No one really knows. Calhoun did a bad job writing it up. When I went looking for details years back, I think the most in-depth primary source I found was like… 2 pages long.
I’ve wondered if what actually happened was just a contagious infection (sterility is a consequence of many infectious diseases), which given the population density should be near-inevitable. Even if he had checked for infections (it’s unclear if he did) it would be easy to miss a lot of organisms, which is why we still regularly run into new evidence of infectious contributions to various problems.
He also ran a number of mouse utopias, IIRC, and usually you hear only about the one which gave the ‘collapse’ narrative.… At this point, I assign it to the mental bucket of ‘wrong 1960s blankslatism like Rosenthal or Pygmalion effect or the Stanford Prison Experiment or Robber’s Cave but which will live on forever in pop science because their message is too appealing’.
No one really knows. Calhoun did a bad job writing it up. When I went looking for details years back, I think the most in-depth primary source I found was like… 2 pages long.
I’ve wondered if what actually happened was just a contagious infection (sterility is a consequence of many infectious diseases), which given the population density should be near-inevitable. Even if he had checked for infections (it’s unclear if he did) it would be easy to miss a lot of organisms, which is why we still regularly run into new evidence of infectious contributions to various problems.
He also ran a number of mouse utopias, IIRC, and usually you hear only about the one which gave the ‘collapse’ narrative.… At this point, I assign it to the mental bucket of ‘wrong 1960s blankslatism like Rosenthal or Pygmalion effect or the Stanford Prison Experiment or Robber’s Cave but which will live on forever in pop science because their message is too appealing’.
I’ve summarized my problems with Mouse Utopia: https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia