Year: Day to Day Men: February 3

Thick Branches

The third day of February in 1923 marks the birth date of American zoologist, entomologist, educator and comparative psychologist Charles Henry Turner. He was one of the first scientists to examine whether animals display complex cognition through his studies of arthropods, specifically spiders and bees.

Born in Cincinnati to Thomas Turner and Addie Campbell, Charles Henry Turner entered the University of Cincinnati in 1896 and studied under comparative neurologist and geologist Clarence Luther Herrick, who had worked on the Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1891, Turner became the first African American to receive a graduate degree at the college. A summary of his undergraduate thesis was published in the journal “Science”, considered one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals.

Turner received his Master of Science from the University of Cincinnati in 1892. He remained at the university as an assistant instructor in its biological laboratory until 1893. Originally Tuner studied for his Doctorate at Ohio’s Denison University but the program was discontinued. He attained his Doctorate in Science at Atlanta’s Clark University where he served as Chair of the Science Department until 1905. Clark University’s Turner-Tanner Hall is named in his honor. 

While teaching for a year as principal of Cleveland’s College Hill High School, Charles Turner continued his studies on insect behavior and pursued a doctorate degree at the University of Chicago which he achieved, magna cum laude, in 1907. Turner was among the first African Americans to receive a doctorate from that university. In 1907, he was a delegate for the Seventh International Zoological Congress held in Boston. There he met such eminent zoologists as Charles Whitman, Frank Lillie and Charles Child. 

Turner published forty-nine papers on invertebrates, including “Psychological Notes on the Gallery Spider” and “Experiments on the Color Vision of Honeybees”, with three papers published in the journal “Science”. Turner was the first person to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch; he also discovered honeybees’ awareness of visual patterns and cockroaches’ trial and error learning. In doing his experiments, Turner advanced the studies of associative learning such as seen in stimulus substitution. He showed that a conditioning stimulus became a reliable predictor of reaction from an unconditioned stimulus. 

Charles Turner’s studies were different from the majority of his contemporaries as he clearly adopted a cognitive perspective to analyze animal behavior. While most scientists believed that animals, such as insects, were driven by innate reactions to external stimuli, Turner used such concepts as memory, learning and expectation in his research. This view of animal cognition would be confirmed through later systematic observations by Edward Thorndike in the early 1900s.

Between 1898 and 1908, Turner applied for a position at the Tuskegee Institute but the Institute could not afford his salary. Unsuccessful at getting an appointment to the University of Chicago, he accepted a teaching position in 1908 at Summer High School in St. Louis, Missouri where he remained until his retirement in 1922 due to ill health. Charles Henry Turner died at the age of fifty-six in February of 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. He was interred at Lincoln Cemetery, a historically African American cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.