Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, June 5, 2026
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42 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I posted this link yesterday, but today I want to think a bit more about it.
Back in the late ’60’s when life was fun (unless you were of draft age, or Vietnamese) an experiment called Universe 25 was carried out. Scientists created a rodent utopia: unlimited food, unlimited water, endless nesting materiel (IKEA gift cards), zero predators and the mice were healthy. And crucially, there was space and resources for 3840 mice.
Eight mice were introduced. The population doubled every 55 days. In a year, 600 mice. And then, despite endless resources, the doubling rate dropped to 145 days. And behavioral problems rose: unmotivated violence, sexual deviancy, loss of maternal instinct, and mice who did nothing all day but groom themselves. Males lost interest in sex. The mice appeared to forget how to be mice.
The population peaked at 2200 mice, more than 1000 under what the space would have accommodated. Then they started dying off. After five years the last mouse died. Not from hunger or thirst or disease.
There are multiple explanations, and of course humans are not mice. However, the human population has begun to decline – not from lack of resources, indeed the decline is sharpest in countries with the most resources. Not from disease – again, Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe are not particularly diseased. People have simply stopped having babies. Sexual deviancy this is not a judgment, just a description of variance from the Adam and Eve model) has risen. Violence is often random, absent motive. Males are losing interest in sex and becoming increasingly interested in grooming.
The parallels to human society in the 21st century are obvious. South Korea is projected to see its population cut in half by 2100, and that population will be elderly and likely unable to reproduce, even if the desire to do so is re-ignited. Homo sapiens is racing toward extinction for no obvious reason. Efforts to convince women to have more babies have failed in every society that has tried.
The expected interpretation was that this was a reaction to overpopulation, but that’s clearly not the case with either the mice, or humans. Deprived of competition for mates and resources, the mice went a bit crazy and then a lot dead. Males had nowhere to use their aggression. Females had no need to protect and nurture. Mouse society collapsed and went extinct.
Human fertility is dropping like a rock. The places where fertility remains relatively strong are the places where humans have the greatest need to compete for resources. And now, a new accelerant: one of the possible AI scenarios is a world without any need for competition. AI doesn’t need to go SkyNet on us, it could just feed and shelter and clothe us to extinction.
We are apes evolved over many millennia to compete, now required to undergo a radical and unprecedented adaption in an evolutionary blink of an eye. I don’t think we understand what is happening to us. And I don’t think we are adapting.
Have a nice day.
Just a casual observation from Houston. Everyday, recently, it seems as though a long standing restaurant closes. Now restaurants are a tough business, but they reflect a changing something whether it be the economy, changing demographics, or Michael Reynolds ennui.
The US needs drones, not Trump-class battleships, Democrats argue
Like the Reagan era Iowa Class battleship boondoggle.
I wonder what the “sincerely held religious beliefs” crowd will say. Seems to me to be blatantly unconstitutional.
Defense Department to drop atheists, pagans, 175 others from list of military faiths
Wait for the VA to try a similar move.
@Scott:
There are two kind of Navel vessels in the 21st century … Submarines and targets.
@Rick DeMent:
Belly buttons or oranges?
@CSK:
English sucks 🙂
Is self-awareness not far behind?
When AI Builds Itself
@Rick DeMent:
Indeed.
The Ukrainians are already deploying naval drones that carry launch canisters for FPV drones. Those aerial drones can be brought within easy fiber-optic (un-jammable) range of ships. They wouldn’t sink a ship, but could quite easily destroy radars and other sensors, while the naval drone itself could hit the rudder. An aircraft carrier deprived of sensors and/or steering is a pitiful helpless giant.
@Michael Reynolds:
If one calls risky elective surgeries, a variety of weird products from tiny labs run by modern alchemists, and pounding anabolic steroids to the point of self-sterilization, grooming.
At least these dumb fucks are have volunteered their genes for extinction.
The lemming legend become useful.
Whom does this decribe:
A) Elon hitler
B) Mad Vlad
C) El Taco
D) Bibi
E) all of the above
@Rick DeMent:
And since submarines can’t support the logistics chain for the current US global force projection capabilities, those capabilities will decline. I have a bet with a couple of online acquaintances that no later than 2042 it will be clear to the world that the US conventional military reach extends no farther than the Western Hemisphere. (I’m an old, but there’s an outside chance I’ll live long enough to collect on that.)
