![]() Well before the rats reached the maximum possible density predicted by Calhoun, however, they began to display a range of “deviant” behaviours: mothers neglected their young dominant males became unusually aggressive subordinates withdrew psychologically others became hypersexual the living cannibalized the dead. The result was a population explosion followed by pathological overcrowding, then extinction. Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.Ĭalhoun built a “rat city” in which everything a rat could need was provided, except space. It was a rodent and, in particular, the laboratory experiments performed on rats in the 1960s by ethologist John B. But the most influential example of “ pathological togetherness” lifted from the animal kingdom was not a bird. The factory-farmed broiler chicken was, in the early 1970s, as much a novel convenience of modern living as the concrete tower block, and feather pecking and cannibalism were real concerns. The episode, soon to be released on DVD for the first time, concludes with Quist calling for a Royal Commission on the “roots of violence in modern society.” ![]() On the contrary, they become so aggressive that their beaks have to be cut off “to prevent them tearing each other to pieces.” For the episode’s writer, Doctor Who veteran Louis Marks, it was only a short, logical step from aggressive poultry to antisocial people. Towards the end of the episode, head doomwatcher Dr Spencer Quist (John Paul) muses that chickens living in batteries do not become docile as expected. ![]() “ The Human Time Bomb”, which first aired in February 1971, also links concerns about high-density housing to animal behaviour. One grim episode of the then-popular BBC television series Doomwatch (think an ecological version of The X-Files for 1970s Britain) explores social breakdown, crime, and violence in a “compact urban unit”. Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, adapted by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, is one of the earliest and most famous examples of a genre that flourished in the 1970s. Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a physiologist who occupies a spartan flat about halfway up, observes the downward spiral with an air of clinical detachment.īallard wrote High-Rise at a time when the tabloid press was filled with real-life horror stories about London’s crumbling tower blocks and dystopian science fiction traded in sociopathic delinquency. The building serves as a microcosm for society, its floors stratified by class with the building’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons in the film), at the top. The timely and already much discussed adaptation of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel traces the mechanical and social collapse of a new forty-storey luxury apartment block on the outskirts of London. In a 2011 article, Ramsden writes that Calhoun’s studies were brandished by others to justify population control efforts largely targeted at poor and marginalized communities.Director Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise opened last Friday in cinemas around the country. Population growth in the 1970s was swelling, and films such as Soylent Green tapped into growing fears of overpopulation and urban violence. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to ,” says Ramsden.Ĭalhoun wasn’t shy about anthropomorphizing his findings, binning rodents into categories such as “juvenile delinquents” and “social dropouts,” and others seized on these human parallels. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves females stopped getting pregnant. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. ![]() This iteration, dubbed Universe 25, was the first crowding experiment he ran to completion.Įventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space, and Calhoun suspected that it was only a matter of time before this caused trouble in paradise.Ĭalhoun had been running similar experiments with rodents for decades but had always had to end them prematurely, ironically because of laboratory space constraints, says Edmund Ramsden, a science historian at Queen Mary University of London. In 1968, Calhoun had started the experiment by introducing four mouse couples into a specially designed pen-a veritable rodent Garden of Eden-with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The results, laid bare at his feet, had taken years to play out. Calhoun wasn’t the survivor of a natural disaster or nuclear meltdown rather, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health conducting an experiment into the effects of overcrowding on mouse behavior. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |