Alfred Kinsey spent two decades measuring gall wasps before he studied people
Some 5 million of the insects in the American Museum of Natural History are gall wasps, all gathered by one man. Alfred Kinsey took 26 measurements of each of hundreds of thousands of specimens. Only later did that same appetite for counting variation turn to human behaviour, and make him famous.
Kinsey was born on 23 June 1894 in Hoboken, New Jersey, the eldest of three children in a poor, strictly Methodist household where Sunday meant prayer and little else. Childhood rickets left him with a slight stoop that kept him out of the 1917 draft. Nature was his refuge. He camped with the YMCA, hiked hard despite a weakened heart, and in 1913 became one of the earliest Eagle Scouts. He once hoped to be a concert pianist, but a high school biology teacher, Natalie Roeth, steered him toward science.
His father insisted on engineering at the Stevens Institute, where he taught. After two unhappy years Kinsey defied him and left for Bowdoin College to study biology, graduating magna cum laude in 1916; his father did not attend the ceremony. At Harvard's Bussey Institute he wrote his doctorate on gall wasps under William Morton Wheeler, earning it in 1919 before taking a biology post at Indiana University. His painstaking measuring methods were themselves counted a contribution to entomology.
In 1926 he published a high school textbook, An Introduction to Biology, that joined botany and zoology and treated evolution bluntly. He mocked the man who rejected evolution while owning a newly bred dog or smoking a cigar from an improved tobacco strain, asking what such disbelief could mean. He also co-wrote a guide to edible wild plants of eastern North America.
His interest in human sexuality dated from 1933, grown partly out of studying variation in how gall wasps mate. With Rockefeller Foundation money he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana in 1947 and published volumes on men in 1948 and women in 1953. Both topped bestseller lists, made him a celebrity and caused uproar; many see them as forerunners of the sexual revolution. He devised the Kinsey scale, rating orientation from 0 to 6. Critics, including the sociologist Edward Laumann, questioned his reliance on volunteers who might not represent the population and his neglect of psychological analysis. He died in 1956.
Source: Alfred Kinsey
