science

The son of a nurse and a church janitor, entomologist Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867–February 14, 1923) died with a personal library of a thousand books, having published more than fifty scientific papers, having named his youngest son Darwin, and having revolutionized our understanding of the most abundant non-human animals on Earth by pioneering a psychological approach to insect learning, devoting his life to discovering “stubborn facts that should not be ignored.”

Without a proper laboratory, without access to research libraries and university facilities, he became the first human being to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and the first scientist to achieve Pavlovian conditioning in insects, training moths to beat their wings whenever they heard his whistle and concluding that “there is much evidence that the responses of moths to stimuli are expressions of emotion.”