Konrad Lorenz

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Konrad Lorenz
MD
, PhD)
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsEthology

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (Austrian German pronunciation:

ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior. He developed an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth.[1]

Lorenz studied

nidifugous birds (i.e. birds that leave their nest early) bond instinctively with the first moving object that they see within the first hours of hatching. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became widely known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive bond. In 1936, he met Tinbergen, and the two collaborated in developing ethology as a separate sub-discipline of biology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lorenz the 65th most cited scholar of the 20th century in the technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses.[2]

Lorenz's work was interrupted by the onset of

Soviet Armenia. After the war, he regretted his membership in the Nazi Party.[4]

Lorenz wrote numerous books, some of which, such as

King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog
, became popular reading. His last work Here I Am – Where Are You? is a summary of his life's work and focuses on his famous studies of greylag geese.

Biography

Lorenz in 1904 with his elder brother

Lorenz was the son of Adolf Lorenz, a wealthy and distinguished surgeon, and his wife Emma (née Lecher), a physician who had been her husband's assistant.[5] The family lived on a large estate at Altenberg, and had a city apartment in Vienna.[6] He was educated at the Public Schottengymnasium of the Benedictine monks in Vienna.

In his autobiographical essay, published in 1973 in Les Prix Nobel (winners of the prizes are requested to provide such essays), Lorenz credits his career to his parents, who "were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals", and to his childhood encounter with Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which filled him with a great enthusiasm about wild geese."[7]

At the request of his father, Adolf Lorenz, he began a premedical curriculum in 1922 at Columbia University,[8] but he returned to Vienna in 1923 to continue his studies at the University of Vienna. He graduated as Doctor of Medicine (MD) in 1928 and became an assistant professor at the Institute of Anatomy until 1935. He finished his zoological studies in 1933 and received his second doctorate (PhD).[9]

While still a student, Lorenz began developing what would become a large

King Solomon's Ring, Lorenz recounts that while studying at the University of Vienna he kept a variety of animals at his parents' apartment, ranging from fish to a capuchin monkey named Gloria.[9]

In 1936, at an international scientific symposium on instinct, Lorenz met his great friend and colleague

dysgenic effects, and to argue in two papers that the Nazi eugenics policies against this were therefore scientifically justified.[10]

Lorenz as a Soviet POW in 1944

In 1940 he became a professor of psychology at the University of Königsberg. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941. He sought to be a motorcycle mechanic, but instead he was assigned as a military psychologist, conducting racial studies on humans in occupied Poznań under Rudolf Hippius. The objective was to study the biological characteristics of "German-Polish half-breeds" to determine whether they 'benefited' from the same work ethics as 'pure' Germans.[11][12] The degree to which Lorenz participated in the project is unknown, but the project director Hippius referred a couple of times to Lorenz as an "examining psychologist".[13]

Lorenz later described that he once saw transports of concentration camp inmates at Fort VII near Poznań, which made him "fully realize the complete inhumanity of the Nazis".[14]

He was sent to the

Behind the Mirror.[3]

The

Buldern, Germany, in 1950. In his memoirs, Lorenz described the chronology of his war years differently from what historians have been able to document after his death. He himself claimed that he was captured in 1942, where in reality he was only sent to the front and captured in 1944, leaving out entirely his involvement with the Poznań project.[3]

In 1958, Lorenz transferred to the

ethologists, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. In 1969, he became the first recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca
. He was a friend and student of renowned biologist
Sir Peter Scott were good friends. Lorenz and Karl Popper were childhood friends; many years after they met, during the celebration of Popper's 80 years, they wrote together a book entitled Die Zukunft ist offen.[17]

He retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg and Grünau im Almtal in Austria. He died on 27 February 1989 in Altenberg.

