Instinct Decay

By Ian Stephen

It is worth realising that of all the species of animal there are; mammals, birds, fish and reptiles are only a tiny proportion. Most animals: Amphibians, insects, and microorganisms are most strikingly different to us because they metamorphosise. That is, throughout their lifetime, different sections of their genetic code get activated, leading to two or more radically different bodies for the same creature.

A common thread with metamorphosis is that the creature which emerges from the process inhabits a different biome from its younger self. That is, the metamorphosised form lives in a new environment, where it gathers food from different sources to its younger self.

Caterpillars live on and eat leaves. Butterflies live in the air and eat nectar. The reason they enter a new biome, is to avoid competing for resources with their juvenile form-as this would harm the species overall.

Hold that thought.

In the 1960s, before people became unduly concerned with research ethics, a scientist, Calhoun wanted to simulate the modern world in animals.

In the wild, a fair number of people die each year, from predation, disease, or from not finding enough food. In modernity, hardly anyone dies before they have grown old. Calhoun wanted to see what a modern environment did to mice, who, in the wild, also dies in large numbers due to their environment, and very rarely grow old, like people.

He put 8 mice in an enclosure, with enough food, water and nesting materials for 3000 mice. There were no predators, and he ensured that all mice going in were healthy, so there was no disease.

Predictably, the mouse population exploded. Interestingly, it did not grow to the carrying capacity of the environment; there was no overshoot and collapse as Malthus would have predicted. Instead, like us, the mice reached an equilibrium of births and deaths with a population of 2200. The mice were living well into old age, and very few mice were born or survived childhood. So, for a while, the age/population graph of mice looked similar to ours in the developed world: A tower-block structure, with nearly equal numbers of mice from childhood to old age.

Interestingly, the mice were not particularly happy. In a normal mouse’s life cycle, he eventually establishes a territory. Mice don’t breed until they have space to call their own.

The space available to them ice was limited. And it all belonged, territorially, to old mice. In the wild, this wouldn’t matter: Old mice get regularly eaten, so a young mouse, if he survives, is bound to eventually gain his own space.

Not so in the mouse experiment, however. Young mice found all their attempts at living a normal life cycle frustrated. And then something interesting happened: the young, chronically frustrated mice went crazy: Among the behaviours observed: Some mice stopped even trying to mate. Groups of young males congregated, occasionally engaging in extreme violence, while most individuals became withdrawn and had no social interactions. When children were born, they were undesired, and left to die by their mothers. Most strangely, some of the frustrated mice began dedicating all their lives to grooming, gaining all the superficial qualities of a healthy and successful mouse, while being both sexless, and, when tested, clueless of most normal mouse behaviours. After a period of unhappy stability: The mice lost all their normal mating behaviours: No new mice were successfully reared, when the last mouse grew old, there were none left.

It seems that not being able to enjoy a normal life progression caused a complete collapse in the mice’s behaviour and instincts.

Many have doubted the applicability of these findings to human society: After all-we have far more space than we need!

But; what if room cannot only be understood as physical space? For our purposes, what really matters is social space. Can we gain enough space in society, that is, wealth and status to fulfill our normal life cycles?

Social space can be understood as both wealth and social standing. In the mouse society, the population eventually reached a ‘tower block’ structure. As old mice, with wealth and status, did not die as they usually would, there was very little social space available to the younger mice. It is fair to say, that during the population growth phase in the mouse experiment, there was still enough social space for young mice to live normally. Similarly, despite the long lives of their elders, in the human population, for a while, people could live long without influencing the behaviours of those younger than them, there was still enough social space, that is, land, high-status positions, and undeveloped businesses to go around.

Today, our population is also in a tower block structure. And, among young people, there are all the behaviours from the mouse experiment: Because of a lack of social space, young people are caught unnaturally in the early stages of the life cycle: And mere survival doesn’t help as very few of one’s elders and peers die each year, meaning that social progress is not a regular or inevitable thing. Among the young, we see social isolation, occasional extreme violence, excessive grooming and an unwillingness to have children.

And, if this is due to social structure-then none if it is going to get better.

The social space can also grow if the population grows. But relying on population growth could never work forever. Most of us agree in the need for a steady population size. But we envision this as a tower block population. As we have seen, this is unnatural, and may well be self-destructive for society.

It appears, a better social structure is the ‘family home’. That is, equal numbers of each age group until the mid-forties, and then a declining number of people in each subsequent year. This allows for people to attain status and wealth while they are still young enough to have children.

Now-that’s a bit morbid: But as we shall see, the Hindus have long practices something very close to what I am suggesting-and they did it without killing anyone.

In Hinduism, life is divided into four ages, or ashramas. In each of these, a man is expected to have different priorities: From birth ‘till 25, he is to learn, to develop his mind, body and character. From 25 until 50, he is to work and raise a family: To strive for material success so he can provide for his wife and children. Form 50, or when the children no longer need his care, he is to gradually distance himself from the material world. By 75, at the latest, he is to have renounced any titles, roles and worldly possessions, and have devoted his life to ascetic spiritual fulfilment, walking the earth with no material possessions, he seeks to fulfill the spiritual phase of life, which is as important as the material one.

Much like the caterpillar being reborn a butterfly, In Hindu society, an old man is expected to concern himself with matters entirely different from his former self.

This frees up social space, allowing for people still in the material phase of their lives to fulfil their aspirations.

This may well be the key to solving the problems we face today, and create a happy, stable society.