Drucker to see what a deep reading of An Introduction to Biology might offer us in understanding both Kinsey the enthusiastic if overreaching entomologist, and Kinsey the groundbreaking if complexly motivated behavioral scientist.Ī close examination of the scientific career of Alfred Kinsey reveals his trip from scholar of the genus Cynipidae to a social revolutionary was smoother than commonly supposed. In this essay, I build on the recent work of Donna J. But the net effect has been to divide Kisney in two. Kinsey’s writings about sex are more interesting to the general reader than his writings about literal birds and bees. Scholars have tended to skip past the boring parts, like his textbook, in their rush to examine Kinsey’s later works … and the naughty bits of his personal life. But biographers have gone rather too deeply into psychosexual analysis when trying to explain how Kinsey, author of the famous “Kinsey Reports,” transitioned seemingly overnight from a mild mannered collector of gall wasps to a world famous cataloger of orgasms. It is terribly tempting to read between the lines of Kinsey’s enthusiastic prose. One might suggest Kinsey was compensating for something.
ALFRED KINSEY MOTIVATION THEORY FULL
In his textbook, Kinsey promoted biology, at least as practiced by a taxonomist like himself, as a rugged sport, full of adventure and manly camaraderie, an antidote to the sissifying effects of the lab and the city. Still, the author made sure he didn’t come off as some kind of odd-duck bug lover.
Where other textbook authors focused on the history of vertebrates culminating with human dominance, Kinsey focused on the behavior of insects culminating with balance in nature. Anticipating concerns that would not enter the greater public consciousness for decades, Kinsey stressed the “ecologic relations of organisms,” and called it “a mistake to test the importance of knowledge by its known, dollars-and-cents application” (v-vi). Kinsey’s 1926 An Introduction to Biology was the first American high school biology textbook organized not against authoritarian concepts of progress, control and exploitation, but instead reflective themes of unity, interdependence and conservation.
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