Personal life

Lorenz married his childhood friend, Margarethe Gebhardt, a gynaecologist, daughter of a market gardener who lived near the Lorenz family;[18] they had a son and two daughters. He lived at the Lorenz family estate, which included a "fantastical neo-baroque mansion", previously owned by his father.[6][19]

Ethology

Further information: Imprinting (psychology) and Ritualization

Lorenz is recognized as one of the founding fathers of the field of

nidifugous birds such as greylag geese in his 1935 book Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels ("The Companion in the Environment of Birds") became the foundational description of the phenomenon.[13]

Here, Lorenz used

Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt to understand how the limited perception of animals filtered out certain phenomena with which they interacted instinctively. For example, a young goose instinctively bonds with the first moving stimulus it perceives, whether it be its mother, or a person. Lorenz showed that this behavior of imprinting is what allows the goose to learn to recognize members of its own species, enabling them to be the object of subsequent behavior patterns such as mating.[20] He developed a theory of instinctive behavior that saw behavior patterns as largely innate but triggered through environmental stimuli, for example the hawk/goose effect. He argued that animals have an inner drive to carry out instinctive behaviors, and that if they do not encounter the right stimulus they will eventually engage in the behavior with an inappropriate stimulus.[21]

Lorenz's approach to ethology derived from a skepticism towards the studies of animal behavior done in laboratory settings. He considered that in order to understand the mechanisms of animal behavior, it was necessary to observe their full range of behaviors in their natural context. Lorenz did not carry out much traditional fieldwork but observed animals near his home. His method involved empathizing with animals, often using anthropomorphization to imagine their mental states. He believed that animals were capable of experiencing many of the same emotions as humans.[20][22]

Tinbergen, Lorenz's friend with whom he conjointly received the Nobel Prize, summarized Lorenz's major contribution to ethology as making behavior a topic of biological inquiry, considering behavior a part of an animal's evolutionary equipment.[23] Tinbergen and Lorenz contributed to making Ethology a recognized sub-discipline within Biology and founded the first specialized journal of the field "Ethology" (originally "Zeitschift für Tierpsychologie")[20]

Involvement with Nazism

Nazism

Lorenz joined the

Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. In his application for party membership he wrote, "I'm able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists." His publications during that time led in later years to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies. His published writing during the Nazi period included support for Nazi ideas of "racial hygiene" couched in pseudoscientific metaphors.[24][25][26][27][28][29]

In his autobiography, Lorenz wrote:

The same individual geese on which we conducted these experiments, first aroused my interest in the process of domestication. They were F1 hybrids of wild Greylags and domestic geese and they showed surprising deviations from the normal social and sexual behaviour of the wild birds. I realised that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals. I was frightened – as I still am – by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi-terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded catholic regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men than I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of us as much as suspected that the word "selection", when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication.[3]

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After the war, Lorenz denied having been a party member,

anti-Semitic jokes on 'Jewish characteristics' in letters to his mentor Heinroth.[34] In 2015, the University of Salzburg posthumously rescinded an honorary doctorate awarded to Lorenz in 1983, citing his party membership and his assertions in his application that he was "always a National Socialist", and that his work "stands to serve National Socialist thought". The university also accused him of using his work to spread "basic elements of the racist ideology of National Socialism".[35][36]

Ecology

During the final years of his life, Lorenz supported the fledgling

power plant at the Danube near Hainburg an der Donau
and thus the destruction of the surrounding woodland.

Contributions and legacy

With Nikolaas Tinbergen (left), 1978

Lorenz has been called 'The father of ethology', by Niko Tinbergen.[37] Perhaps Lorenz's most important contribution to ethology was his idea that behavior patterns can be studied as anatomical organs.[38] This concept forms the foundation of ethological research.[37][39] However, Richard Dawkins called Lorenz a "'good of the species' man",[40] stating that the idea of group selection was "so deeply ingrained"[40] in Lorenz's thinking that he "evidently did not realize that his statements contravened orthodox Darwinian theory."[40]

Together with

ethologists
; and his popular works, were important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public.

Lorenz claimed that there was widespread contempt for the descriptive sciences. He attributed this to the denial of perception as the source of all scientific knowledge: "a denial that has been elevated to the status of religion."[41] He wrote that in comparative behavioral research, "it is necessary to describe various patterns of movement, record them, and above all, render them unmistakably recognizable."[42]

There are three research institutions named after Lorenz in Austria: the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) was housed in Lorenz' family mansion at Altenberg before moving to Klosterneuburg in 2013; the Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle (KLF) at his former field station in Grünau; and the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, an external research facility of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.

Vision of the challenges facing humanity

With Nikolaas Tinbergen (right), 1978

Lorenz predicted the relationship between market economics and the threat of ecological catastrophe. In his 1973 book, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, Lorenz addresses the following paradox:

All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction[43]

Lorenz adopts an ecological model to attempt to grasp the mechanisms behind this contradiction. Thus "all species... are adapted to their environment... including not only inorganic components... but all the other living beings that inhabit the locality." p31.

