I read a lot of nonfiction, but this is still a book I probably wouldn't have thought to pick up on my own. But I'm glad I did! I'm also from rural Tennessee and, even though I've been to most of the places he studied birds and wildlife at, I'd never heard of Dr. Calhoun before this book! This book is technically a biography that goes through Calhoun's life and education (as well as WWII) leading up to the rat experiment. It was super interesting though and easy to read while still being well written and informative. I surprisingly really enjoyed this!

Thanks to netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was not quite what I expected. If you are interested in the study of mice and rats and the possible relation to human interaction this is for you.

As for me, I found it very dry. A few facts were interesting but not enough to really keep me interested.

This was a interesting concept for a biography book, I enjoyed getting to learn about this story and the scientific element that was going on in this book. Lee Alan Dugatkin has a great writing style and it kept me wanting to read more and enjoyed learning about this.

Calhoun’s Universe 25 was a mouse utopia where there is no shortage of food, no predators, no sickness. It’s also where the Beautiful Ones are born, mice (and rats) who lose the ability and even the need for their fellows. They groom themselves, they eat … but they do not reach out. They do not socialize, they do not breed. And in the end, they die.

While Universe 25, with its Beautiful Ones, is a fascinating and alarming experiment, I was more caught by Universe 34B (which I’ve never heard of), in which Calhoun arranged it so that the rats living there would be required to coorperate in ways nature wouldn’t force. Making male and female rats work together to get water, rats of different statuses had to perform certain tasks in certain groups to get food which lead to more cooperation. It was in some ways a healthier society, though — like Universe 25 — it came with some unintended side effects.

But Calhoun is more than just the man with the mousery and universes of rats. He also wrote numerous papers, worked on a book, edited anthologies. He studied the wingspans of sparrows and the nesting habits of swifts. He taught, gave lectures, and worried for the future of humanity. His work has been cited all over the world, been a source of inspiration for numerous researchers, and is both fascinating and horrifying.

I’m surprised at how much I really enjoyed this book, considering that I don’t often wander into the non-fiction section of the literary world. But Universe 25 — how it came about, and what was learned from it — is interesting, and thought provoking, and I’m left with an appreciation for the imagination and curiosity of Calhoun and those who worked with him. I’m also left with an appreciation for the author who wrote in such a way that I was able to easily understand even the larger and more complex findings.

It took a day to read this book … and I might have read it quicker if I hadn’t stopped every other chapter to breathlessly repeat to some unwitting family member one of the neater bits of information I’d just learned, like the rat (from an early experiment) who climbed over the dividing wall to punish a rat that wasn’t behaving the way it was supposed to; or the birds who learned to pluck foil lids off milk bottles so they could get a drink or two in. If you’re interested in animals and their behavior, scientists and their behavior, or Universe 25, I highly recommend this book.

This book is interesting but not one for me.

It explores the work of Dr Calhoun and his research and theories re rat and mouse populations.

I think the main thing putting me off is the realisation that I really am not a rodent fan!

Dr. Calhoun's Mousery tells the fascinating story of Dr. John Calhoun's life with an emphasis on the brilliant experiments that he conducted on rodent behavior in community settings. I really enjoyed the first part of the book that talked about Dr. Calhoun's career and went into detail on the experimental design of his projects and the results. The second half of the book was a little slow and discussed publications that cited Dr. Calhoun's work.

In modern times, Dr. Calhoun's work is not largely cited and the book provides some explanations on the reason for this. As a scientist I really enjoyed this book, especially the first half. Dr. Calhoun was a brilliant experimentalist. I think that it is challenging to try to extrapolate the results in controlled rodent colonies to real human life. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It’s like Margaret Sanger’s Willard.

This is a biography of John Calhoun. Calhoun was an ethologist (it means the study of animal behaviors, specifically as part of a group or between animals of the same species) in the early days of the codification of the field, and did his most famous work with rat and mouse populations, and specifically his experiment in what he called ‘rat utopia.’ He has been somewhat forgotten, maybe with good cause. Even I had him conflated with Bruce Alexander (who did rat park, not rat utopia).

The book is focused on his work. He did do his masters and doctoral work at Northwestern, provoking my Chicago fact-check for the book: there was not a Red or Purple line in 1938. 1 Admittedly, the author makes it seem like his life was his work and his home orderly and ordinary.

Calhoun’s work started with his noticing that rat populations for an area tended to be stable at a certain number, even if the area had the resources to support more rats. Even if the number was artificially increased or decreased, it would float to that number. So he created an experimentally perfect place for rats, that he would call rat utopia, where all their needs were met, but where the natural processes would stick population at that increased number in order to see what would happen.

From there, shit got weird.

Shit got weird in the experiment, as the rat populations start to exhibit unusual behaviors, made more aberrant still via Calhoun’s gift of a turn of phrase, like “behavior sink” or “universal autism.” I am consciously not going to try to describe the results of what happen for reasons that ought to come clear later, but when Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson write about your work, you know it produced read-worthy information.

But shit also got weird in Calhoun. The analogy is the family-friendly John C. Lilly. Calhoun reacted to the dystopias he created for rats by envisioning utopias for humans. He even wrote a sci-fi novel that sounds like it was wisely left unfinished. Calhoun was intense about the idea of a philosophy that would provide what humanity needed to continue to thrive. It does not seem like he had an answer for that philosophy, but he could describe the outline of it.

