Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery By Lee Alan Dugatkin — Review

A compelling biography about a pioneering scientist and his controversial work, using cities of rodents – rodentia – to identify and examine potential catastrophes that could befall the human population.

Extinction is everywhere these days, largely driven by unchecked human overpopulation, ecocidal abuses, and runaway greed. But mankind itself must beware of their impending doom.

What might humanity’s “last days” look like? The theme of the last days of humanity has occupied many dystopian and science fiction writers, but it has not really attracted the interest of scientists in a systematic and rigorous way. But there was a scientist, an ethologist (animal behaviorist) named John B. Calhoun, who was interested in finding answers to the many questions about what the extinction of humanity might look like. In his search for answers, he conducted an 18-year study with a ‘rodent utopia’ that he designed. His findings about population dynamics in his captive populations of rats and mice shocked most people from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, making him a scientific celebrity, although, surprisingly, most of the work his is forgotten today.

As with all scientific investigations, these experiments looked quite different at first. After earning his doctorate in zoology, Dr. Calhoun joined the Baltimore Rodent Ecology Project in 1946, whose original goal was to eliminate rodent pests in cities. That project had limited success, in part because no one could figure out which aspects of rodent behavior, lifestyle, or biology to investigate and target. So Dr Calhoun decided to start his studies from humble beginnings by creating his first rodent utopia for Norway rats in the woods behind his house. He monitored the rodents over time to learn what factors fueled their population growth.

It was then that Dr Calhoun noticed a curious thing: rat populations in a given area tended to stabilize after a certain population number was reached, even if the area had enough resources to support more rats. If Dr Calhoun added or removed a few mice to see how the community would react, the mouse population would adjust until it reached its original number.

This fascinated Dr. Calhoun. He became interested in learning about rodent behavior for its own sake and began to create increasingly elaborate and carefully controlled environments. But it wasn’t just the rodents’ behavior that interested him. Architects and civil engineers at the time were in the midst of heated debates about how to build better cities. For his part, Dr Calhoun proposed that urban design could be studied first in rodents and then extrapolated to humans.

Dr. Calhoun then decided to test his hypothesis by creating an experimentally perfect enclosure for rats, known officially as the Anti-Mortal Environment for Rats, but informally and more commonly known as “Rat Paradise”.

The mouse’s paradise was a large enclosure—a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could want or need: plenty of food and water; a perfect climate; pieces of paper to make cozy nests; and 256 separate apartments that were accessible via mesh pipes bolted to the enclosure walls. Dr Calhoun also pre-screened the mice to eliminate any that were sick. Thus, free from disease, predators, and other concerns, a mouse could theoretically live to an incredible old age in mouse paradise without a single worry. And indeed, these enclosures initially looked like mouse (or mouse) utopias, but as natural processes worked, these rodent utopias quickly experienced overpopulation. This caused abnormal behavior in the rodent citizens, behavior that Dr. Calhoun called “universal autism.”

Because so few juveniles died, large hordes of mice would congregate in the center of the enclosure. Dr Calhoun referred to them as “abandoned”. They were invariably covered in bites, and great brawls often broke out—vicious free-for-alls, filled with bites and jabs that served no apparent purpose—just senseless violence. (In earlier rodentias involving rats, instead of fighting, some castaways became cannibals.) Other deviant behaviors also emerged. Intriguingly, such dysregulated behaviors can spread like an infection from mouse to mouse. Dr. Calhoun called this phenomenon the “behavioral sink.” Inevitably, the mouse sky was filled with mouse miscreants that caused a population decline and eventual extinction.

After he developed his methodologies and followed several rodents to their natural termination, Dr Calhoun found that the results of all these experiments were remarkably consistent. Regardless of the scale of the experiments or whether they involved rats or mice, the same events occurred in each experiment:

1. Rodents will mate and breed in large numbers.
2. Followed by a reproductive leveling.
3. Then violent or hostile anti-social behavior became common.
4. And finally, the population would enter the death stage where it would go extinct.

According to Dr. Calhoun, there were two stages to the death stage: the “first death” was characterized by the loss of a reason for living beyond mere existence (such as the desire to mate, raise offspring, or create a place in society). , and the “second death”, which was the actual death and extinction of rodentopia.

This 18-year series of experiments captured the imagination of writers, behavioral biologists, psychologists, architects, and the general public—though no one was quite sure what the findings actually showed. In fact, Dr. Calhoun reacted to the dystopias he created for rodents by envisioning utopias for humans. As his work progressed, Dr Calhoun seemed to focus intensely on the idea of ​​a philosophy that would provide what humanity needed to continue to thrive despite the challenges posed by overpopulation. He also largely stopped publishing his research in scientific journals, preferring to publish in popular journals, in part because of how his work overlapped with the overpopulation crisis, which was getting a lot of media attention. Dr Calhoun even wrote an unfinished science fiction novel on the subject.

All this and much more you will find in the book, Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Famous Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Mankind (University of Chicago Press; 2024: Amazon US / Amazon UK). Written by evolutionary biologist and historian of science Lee Alan Dugatkin, a distinguished university professor and researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville, where he studies the evolution of social behavior.

In this book, Professor Dugatkin does an excellent job of investigating, documenting and writing about Dr Calhoun’s life and work, although he sometimes follows the media coverage, conference talks and the intricacies of the experiments a bit too far, in my opinion. (Thus, I found the middle of the book drags a bit.) However, there are many important, thought-provoking ideas in this book that I haven’t mentioned here.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research and interviews with Calhoun’s family and former colleagues, Dugatkin provides an engaging account of an intriguing scientific figure. Considering the experiments of Dr. Calhoun, it explores the changing nature of scientific research and delves into what the study of animal behavior can teach us about ourselves.

I think Professor Dugatkin also missed an opportunity to present the social debates that Dr Calhoun’s work stimulated and contributed to. For example: what was the main result from Dr Calhoun’s research? Were these experimental findings applicable to humans? Did Dr. Calhoun’s darker predictions harm the public?

Still, I enjoyed this book, and I think many scientists and psychologists will be interested in reading this long-overlooked research, and dystopian and science fiction writers will surely find it inspiring.

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