September 17, 2024
3 min learn
Guide Evaluation: How One Bizarre Rodent Ecologist Tried to Change the Destiny of Humanity
A biography of the scientist whose work led to fears of a ‘population bomb’
NONFICTION
Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery: The Unusual Story of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Way forward for Humanity
by Lee Alan Dugatkin
College of Chicago Press, 2024 ($27.50)
Within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies American society suffered a yearslong collective panic concerning the perceived menace of overpopulation. Biologist Paul Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Present to tout The Inhabitants Bomb, his 1968 polemic about human numbers run amok. The 1973 movie Soylent Inexperienced depicted a squalid hellscape wherein surplus individuals can be processed into meals. Faculty college students pledged to stay childless for the good thing about Earth.
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This nervousness originated, partially, within the laboratory of John Bumpass Calhoun, an enigmatic ecologist who spent many years documenting the opposed results of overcrowding on rodents in elaborate experimental “cities.” Calhoun is essentially obscure right now, however few scientists in his time wielded extra affect. He hobnobbed with science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and was featured in books by naturalist E. O. Wilson and journalist Tom Wolfe—within the course of spreading overpopulation angst far and vast. “The most profound impact of Calhoun’s studies lies far from academic halls and ivory towers,” writes Lee Alan Dugatkin in Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery, a brand new biography practically as quirky as its topic. Calhoun’s work completely “seeped into the public consciousness.”
Calhoun made for an unlikely prophet. A nature lover from Tennessee, he took a job within the Forties main a long-term research in Baltimore with the first aim of controlling city rats. Calhoun discovered that every metropolis block was house to round 150 rats, a quantity he discovered low given the “abundant sources of food in open garbage cans.” Rat populations, he suspected, have been “self-regulating”: when new rats tried to maneuver in, residents kicked them out. However the unpredictability of Baltimore’s streets— the place people have been consistently killing rats or messing with the traps—annoyed Calhoun’s analyses. To really perceive rat society, he determined, he wanted to manage their setting.
Within the late Nineteen Fifties the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being gave Calhoun the chance to control rats in a reworked Maryland barn. Calhoun, an endlessly ingenious designer of experiments, constructed an enclosure outfitted with rat residences and partitioned the pen into related “neighborhoods,” making a murid arcadia that he may observe at his leisure.
This utopia quickly turned nightmarish. Because the rats multiplied, they fed and gathered in ever larger densities, resulting in a social breakdown that Calhoun referred to as a “behavioral sink.” Packs of libidinous males relentlessly hounded females, who in flip ignored their offspring; in some neighborhoods, pup mortality hit 96 p.c. The rats, Calhoun declared, suffered from “pathological togetherness” that would result in collapse. Within the years that adopted, he shifted to mice, however his elementary conclusions remained the identical: rodents succumbed to chaos as their populations exploded.
Calhoun wasn’t shy about extrapolating to our personal species’ destiny. “Perhaps if population growth continues to grow unchecked in humans, we might one day see the human equivalent” of socially catatonic rodents, he instructed the Washington Each day Information in a single attribute interview. His fears each channeled the zeitgeist and directed it.
Dugatkin—an evolutionary biologist, science historian and prolific writer who sifted by means of 1000’s of pages on the Calhoun archive in Bethesda—is an admirably thorough researcher. However his granular chronology of Calhoun’s actions typically slides too deep right into a recitation of media protection, convention talks and complicated experiments. Amid this blizzard of trivialities, Mousery often loses sight of a query that needs to be central to any biography: Why does Calhoun matter right now? Dugatkin acknowledges that the “lasting impact of [Calhoun’s] work is nowhere near” that of pioneering behaviorists similar to Ivan Pavlov. However he misses a possibility to probe the social debates that his topic’s work catalyzed. Did Calhoun’s darker prognostications do hurt? The inhabitants bomb, in any case, did not detonate.
Calhoun belonged to a technology of scientists who had no compunctions about straying from their disciplinary lane. He wrote poetry and sci-fi and consulted on humane jail design. Dugatkin captures the grand ambition of a person who gazed at rodents and noticed the universe, even when the importance of his analysis is murky right now. As Dugatkin notes, the disturbing dynamics that Calhoun produced in his micromanaged “universes” have by no means been noticed within the wild. Calhoun didn’t describe the world; he created his personal.
