Charles Henry Turner

Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867 – February 14, 1923) was an American zoologist, entomologist, educator, and comparative psychologist, known for his studies on the behavior of insects, particularly bees and ants. Born in Cincinnati, Turner was the first African American to receive a graduate degree at the University of Cincinnati and the first African American to earn a PhD from the University of Chicago. He spent most of his career as a high school teacher at Sumner High School in St. Louis. Turner was one of the first scientists to systematically examine the question of whether animals display complex cognition, studying arthropods such as spiders and bees. He also examined differences in behavior between individuals within a species, a precursor to the study of animal personality.

Personal life

Charles Henry Turner was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on February 3, 1867. His father had moved from Alberta to Cincinnati. He married Leontine Troy in 1886. They had three children; Henry Owen Turner (1892–1956), Louise Mae Turner (1892,1894-?), and Darwin Romanes Turner (1894–1983). Leontine died in 1895, and Turner married Lillian Porter in 1907 or 1908.

Academic career In 1886, Turner graduated valedictorian of Woodward High School, marking the start of his academic career. A summary of his undergraduate thesis on the neuroanatomy of bird brains was published in the journal Science in 1891, making him the first African American to be so recognized.

Turner earned an M.S. in 1892 from the University of Cincinnati under his undergraduate advisor, Herrick. After receiving his degree, he remained at the university as assistant instructor in the biology laboratory until 1893. He attained a professorship in the Science Department at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he also served as Chair of the Science Department. The Turner-Tanner Hall at Clark Atlanta University is now named in his honor. Sources fail to determine his length of service, but it is estimated that he was at Clark sometime between 1893 until 1905. While he was teaching, he continued to study insect behavior, He was the first to study systematically differences in psychology between invertebrates. He concluded from the variations seen in spider web construction that the details in the construction involved intelligence rather than mere instinct as then attributed. Much of his research was conducted while he was teaching high school classes at Sumner; while there, he published 41 papers between 1908 and his death. Yet, in doing these experiments, he advanced important principles of associative learning such as stimulus substitution, the fact that a conditioning stimulus becomes a reliable predictor of an unconditioned stimulus.

Turner's work was different from the majority of scientists of his time as he clearly adopted a cognitive perspective to analyze animal behavior. This cognitive view would only reemerge much later in studies of animal behavior. One such 1908 experiment there is particularly noted because it demonstrated that bees can adapt their foraging habits to a schedule and therefore were able to perceive time. To honor Turner, the Animal Behavior Society named its undergraduate diversity program after him.