Charles Henry Turner
Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) was an entomologist, behavioral scientist, and early pioneer in the field of insect behavior. He is best known for his work showing that social insects can modify their behavior based on experience. Turner is also well known for his commitment to civil rights and for his attempts to overcome racial barriers in academia.
Born in Cincinnati, he was educated at the University of Cincinnati (B.S., 1891; M.S., 1892, both in biology) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., magna cum laude, in zoology, 1907). He held teaching positions at various schools, including Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), a Historically Black College, from 1893–1905. In 1908, Turner settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and was a science teacher at Sumner High School, where he remained until his retirement in 1922. During his thirty-three-year career, Turner published more than seventy papers despite significant challenges, including limited access to laboratories and research libraries and a heavy teaching load at Sumner. Turner designed apparatuses, such as mazes for ants and cockroaches and colored disks and boxes for testing the visual abilities of honeybees, conducted naturalistic observations, and performed experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and fundamental aspects of invertebrate learning.
Turner is thought to be the first to investigate Pavlovian conditioning in an invertebrate. In addition, he developed novel procedures to study pattern and color recognition in honeybees (Apis), and he discovered that cockroaches trained to avoid a dark chamber in one apparatus retained the behavior when transferred to a differently shaped apparatus. At the time, the study of insect behavior was dominated by nineteenth-century concepts of taxis and kinesis, in which social insects were believed to alter their behavior in specific responses to specific stimuli. Through his observations, Turner was able to establish that insects can modify their behavior as a result of experience. Reviews by Turner on invertebrate behavior appeared in such important publications as Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Animal Behavior.
In 1910, Turner was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of St. Louis. French naturalist Victor Cornetz later named the circling movements of ants returning to their nest tournoiement de Turner (“Turner circling”), a phenomenon based on one of Turner’s discoveries. Turner maintained a lifelong commitment to civil rights. As a leader of the civil rights movement in St. Louis, he maintained that education is the key to changing behavior and proposed that racism could be studied through the lens of comparative psychology.