That was a lot darker than I thought it was going to be. With a name like Cabinet Magazine, I thought I was going to read about a better kitchen sink.

And apparently no one thought to suggest that the problem was inbreeding?

No, people did, and also pointed out the possibility of contagious disease. Calhoun just ignored them, doing nothing to prevent or check, and ignored the results when people did similar experiments with less-inbred populations while not getting the same results.

I looked into Mouse Utopia in part because this article gets shared a lot ( https://www.gwern.net/Questions#mouse-utopia ), and Wiles did not do his homework, and makes a lot of false statements. For example:

> He had been building utopian environments for rats and mice since the 1940s, with thoroughly consistent results. Heaven always turned into hell.

Completely false. Calhoun's 1940s experiments were not utopia experiments as Wiles implies, and his utopia experiments were not consistent and he reported only cursorily on a handful of them (hence Wiles's heavy dependence on the SciAm popularization) before the NIMH effectively fired him for reasons which remain unclear.

takes kind of a strange person to make even a single "rat city" on a quarter-acre plot next to one's house, much less the 24 (presumably) successive rat "utopias"... what a strange (great) story.