I’ve secured a second tranche of vacation with both a supervisor and a manager. I was concerned, because two or three Hell Week projects are supposed to be coming back to life soon. Apparently they think they can manage without me (I’ve heard that before).
I want to use the time to write one or two stories. I’ve four possibilities:
1) the coup in the kingdom in the world where humans got transplanted to I mentioned yesterday. the issue there is the massive backstory of the transplant and what the world looks like, not to mention what the politics, religion, and economics are, this seems to require a longer work, possibly a full novel.
2) A story set in the same universe as the above, only much later in its history. This involves three interstellar nations, a rebellious colony world of one of them, and some intrigue. Again, massive backstory; even more massive because of what took place in interstellar relations before FTL travel was discovered.
3) An archaeologist and an anthropologist*, and a lot of hired workers, begin a dig in an unpromising valley in Europe, because someone found what looks like a stone hand axe, and none had ever been found there before. They find nothing of note, but hit a layer of volcanic ash. Since they still have funding, they keep digging. Under the ash, they find a portion of some perfectly reflective, non-metallic material (or so they assume). Then something interesting happens.
4) Another archaeology story, this time far, far, far away from Earth. A military survey ship finds a massive interstellar ark** (say 40-60 kilometers long), complete with massive engines and enormous fusion reactors. inside they find, well, many different types of tombs, and thousands of working robots that keep the place in perfect shape.
I’m more inclined to the latter two, mostly because they’d be shorter
*It really should be an archaeologist, an anthropologist, and a paleontologist, but that sounds like the setup for a joke.
** the original iteration had three such massive arks, with two being identical, and the third being very different. But that would lengthen the story and give it a goldilocks feel; besides, the third one wouldn’t be “just right.”
@Michael Reynolds: I’m not sure the folks at TED Talks are going to call you back, but I find that interesting.
Brain engagement, scarcity, and the need to…strive? I guess? all feel very important to establishing a NEED, or desire, *to* survive.
@Michael Reynolds: First, I seldom watch videos, low info density, and haven’t watched your link. So I apologize if I’ve missed some nuance. And the rat experiment is well known.
Declining fertility is a big concern at conservative sites lately. They seem to be looking for some deep , mystical, sociological explanation they can blame on the libturds. Seems to me it’s a product of a) we no longer need to have ten kids, hoping two survive childhood disease to work the farm in our old age, b) reliable birth control.
It is a legit concern and could lead to extinction, perhaps explaining the Fermi Paradox. As I’ve commented on conservative sites, I’ll worry about this sometime after 2084 when population is forecast to peak at over 10 billion. Especially as we are likely able to develop technical solutions.
@Rick DeMent: Pursuing my pet peeve about “smart” spell check, I read over “navel” with a quick, “oh, naval” and forgot about it. I experimented, had you typed “neval” it would have read “venal vessels”. Gibberish. And I have to keep looking back to check it hasn’t corrected my deliberate misspelling.
@gVOR10: You are confusing birth rates with fertility. The right wing is concerned about both.
You will often hear RFKJr mentioning the sperm counts of teenage boys in a way that would make you wonder if he is actually interested in making a milkshake and wants to make sure it will be thick.
If the declining sperm counts are real, then it’s probably something someone who isn’t RFKJr should be worried about as it may be a leading indicator of something else.
The declining birth rates… they only care about white birth rates, and that’s just their white supremacy and the great replacement theory.
I’m not sure either fits in with Michael’s video, which I also did not watch. (Mice crammed in cage, unless there are multiple experiments with it, I know this one)
Maybe a mouse paradise in a cage lacks the room, environment, and variety mice need.
I plain don’t see how a squeezed middle class perpetually one accident or misfortune away from penury, whose children can’t find decent housing, and who work long hours often under stressful jobs, can be seen as living in some kind of paradise.
@Scott: So eventually AI will create Deep Thought.
