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the time the experiment was carried out, it was not the norm to provide stimulating environments for experimental animals; today it is, and had that been factored into the experiment the resulting mouse behaviours might well have been quite different.

Finally, there is the density that the mice were allowed to reach. They were specifically prevented from migrating out of the habitat in which they were placed to enable overcrowding to develop. It is clear from the photographs that they were literally teeming, living cheek-by-jowl with nowhere else to go. No matter how crowded humans get in cities, there are still options for them to move to less populated areas. You would not get conditions analogous to Calhoun’s mice unless the entire Earth surface was packed with humans to the almost complete exclusion of anything else, by which time the idea of infinite resources would be a distant memory. Humanity could never find itself living in conditions analogous to these mice.

Moving on to the interpretation of the experimental results by Michael Woodley, there are a number of aspects of this that might cause eyebrows to be raised. Firstly, there is his assertion that technological advances since the industrial revolution have meant humans have stopped evolving because people who would previously have been too unfit to survive now do; but this is far from proven. Other researchers suggest that because there are far more people alive now, and far more genetic variants that are allowed to survive, there is vastly more potential for evolution, so it is actually speeding up.

Then there is the idea of mutational load and ‘spiteful mutations’. No mutation is necessarily harmful; its harmfulness is determined by whether it makes an organism more, or less, fit to survive in the environment in which it finds itself. Mutations that are deleterious in one context can be helpful in another. Further to this is the belief that autism, mental illness, allergies, and even left-handedness are entirely the result of genetics, which was the prevalent idea in the 1960s when Calhoun’s experiments were first being interpreted as analogies for human society. Today, however, they are considered to be significantly influenced by environment and upbringing, with genetics only playing a partial role.

Woodley then extrapolates this to consider intelligence, which he asserts modern society no longer selects for, and that IQ is going down as a result. This opens a whole new can of worms. For example, IQ is not a great measure of intelligence and is largely discounted as such by modern research; and in any case it is not going down, it is going up. The average IQ can be shown to have been increasing by about three per cent per decade since IQ tests were invented. Woodley is, it has to be said, aware of this, and has switched to an alternative measure, that of reaction time, but this assertion is tenuous. Elsewhere, the idea that society no longer produces towering geniuses like Newton and Einstein has been brandished to make the same point, that humanity is genetically deteriorating to the point that it cannot produce outstanding individuals. However, others counter this by pointing out that current science is much more reliant on research by large teams, so no individual stands out as a lone genius, while the Transhumanists in particular take the view that we are actually producing ever more brilliant people so that there are so many that they no longer stand out as extraordinary, and that this is all part of our accelerated rush towards the apotheosis of the Singularity. However you measure intelligence though, there is the fact that it is not solely genetically determined – at least 50 per cent of an individual’s intelligence can be attributed to environmental factors such as family, environment, nutrition, education etc etc., so whether society is producing more or fewer intelligent people, it won’t just be down to genetics.

Woodley also harks back to the assumption, made by Galton and his eugenicist successors, that stupid people breed more stupid people, while intelligent ones have intelligent offspring, and that if you leave them to it, the dumb members of the population will breed like rabbits and overwhelm the intelligent, causing civilisation to collapse into a new dark age until selection for intelligence re-asserts itself. The idea that civilisation is destined to collapse under a tide of imbecility was the central tenet of early 20th century eugenics, led to a hideous catalogue of human rights abuses, and has since been comprehensively exploded. Even a cursory contact with reality ought to be enough to disprove the idea – there are plenty of people who are significantly more intelligent than their parents, and, unfortunately, quite a few who are more stupid. As an ideology it is dead in the water and deserves to stay that way.

This view, and others expressed on religiosity and female fertility, suggest that Woodley’s interpretation is not an objective one. He seems to be coming from a right-wing perspective that sees modern liberal culture as a sickness that needs to be eradicated. To do so he is extrapolating from a 50-year-old experiment that was not intended to be used as an analogy for human development and appears to be using outdated interpretations of how genetics works to espouse an Ayn Randesque view of humanity founded in the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics. The only conclusion you can draw from Calhoun’s experiment is that if you let a mouse population grow in an unchecked manner in a contained environment with insufficient stimuli, they start to behave in a pathological manner and eventually go extinct. There are absolutely no lessons for any other organism that you can extrapolate from it, let alone predict the future of humanity. Ian Simmons Monkseaton, Tyne and Wear In his experiment, Calhoun began from only four pairs of mice. The genetic diversity in the population was, therefore, from the start, seriously limited, and well beneath the diversity now thought to be necessary to build viable populations of any animal. The failure of the mouse colony, if it is to be explained genetically, is thus not to do with space or a failure to weed out mutations, but rather an initial genetic impoverishment.

Humans, unlike mice, have a complex culture. This means that much of our “intelligence” is held, not in our individual heads, but in our culture. Oral traditions, libraries, and now the Internet carry knowledge that the individual can readily access, and modern cultures know more than any previous cultures could even imagine. But if intelligence is problem solving, and not merely knowing stuff, again, humans solve problems collectively. Modern society, with its extraordinary communicative technologies, allows people to cooperate and work together. We still do dumb things, but we do extraordinary things too (think of all that wonderful technology, but also the assault on the major sources of disease and illness that allows the vast majority of us to anticipate long and healthy lives – which is of course, precisely the thing Dutton is railing against).

Dutton makes the odd claim that we do not know why the industrial revolution happened uniquely in Western Europe. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, put forward a plausible hypothesis over a century ago, and one that has been debated ever since by sociologists and historians. (Weber’s argument, very crudely, is that Protestant culture – yes, again culture, that all-important feature of human life – encouraged the reinvestment of profits, rather than their squandering in luxurious living. Weber admits that readily accessible supplies of coal and iron in northern Europe also helped a lot.)

Dutton’s arguments are the worst sort of pseudoscience. More worryingly, behind this pseudo-

Dr Edward Dutton’s piece on John Calhoun’s classic mouse experiment and its recent reinterpretation by Michael Woodley of Menie (‘Of Mouse Utopias and Men’,

FT356:56-57) raises a number of points that require examination. First and foremost is the original purpose of Calhoun’s experiment. It was not intended to model the effects of a utopian environment on humans using mice, but rather to explore the effects of overcrowding on mouse populations. Only after publication did it get picked up by popular culture as an analogy for human population growth. The supposed ‘utopian’ aspects of the experiment came about because Calhoun wished to study the effects of overcrowding alone, so to control the other variables in the experiment the mice were supplied with abundant replica habitats, a safe, disease-free environment and all the resources they might need to survive. The experiment was not intended to explore the effects of providing the mice with these.

Secondly, the experiment cannot be extrapolated to human populations for several reasons, primarily because the reproductive strategies and social behaviours of mice are vastly different from those of humans. Humans don’t produce large litters of offspring; males do not fight to control harems of females, and humans’ intelligence and ability to communicate mean they can develop more sophisticated strategies for dealing with crowded environments than mice can. It is clear from the photographs that the environments in which Woodley’s mice were breeding were not particularly stimulus-rich, so the animals would not have had much to occupy them apart from breeding and social interaction. Humans live in a far more stimulating environment than this, so have more to distract them, even when living at high densities. At