When Herds Cull Themselves

Alternative sexualities go where predators fear to tread

Calhoun’s mice, and today’s teenagers

In the Brazilian shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro, where abject poverty prevents the proper feeding of children, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes describes a culture-bound illness mothers have come to attribute to a large number of their newborns. Diagnosed via vague symptoms such as lethargy, low appetite, weakness, and a "failure to thrive," the broadly named “child sickness,” which is thought fatal, allows mothers to justify withholding food from affected infants (which, conveniently, conserves food for other infants). Quoting sociologist Gilberto Freyre, Scheper-Hughes notes that infant death in such cases is not mourned by this Catholic community, but "accepted almost joyfully" as the children are believed heaven-bound.

A mother kangaroo has been known to fling a tiny joey from the pouch when she needs to conserve resources for an older one. With our developed brains and sense of morality, humans can’t justify simple infanticide, but nature finds a way.

"As a species, we’re as responsive as any other to the availability of food... It’s estimated that the human population at the beginning of the Neolithic Age was around 10,000,000.

Then, very suddenly, things began to change. And the change was that the people of one culture, in one corner of the world, developed a peculiar form of agriculture that made food available to people in unprecedented quantities. Following this, in this corner of the world, the population doubled in a scant 3000 years. It doubled again, this time in only 2000 years. In an eye blink of time on the geologic scale, the human population jumped from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 — probably 80% of them being practitioners of totalitarian agriculture." - Daniel Quinn, Story of B

It was my ex-husband Jamie who introduced me to Daniel Quinn. Jamie was excited about Quinn's insight that human populations, like those of other animals, contract and expand in response to available food. "More food, growth," Quinn wrote. “Less food, decline." In these words, Jamie saw an answer to overpopulation: stop producing excess food.

The problem with that theory, I argued, is the mechanism by which populations cap themselves: miscarriage, downstream from malnutrition, especially for those on the fringe. You can't ask humans to starve and/or miscarry for the greater good, I told him, nor would they comply, where food production is possible. This turns out to be a common criticism of Quinn: his work on "totalitarian agriculture" names a problem but provides no practical solutions.

As it turns out, miscarriage is only one of the mechanisms by which animal populations stabilize. In 1968, a biologist named John Calhoun conducted a series of experiments into what he called "mortality-inhibiting environments," lavishing a colony of mice with everything mice could possibly desire: abundant food, water, space, social opportunities, spaces for privacy, "reams of paper to make cozy nests," and protection from disease and predators. But this "mouse utopia" only fostered population growth for a time.

Once populations reached a certain point, the mice began to exhibit behaviors at odds with species survival. They ceased courtship and mating, engaged in homosexual acts, stopped nursing, neglected or attacked their young, failed to defend themselves, and—oddly—became obsessed with grooming. Calhoun described this breakdown as "spiritual death." Eventually, infant mortality approached 100%, and by the end of the experiments, the mice had rendered themselves extinct. When predators or disease or even food scarcity won't keep a species in check, it seems, the species will take on the duty itself.

We in the developed world live in abundance, like Calhoun's mice. We have food, water, and space to breathe, but also Starbucks, video games, movies on demand, porn, chocolate, flattering selfie filters, and social media platforms full of adoring fans eager to hear our thoughts. Is it any wonder we’ve developed the same pathologies as Calhoun’s mice?

Consider this: transgenderism alone encompasses at least three of the species-sabotaging behaviors observed in his experiments: it lowers the libido, destroys fertility, and harms the children—in a way we can “accept almost joyfully,” of course, because we’re not monsters—via the creation of our own, more modern, more culturally relevant culture-bound illness.

We have others covered, as well. Dating, sex and marriage are among the milestones young people today are delaying or skipping altogether, and asexuality is “on the rise.” One in five gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ; and those identities in the general population are “doubling every generation.” As Bill Maher says, “We will all be gay in 2054.” Certainly we are obsessed with grooming, from selfies to the performance of “gender” to Instagram-inspired body mods. Perhaps grooming is a manifestation of narcissism more generally, a luxury made available by affluence.

To these we could add many unique to our time and place: mass shootings and road rage fatalities, for example.

We, like Calhoun’s mice, are proof that environmental stress comes in other forms besides scarcity. Despite our proverbial piles of fruit and cheese, depression, anxiety, self harm, drug and alcohol-related deaths and suicide are on the rise.

Perhaps Jonathan Haidt’s work on antifragility provides an insight. We "require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow," he writes, and systems that prevent this "become rigid, weak, and inefficient.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s playground,” Jamie’s mom used to say. Postmodernism, the academic backdrop to identity politics, queer theory—and increasingly, culture itself—urges us to tear down our “normative” social structures. We lack hunger, we lack challenge, we are bored. So we have started the process of destroying ourselves.