Alfred C. Kinsey Entomological papers

Alfred C. Kinsey most famous for his work on human sexual behavior, was a world authority on gall wasps; winged but mainly flightless members of the genus Cynips. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 23, 1894, Kinsey moved with his family to South Orange in 1904. He received his education at the Stevens Institute of Technology before moving onto Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to study biology, graduating in 1916. From there, Kinsey attended the Bussey Institute at Harvard University, which is where in 1917, he began to study the gall wasp for his Ph.D. under the tutelage of William H. Wheeler. Receiving his doctorate in 1919 and enabled by a $1,500 Shelton fellowship Kinsey continued his research into the gall wasp, travelling for over 15 months, first to Texas and then on to cover 18,000 miles, 54 locations in 36 states before he was offered a position in the Department of Zoology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana in August 1920, where he spent the remainder of his career. Kinsey’s emphasis was on individual variation and he became interested in the origin of the species. As gall wasps are flightless, Kinsey hoped to trace their origin across the continent and complete the taxonomy of the whole genus. To enable this research and believing that the phylogenetic line for the gall wasp converged in Southern Arizona where he would find a common ancestor, he undertook two research trips in the 1930s, Mexico in 1931 and Guatemala in 1936. He took four research students and a vehicle he had specially adapted as a makeshift laboratory. Whilst he did not find the origin of the species, these expeditions contributed to his 1936 publication The Origins of Higher Categories in Cynips. His last gall hunting expedition was in 1941. During the 1930s, Kinsey published the majority of his research on gall wasps and by the end of his career had accumulated over seven million gall wasps and a million specimens of gall. In 1938, Kinsey’s research focus changed to human behavior after the University of Bloomington asked Kinsey to coordinate a marriage course. The Institute for Sex Research was incorporated at the University of Bloomington in 1947 with Kinsey listed as its Director. He went on to publish two books on human sexual behavior based on his research, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female in 1954. Kinsey married Clara McMillen in 1921 and they had four children together, one of whom died in infancy. He died in 1956.