> Not to mention, rat society doesn't change much whether it's ten rats or a hundred.
It turns out rat society is much more complicated than I at least thought, and it definitely changes dramatically once it reaches a critical mass.
> Is this a totally reasonable thing to say, though, comparing us to rats in this situation?
I don't know. It depends on how generalizable social behavior is. I think it's very worrying with the problems we see with socialization in the world today and behaviors that, by analogy, resemble what's going on in Calhoun's experiments. We also have some anecdata from other social animals experiencing different types of collapse, where even though there is the physical capability of reproduction, the social collapse prevents it from occurring.
> Rats have no concept of extinction or death, humans do. To me, that means a lot.
What we abstractly know, for better or for worse, generally has little do with how we act. For example, human populations that experience severe trauma have problems even generations later, despite all their knowledge that their behavior is counterproductive.
I don't think we're too far off from not needing to worry about social behavior in regard to reproduction honestly. We're fairly close to literal test tube babies. Once that point arrives, we just need to have our Soma nearby and society will continue to function properly.
It turns out rat society is much more complicated than I at least thought, and it definitely changes dramatically once it reaches a critical mass.
> Is this a totally reasonable thing to say, though, comparing us to rats in this situation?
I don't know. It depends on how generalizable social behavior is. I think it's very worrying with the problems we see with socialization in the world today and behaviors that, by analogy, resemble what's going on in Calhoun's experiments. We also have some anecdata from other social animals experiencing different types of collapse, where even though there is the physical capability of reproduction, the social collapse prevents it from occurring.
> Rats have no concept of extinction or death, humans do. To me, that means a lot.
What we abstractly know, for better or for worse, generally has little do with how we act. For example, human populations that experience severe trauma have problems even generations later, despite all their knowledge that their behavior is counterproductive.