The experiment linked below of 60 years ago unfortunately shows the fate of the human species. It is, as Shakespeare would write, a fatal flaw of the mammalian family.
It is all about the Tragedy of the Commons which I wrote about some time ago, where the allocation of shared resources becomes corrupted by the self interest of those who rely on that resource. I urge you to read-up on the Tragedy of the Commons.
Insects such as ants do not have this issue. Ants will willing sacrifice themselves to form bridges across water so that the majority can use their bodies to walk to safety. There is no individualism with ants. However mammals are not like this; we have self-preservation as a primary goal. And this is our undoing. When populations are low or resources are plentiful, self-interest does not cause a problem, but as populations grow (as the rats in the experiments did) then resources, which could be adequate if managed properly, become depleted by self-interest.
And the experiment shows that if finite resources are depleted then the entire colony dies. One would think the colony would shrink to the point where the resources would, once again, be adequate for that population. But that is not the case. Once the fight for resources takes place, there is no turning back. The colony dies. They did the experiments 25 times with very different situations and it all came back to the same ending. The colony dies.
