10 Feb Charles Henry Turner: Discovering Intelligence in the Smallest Creatures
Born in Cincinnati in 1867, Charles Henry Turner came into this world right after the Civil War. He began his studies to become a scientist at a challenging time. Much of the racial equality momentum following the Civil War had unfortunately disappeared and African Americans were receiving heavy backlash.
Those headwinds did not dampen his fervor to join the scientific community however. He was one of the first African Americans to graduate from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. and M.S. in Biology. He then followed that up as one the first African Americans to graduate with a PhD from The University of Chicago. He received Magna Cum Lade honors with a focus on Zoology.
All these great accomplishments did not offer him the path he desired and deserved though. Unable to secure a research position as a scientist, he briefly taught at Clark University in Atlanta and then secured a science teaching position at Sumner High School, an all-black vocational school in St. Louis. That however did not lessen his desire to make a name for himself within the science community.
Most people would assume he has given up his dream, but that is not the case. While becoming a full time high school science teacher, Turner published over 40 research papers about insect behaviorism. His name is still used today by entomologists due to the complicated tests he used to study insect behavior.
Through these diligent tests, Turner would show that insects are capable of communication, memory, and ability to problem solve. Some of his work included work with honey bees. Turner was able to observe how they were able to pick up on cues in their environment to determine where they should go to harvest pollen. The bees would look at colors of the plants to understand and determine current and future flight patterns. They would use color to determine which plants tend to have more pollen and would use what they saw to determine if it were time to explore a new working route.
He also challenged the idea of the time that insects, like ants, had homing-like tendencies and would almost be like a mechanical in their process. Turner believed that insects, like other animals, had a sense of intuition. Through using his apparatuses (in this case an advanced maze system). He showed the ants actually would interact with the obstacles within their environment. Moreover he would show they actually had memory skills as the next day they would learn to avoid such challenges they ran into in the previous days.
It was not enough to carry the workload of a high school teacher and producing ground breaking discoveries in entomology, he also challenged our nation on the issue of Civil Rights. He became a key leader in the St. Louis Civil rights movement and challenged that higher education should be open to all regardless of race. Through his work he tried to promote and more importantly prove the importance of African Americans in the science field. This man not only overcame so much to advance what we knew about insects, but he also took the time to do so surrounded by and supporting his community.
Next time we are in the garden and we watch the ants march to their orders, or notice the bumble bee is moving on to a new section of the garden think of Turner. Think how, like the insects he studied, he did not let the distractions or obstacles around him slow down the work he had at hand and more importantly his contributions to the community he clearly cared for.
– Clark Hudmon
