Dr. Calhoun's Mousery

“At first, scientists just wanted to figure out the best way to kill these pests. Then they decided that studying rat society could reveal the future of our own. . . . Calhoun came up with a new term to describe the process he had witnessed. The rats, he said, had fallen into a ‘behavioral sink.’ . . . Whether or not Calhoun proposed ‘an early version of the world wide web,’ as Dugatkin claims, the Internet has certainly linked ‘more and more individuals in a common communication network.’ And, it could be argued, our increasingly intelligent laptops and cell phones count as ‘thinking prostheses.’ But where, oh where is the compassion? Facebook, Yik Yak, Twitter, Twitch—each had a sunny, expansive phase, followed by a descent into flaming, catfishing, and troll wars. To the extent that Calhoun’s rats have any sociological relevance, it would seem to be in the mirror world of the Web. What, after all, could be a better description of X these days than a ‘behavioral sink?’” -- Elizabeth Kolbert * The New Yorker *
“The problem was overpopulation; the diagnostician was John B. Calhoun, a pioneering student of animal behavior and ecology and the subject of Dugatkin’s well-turned biography. . . . Dugatkin . . . evokes nicely the ‘eclectic, unorthodox’ trajectory of Calhoun’s career, in which he ranged with thrilling freedom across disciplines. . . . [He] animates the bureaucratic details of Calhoun’s career with dry humor. . . . And for all of the inspiration his lab work offered to city planners, prison reformers, artists and others, its scientific legacy today is slight. Partly this is because people worry less about overpopulation, but mostly—as Dugatkin notes only in the epilogue, as if gently rousing readers from a dream—it’s because the eye-catching phenomena Calhoun found in captive populations have never been documented in the wild. Behavioral sinks and beautiful ones are more suggestive metaphors than hard science, it seems, an uneasy triumph of story over data.” -- Timothy Farrington * The Wall Street Journal *
“A compelling biography about a groundbreaking scientist and his controversial work, using rodent cities—rodentopias—to identify and examine the potential catastrophes that might befall human overpopulation. . . . Dugatkin does an excellent job of investigating, documenting and writing about Dr. Calhoun’s life and work. . . . Drawing on previously unpublished archival research and interviews with Calhoun’s family and former colleagues, Dugatkin offers a riveting account of an intriguing scientific figure. Considering Dr. Calhoun’s experiments, he explores the changing nature of scientific research and delves into what the study of animal behavior can teach us about ourselves.” -- GrrlScientist * Forbes *
“A new biography nearly as quirky as its subject. . . . Dugatkin—an evolutionary biologist, science historian and prolific author who sifted through thousands of pages at the Calhoun archive in Bethesda—is an admirably thorough researcher. . . . Calhoun belonged to a generation of scientists who had no compunctions about straying from their disciplinary lane. He wrote poetry and sci-fi and consulted on humane prison design. Dugatkin captures the grand ambition of a man who gazed at rodents and saw the universe.” -- Ben Goldfarb * Scientific American *
“Only publishing . . . could contrive to drop two excellent books about Calhoun’s life and work into the same cycle. . . . I prefer [Dr. Calhoun's Mousery]. Its narrative is more straight-forward, and the author gives greater weight to Calhoun’s later career.” -- Simon Ings * The Spectator *
"Biologist Dugatkin’s deeply researched biography traces Calhoun’s career with close attention to the intellectual currents that directed the mouse work. Since Calhoun’s death, subsequent currents have swept a way much of what he accomplished." * Natural History *
"Though labeled an animal ecologist, Calhoun worked across disciplines and incorporated science, math, urban planning, economics, and sociology into his research. . . . Few academic fields have rock stars. Yes, there were Malthus, Darwin, and Skinner, but Calhoun’s national and international fame in the 1960s and 1970s was truly dazzling. . . . Dugatkin wrote Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery to introduce new generations to a largely forgotten scientist who, although engaging in somewhat bizarre research, did so with a certain je ne sais quoi and left excellent notes concerning his work." * Washington Independent Review of Books *
"Can we monitor rats' behavior and then learn anything about ourselves? Well we sure can, but we may not like what it tells us. There have been some famous experiments about all of this and our next guest has written about that actually. [Dugatkin] is . . . professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville and the author of Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity." * Mornings with Simi on 980 CKNW *
"This stimulating scientific history from Dugatkin . . . recaps psychologist John B. Calhoun’s yearslong experiments on mice and rats in the 1960s and ’70s. . . . Dugatkin offers colorful accounts . . . and descriptions of the exigencies of the rat-race within them intrigue. . . . This fascinates." * Publishers Weekly *
“Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery is a brilliant reminder, from biologist and author Dugatkin, of how relevant some research remains even decades later. This story of a fascinating, complicated psychologist and his innovative, insightful, troubling studies of overpopulation in rodents is an absorbing read and a potent lesson in moral behavior—both of rodents and of humans." -- Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of "The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century"
“John Calhoun famously showed that rodential ‘society’ degenerates horrendously when rodents live at high densities. Politicians, urban planners, pundits, and criminologists then seized these findings, often distorting them when extrapolating to supposed inevitabilities about urban humans. Dugatkin gives us the life of Calhoun himself―often eccentric, with wildly expansive ideas, unclear as to just how much he wanted them interpreted imprudently. A fascinating read about an immensely influential scientist.” -- Robert M. Sapolsky, author of the New York Times–bestseller “Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will”
“William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. John Calhoun saw it in a mousery—a utopian apartment complex built for mice! Dugatkin’s brilliant, fast-paced account of Calhoun's research takes us on a whirlwind tour with stops along the way at the Royal Society in London, the Vatican, and Washington, DC. Dugatkin is both learned and lively, and his book is irresistible.” -- Edward Dolnick, New York Times–best-selling author of "The Clockwork Universe" and "The Writing of the Gods"
“This engagingly written book revives the life and work of the almost-forgotten behavioral population biologist John Calhoun, whose discoveries on the crowding syndrome and social pathology in rodents had at that time far-reaching interdisciplinary implications concerning the consequences of human population growth. This book is a masterpiece of critical, scholarly biography and historical analysis of a field in behavioral biology.” -- Bert Hölldobler, coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize–winning "The Ants"