In the process, he allegedly predicted the internet, though for my money he predicted the internet in the same way that Ender’s Game predicted 4chan (you forgot that part of the novel, didn’t you?). Or maybe he predicted the subreddit, and the idea of a global space for the congregation of subject-matter expertise. He also largely stopped publishing in scientific journals to be in popular ones, in part because of how his work overlapped with the overpopulation crisis. And this is where the book started to let me down.

The author is fully journalistic about the process of documenting Calhoun’s life. I cannot fault that, but I do think that here is where it should not have been.

It is difficult to sum up the cultural cache of overpopulation in the mid to late 20th Century. Coming from, and persisting with, racist overtones, it became a sort of idée fixe that shows up everywhere for about two decades, in part due to the celebrity scientist status of proponents like Paul Ehrlich (who the book mentions largely in the context of his frequent talk show appearances) and Calhoun himself.

Calhoun is in the thick of it, both indirectly in the way that his works connections with overpopulation was the point of interest of most of the pundits and journalists to look at it, but also directly. Calhoun’s quasi-esoteric thoughts about the future of humanity treated it as the singular problem to solve, and his visions of the future related to the question of how best to solve it.

Pointedly, this seems to be a major schism between Calhoun and a lot of the doomsayers around the alleged “population bomb.” He considered overpopulation an existential threat to human life, but also felt that intellectual or cultural solutions existed, as opposed to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Eugenics! more customarily floated. One of his rat utopia experiments was specifically developed to the end of fostering mutuality and cooperation, which he believed to be a major element of the cure.

The overpopulation crisis did not manifest. Whether that means it never was, or that we solved it, is debated. (I tend to side with the third option of it being a bad expression of other problems that we still live to solve.) But, if only for some of its less savory bits of history, I think that a direct address of the topic is appropriate, in the same way that we might be frank about any good scientist’s bad ideas. In fact, it is more important here. This is not the usual narrative of someone like Agassiz of a great scientist with terrible beliefs. This is someone who , but who saw positive possibilities in something that usually lead people to evil beliefs.

This is a minor point, and only weakens the book. The major point, however, is the discussion has no context to it. Put inelegantly, what the living ***** does any of this mean?

For a book written by a professor and well-established science writer, the text comes off as wholly incurious. Have the lines of Calhoun’s research been further elaborated or studied? Replicated? Are there alternate theories? Is the whole of it dismissed as weird science? There are notes about contemporaneous critiques, and some discussion of how different modern mouse studies are, as well as how much scientists now frown on the sort of anthropomorphic language that Calhoun used so well. Even if science walked away from the area altogether, someone still ought to be able to opine on the matter. You can’t even do the Milgram or Keyes experiments any more, but there are whole industries around interpreting the work.

In short, having read the book, I now feel the need to find the book about the book. I cannot fault the author, in the sense that the book is exactly what it promised to be. But I feel informed without feeling educated.

My thanks to the author, Lee Alan Dugatkin, for writing the book and to the University of Chicago Press for making the ARC available to me.

The CTA did not start naming lines for colors until 1993. In fact, there was not a CTA, only one of the predecessor entities, which I think at this point has unified what would become the Purple line and the Red line. But ah ha! This was a trap all along. You would not take the Purple line to the Red line to get from Northwestern to U. of C.: you would take the Purple, to the Red, to the Green. Or the Ls that these would become. Though maybe Calhoun liked a walk. I also feel it necessary to add here that the L probably is the spiritual successor to a rat utopia. ↩︎

I had learned about Dr. Calhoun’s work through a short video that made me curious, and was delighted, when I saw this book, to be able to learn more about it !
Dr Calhoun’s Mousery could be divided in 3 parts : his early life and first experiments, followed by global scientific recognition, then last experiments and career end.

The first part is fascinating. After a short introduction of what brought the professor to studying animal behavior, his first experiment on the impact of population on rats’ ways of feeding and interacting with each other is thoroughly developed : setup (in his own garden !), observations through time, conclusions and open questions that results. In particular, a first link is made with human behavior - that will be dug deeper over the course of the book.

This experiment led him to scientific recognition, with funds, staff and a building being made available to him for further research over years. The second part of the book explains well these bigger scale experiments : initial setup, what was hoped - and started - to be observed, how the first conclusions could be applied to human behavior… And then, I was lost.
The book focus wasn’t on the research anymore, but described each article, speech, conference, impact on other researchers, even a single mention in a thesis of Calhoun’s work. Although it seems a very complete bibliography of its impact on others, and I have to salute M. Dugaktin and his assistant’s enormous effort for gathering such detailed information, this was too much for me. I found myself skipping paragraphs and paragraphs, only starting to read again through what seemed major impact events, until the focus shifted on the science again.

The last part is as fascinating as the first one : new experiments, new results, further open questions… And the refined point of view of Dr. Calhoun : what if he and his team observed with rats overpopulation was applicable to humanity ? Indeed, would coming back to more local communities, solidarity and cooperation be a solution to social loneliness, aggressive behaviors and ostracism ?
A great conclusion that leaves the reader wondering !