Episode notes
“I shall largely speak of mice,” the paper begins “but my thoughts are on man.” So begins a truly extraordinary scientific paper, and an equally extraordinary story. “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” was published in 1973 by John Calhoun, and it detailed his increasingly bizarre research into the psychological effects of overcrowding. Over two decades he built a series of ‘rodent utopias’, where he could keep a population of rats or mice, meet all their basic food and shelter needs, but mess around with population levels. He wanted to see how they…
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