Anon01/23/26, 03:28No.18639422
>A select group of mice, which Calhoun called “the beautiful ones,” secluded themselves in protected places with a guard posted at the entry. They didn’t seek out mates or fight with other mice; “they just ate, slept and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection.”>Eventually, several factors combined to doom the experiment. The beautiful ones’ chaste behavior lowered the birth rate. Meanwhile, out in the overcrowded common areas, the few remaining parents’ neglect increased infant mortality. These factors sent the mice society over a demographic cliff. Just over a month after population peaked, around day 600, according to Distillations magazine’s Sam Kean, no baby mice were surviving more than a few days. The society plummeted toward extinction as the remaining adult mice were just “hiding like hermits or grooming all day” before dying out, writes Kean.>Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day—preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.
