Each person also learns a special skill that contributes to the country. Population growth in the 1970s was swelling, and films such as Soylent Green tapped into growing fears of overpopulation and urban violence. Study Guide Utopia Book 2, Section 3 Advertisement - Guide continues below Book 2, Section 3 Their Occupations At some point, everyone farms. “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. In his wisdom, Utopus set up the Utopian society that Hythloday finds so immensely attractive. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves females stopped getting pregnant. He conquered the savages who once lived on the isthmus Utopia now occupies, and then set his army and new subjects to work cutting the land away to make Utopia an island. 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. And remember, when he was writing Utopia, Christianity was the accepted and standard religious code, so he would have expect his readers to all believe in the Christian God, too. These include poems and an alphabet in the 'Utopian language,' maps of Utopia, and letters that supposedly verify the existence of Utopia. So, you can imagine, he was a pretty religious guy. Front Matter Before the beginning of Utopia, More provides a number of made-up but intriguing items. 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. Thomas More, as you might be aware, was later made a saint by the Catholic Church after being executed by Henry VIII. 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.
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