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=159&v=_k8PahVTNJg

Andy
Andy
Reply to  Cecil Henry
6 years ago

“i know more people of color then you do”.

Fuck, women will always be bitchy little children and every civilization that lets them into leadership positions is perverted and doomed. I see just two dumb cunts haging at each other and a couple of guys that die of boredom.

Squidz
Squidz
Reply to  Cecil Henry
6 years ago

Oh, man. I can’t wait until these people start to get their comeuppance.

rogerlocke
6 years ago
Eidolon
Eidolon
6 years ago

I guess the lack of escape route is similar to our situation too in that as the richest society, there’s nowhere more r-friendly for r’s to go to.

Makes me wonder a couple of things. First, if there was a more normal environment available (say if they could leave but not return, or return was very difficult while leaving was easy) would they migrate to a more difficult environment? Would they immediately fail there or would their behavior return to a more normal state? I wonder if any part of the utopian mice would actually seek out a more difficult environment to avoid maladaptation.

Secondly, if they had a button that would let in more aggressive and more normal mice, maybe of another species or variety that they normally would avoid, would they press it to let them in? I think we have experimental results to indicate what would happen but it would be interesting if that behavior pattern could actually be replicated in lower species.

Hell, I wonder if, had there been a place they could go where there were cats, if they’d have intentionally gone to the cats by the end.

c_arnold
6 years ago

So, basically an overreaching civilization, it’s various agencies and agents, including the government, judiciary, and law enforcement, are the walls containing us within what is a virtual mouse utopia?

Mr Darcy
Mr Darcy
6 years ago

We are already two years into the Eddy Minimum, and the planet’s magnetic shield is getting alarmingly weak, so the Apocalypse has already started. Within the next 5 or 6 years, we’ll know for sure who is going to come through it.

Andy
Andy
6 years ago

“I suppose it is just one more reason to be thankful for the coming Apocalypse.”

,,Existance is corrupt and so there should be no existance at all” said the Devil Mephisto in ‘Faust’, and i fear our systems today are so big and overgrown that manly virtues and traits will still lose out in the end.
Just take Molyneux. Hes the mouse. Hes the abandoned and attacked mouse offspring and now he walks around doing tricks for people for small change. He wrote a series on atheism and now he did a complete 180 cause the bigger market is with millennial zelots dreaming of jihadi like revenge and not with atheist neckbeards.

cosplayconstruction
6 years ago

I’ve seen/read a lot of Lefties trying to downplay the Mouse Utopia Experiment, trying to say that what affects mice can’t be extrapolated to humans. If we could attempt this experiment with other species, like monkeys (perhaps altering the experiment to make it closer to the social experimentation currently being attempted on humans today,) we might be able to convince people that it’s not just a mouse thing.

It’s clear from this experiment that environment shapes psychology. One of the reasons the mouse society breaks down is because male mice no longer have enough room to define and capture a territory big enough to meet all of their social/mating needs. They aren’t allowed to grow up and “become men” as it were. How is this any different from the plight of the modern day US male, watching as his job is shipped off to be done by foreign scab labor, having only menial, minimum wage jobs to sustain him? Or having foreigners come in and drive the cost of housing sky high so he can’t afford a house large enough to raise a big family? Why would any man bother to try in a society whose leaders hate and revile him, and wish he would just roll over and die? It makes you think…

Duke Norfolk
6 years ago

“One thing I have never liked about Calhoun’s mouse experiment was the conclusion that Calhoun’s mice were experiencing an accumulation of deleterious mutations which were not removed, and that it involved genetic changes to the mice.”

People can’t face the truth. They don’t want to face the fact that we can’t live our decadent, slothful modern life of ease with no bad consequences. It just has to be something out of our control vs. our own poor choices and arrogance.

This is very analogous to all the grasping for genetic causes for cancer vs. the notion/possibility/likelihood that we have induced the bulk of the huge growth in cancer through terrible nutritional and other behavioral practices in the last 100 years or so. I could go on and on with the parallels – auto-immune diseases, obesity, diabetes type II, and maybe even type I, conditions resulting from poor prenatal practices, etc., etc. And maybe the mother of them all is the notion that we may be at least partly responsible for the disease and dysfunction of following generations due to our own poor nutritional and other behavioral practices through some kind of epigenetic mechanisms (see Pottenger’s cats); that’s a big bitter pill people don’t want to swallow in our hyper-individualist world.

It’s also interesting that many people (K types) know intuitively that we need hard work, struggle and hardships in life to develop properly and become fulfilled and truly happy. One way or another we’re going to get that again.

ACThinker
ACThinker
6 years ago

came across a MGTOW link shortly after reading this, and realized that the male mice had done just that. The females became to agressive and the males were like “I’m out of here”.

I wonder if they ran a mousetopia and a mouse normal next to each other and periodically swapped some of the residents around what the results would be like…. We could then compare what happens when a hyper r gets back to normality (dies, or adapts) and a normal goes hyper r … and either takes over or goes crazy like the others. And how the interplay between them all works.

I wonder if we can make a mousehardship and create more K like mice….