@Michael Reynolds:
It isn’t. For instance, in the US cage, the human-mice who are the most deeply disturbed are the ones in rural areas, with the most room to roam and explore. There’s greater violence, self-harm and antisocial behaviors in these areas, as well as a form of self-grooming involving Trump paraphernalia.
Further, to reach densities like the mice experienced, we would have to be looking at a prison, but there the societies are structured very differently. Maybe there’s a small, very crowded island with very limited immigration and emigration that is a better model.
@Gustopher:
You might want to watch the video. Density was not the issue. Overpopulation was not the issue. There was no scarcity.
As I often hum to myself as my dogs become excited and stare expectantly over something that’s really nothing, something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There are things beyond politics, and even things we don’t understand. The hard fact is we are de-populating.
@gVOR10:
Population may peak in 2084 – or not, we’ve been wrong a lot about population projections. But if current trends continue, that peak population will be very old and no longer capable of reproducing. Japan for example, is simply no longer able to regain population. 80 year-olds don’t fuck that much. Of course 71 year-olds, oh, we go at it like bunnies.
@Kathy: “I plain don’t see how a squeezed middle class perpetually one accident or misfortune away from penury, whose children can’t find decent housing, and who work long hours often under stressful jobs, can be seen as living in some kind of paradise.” Indeed. As a SciFi fan I see our future laid out much more in the societies of William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy and The Peripheral or in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
@gVOR10: “Declining fertility is a big concern at conservative sites lately. ”
Declining ‘white’ fertility.
@gVOR10: “Declining fertility is a big concern at conservative sites lately. ”
Declining ‘white’ fertility.
The Taco misnamed DoJ argues no court has the authority to stop construction of the epstein ballroom and hitler bunker.
Au contraire: every court has such authority.
I wonder if the court is aware of this. The opposing counsel, Thad Heuer, is aware:
Reminder: congress has appropriated not even a nickel for this deranged project.
@Kathy: Will the current Supreme Court overturn Marbury v Madison?
@Scott:
Probably using an originalist argument…
@Michael Reynolds:
I can’t speak for the video. Nor the books reviewed in the link.
“The Beautiful Ones“
Our understanding of human psychology is closer to incomplete than complete, even if among individuals in groups to whom we have direct contact and access for study. We cannot be sure that testing potential medicines on rats or rabbits for toxicity thresholds will tell us anything about the toxicity of the same substance in humans.
Yet, we have people who make specific claims about human nature based on a a series of general assumptions about ancient environments (EvoPsych), and psychologists drawing broad conclusions about human behavior based on experiments on rats.
In this particular circumstance, this is not like the Milgram experiment or other older studies that were later found to either have serious methodological flaws and/or fabricated data. The most direct criticisms about anthropomorphizing animals and assumptions were made when Calhoun built his universes.
Nothing in the intervening years has rendered those criticisms invalid.
I agree, it doesn’t require one to squint hard to see the parallel between ‘the beautiful ones’ among the U25 rats and Clavicular. But it must be remembered that squinting does far more than improve focus on a distant object—it makes it harder to see and focus on anything in the foreground. It is an error to assume we can still see everything close to our eye with clarity.
@gVOR10: The birth rate thing is something to look at.
Thing is, humans adjust birth rates to fit their situation in ways that are not easy to pin down. But it happens via delayed marriage in some situtations, and in other ways in others.
Mice are not apes, and apes have long established colonies that don’t really have to spend a long time getting their food and safety. So they spend their time socializing and often making each other miserable (or happy!).
I think declining birth rates are correlated with rising incomes and people (particularly women) moving into the middle class. In a broader sense, they are connected to overpopulation pressures, but the mechanisms are not all that clear. Despite being unclear, they have been around for a long time.
@Scott:
The Claremont crowd, et al. has been criticizing Marbury v. Madison for a long time now.
@Sleeping Dog:
And they can cite founders who disagreed with the decision.
It’s almost as if originalism’s core assumptions about the founding era, and the right wing’s insistence on “the Founders” as a group that can draw a coherent map for us, are both built on faulty assumptions.
@Kurtz: Not faulty assumptions, faulty motives.
@Scott:
@Kurtz:
I can see the fixer court overturning the constitution*. The articles of confederation, under which the union was constituted, don’t include a constitution. The convention that pulled a constitution out of thin air didn’t have either the authority or the mandate to do so. they were supposed to revise the articles, not to replace them with a constitution nobody asked for. Ergo the constitution is unconstitutional.
Once repealed, the articles of confederation would come back into effect. For a few minutes before civil war erupts, or more likely an angry mob beats the fixer court to a bloody pulp.
*If that’s what the donors want.
@Michael Reynolds: Word from Ukraine is they have effectively cut M14, the road that runs along the shore from Rostov-on-Don to north of Crimea, with AI drones. The things are capable of finding and hitting trucks and hitting them completely on their own so jamming seems to be headed for the dust bin of evolution.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Yes, the mechanizm should not be assumed. It may have been that that mice have a blocking mechanism to avoid too much interbreeding -and the entire population became too closely interbred for sexual attraction for all we know.
Some odds and ends…
Iran makes unreasonable demands rationally.
TL;DR: Returning $12 billion in frozen funds as a signup bonus on an agreement to negotiate. Plus control, along with Oman, of the strait of Hormuz, with tolls.
Lego to launch a set to build your own Basilica de la Sagrada Familia.
I care little for Lego or this kind of architecture. But I wonder if the set will be sold complete, or whether the pieces will be released in fits and starts over 140 years.
Boeing may be at it again. Nose gear collapse on a brand new Lufthansa 787 while parked at the gate.
It’s possible this was a maintenance issue and not a Big Boeing Blunder, as illustrated in the linked piece a by a similar nose gear failure of a BA 787.
@Michael Reynolds:
” Density was not the issue. Overpopulation was not the issue. There was no scarcity.”
I watched most of the video. I’m no expert on how much square footage a rat needs to avoid going insane but it looked awfully crowded to me. So I would guess that density and overpopulation, for that area, were very much issues. Sure there was enough food. But living space?
A Google search says that the study was done to determine the effects of overcrowding. I don’t think Universe 25 is the future for humanity.
If I’m wrong and you’re right, cheer up and look at the bright side. We’ll both be long gone by then.
Allow me to recommend something less gloomy. https://www.youtube.com/@%E9%99%88%E6%B3%A1%E6%B3%A1-d5q
@Scott O:
Yes.
From the London Review of Books link I posted above:
I had a kind of epiphany earlier while experimenting with an LLM. Current models are sold as generative artificial intelligence. Since what they do is pattern matching, albeit at a high level and with some degree of sophistication, they’re more like imitation intelligence.
That is, they give the appearance of intelligence but lack the substance of it.
There’s a animated TV show, probably still on Netflix, called Pantheon that deals with “uploaded intelligence.” The notion is to have a human mind uploaded to a computer, thus giving a person genuine human thought at computer speeds.
That’s what people seem to believe LLMs are. Not literally uploaded human minds, but human-level minds that can reason far more quickly. I admit they generate lots of text fast, and most of it is cogent and coherent, but it’s not human thought by a long shot. It’s a pale imitation.
I’ve also realized I’m feeling rather disappointed at the limitations of LLMs. I’m still a technophile, and I’d like to see genuine, useful AI.
@dazedandconfused:
Long ago I read a study where researchers had young men sleep in a t-shirt for a couple of nights and then turn it in. The shirts were presented to each of a group of young women who were asked to provide an opinion about how “attractive” each man was. The conclusion was that the women were identifying — by odor, mind — how different the men’s basic immune system was from their own. That is, the men any particular woman identified as attractive had immune system characteristics that were quite different from the woman’s own. With the implication that their children would be resistant to more things and somewhat more likely to survive.
a) Seems like a stretch to me. Dogs? Sure. Dogs can smell early-stage cancer. But humans?
b) OTOH, Mrs-Cain-to-be would wrap herself around me in bed, inhale deeply, and announce, “You smell good. Not your soap, or shampoo, or deodorant, just you.”
Trump, once again seated, for the type of event he used to do standing behind a podium.
@Jen:
You might like the latest cartoon by Ann Telnaes
@Scott O:
This is what I reassure myself every day.