Fundamental to Lorenz's theory of ecology is the function of negative feedback mechanisms, which, in hierarchical fashion, dampen impulses that occur beneath a certain threshold. The thresholds themselves are the product of the interaction of contrasting mechanisms. Thus pain and pleasure act as checks on each other:

To gain a desired prey, a dog or wolf will do things that, in other contexts, they would shy away from: run through thorn bushes, jump into cold water and expose themselves to risks which would normally frighten them. All these inhibitory mechanisms... act as a counterweight to the effects of learning mechanisms... The organism cannot allow itself to pay a price which is not worth paying. p53.

In nature, these mechanisms tend towards a 'stable state' among the living beings of an ecology:

A closer examination shows that these beings... not only do not damage each other, but often constitute a community of interests. It is obvious that the predator is strongly interested in the survival of that species, animal or vegetable, which constitutes its prey. ... It is not uncommon that the prey species derives specific benefits from its interaction with the predator species... pp31–33.

Lorenz states that humanity is the one species not bound by these mechanisms, being the only one that has defined its own environment:

[The pace of human ecology] is determined by the progress of man's technology (p35)... human ecology (economy) is governed by mechanisms of POSITIVE feedback, defined as a mechanism which tends to encourage behavior rather than to attenuate it (p43). Positive feedback always involves the danger of an 'avalanche' effect... One particular kind of positive feedback occurs when individuals OF THE SAME SPECIES enter into competition among themselves... For many animal species, environmental factors keep... intraspecies selection from [leading to] disaster... But there is no force which exercises this type of healthy regulatory effect on humanity's cultural development; unfortunately for itself, humanity has learned to overcome all those environmental forces which are external to itself p44.

Regarding aggression in human beings, Lorenz states:

Let us imagine that an absolutely unbiased investigator on another planet, perhaps on Mars, is examining human behavior on earth, with the aid of a telescope whose magnification is too small to enable him to discern individuals and follow their separate behavior, but large enough for him to observe occurrences such as migrations of peoples, wars, and similar great historical events. He would never gain the impression that human behavior was dictated by intelligence, still less by responsible morality. If we suppose our extraneous observer to be a being of pure reason, devoid of instincts himself and unaware of the way in which all instincts in general and aggression in particular can miscarry, he would be at a complete loss how to explain history at all. The ever-recurrent phenomena of history do not have reasonable causes. It is a mere commonplace to say that they are caused by what common parlance so aptly terms "human nature." Unreasoning and unreasonable human nature causes two nations to compete, though no economic necessity compels them to do so; it induces two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programs of salvation to fight each other bitterly, and it impels an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his scepter. We have been taught to regard some of the persons who have committed these and similar absurdities with respect, even as "great" men, we are wont to yield to the political wisdom of those in charge, and we are all so accustomed to these phenomena that most of us fail to realize how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behavior of humanity actually is [44]

Lorenz does not see human independence from natural ecological processes as necessarily bad. He states that:

A completely new [ecology] which corresponds in every way to [humanity's] desires... could, theoretically, prove as durable as that which would have existed without his intervention (36).

However, the principle of competition, typical of Western societies, destroys any chance of this:

The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. [...] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff... (pp. 45–47)

Philosophical speculations

In his 1973 book

Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, Lorenz considers the old philosophical question of whether our senses correctly inform us about the world as it is, or provide us only with an illusion. His answer comes from evolutionary biology
. Only traits that help us survive and reproduce are transmitted. If our senses gave us wrong information about our environment, we would soon be extinct. Therefore, we can be sure that our senses give us correct information, for otherwise we would not be here to be deceived.

Honours and awards

  • Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957[45]
  • Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1964
  • Elected a
    Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1964[1]
  • Elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1966[46]
  • Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1969
  • Gold Medal of the Humboldt Society in 1972Rupke, Nicolaas (2008). Alexander Von Humboldt: A Metabiography. University of Chicago Press. p. 151.
    ISBN 978-0-226-73149-0
    .
  • Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973[3]
  • Elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1974[47]
  • Honorary Doctorate, University of Salzburg, 1983, revoked in 2015[48]
  • Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband) in 1984
  • Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art in 1984

Works

Lorenz's best-known books are

King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression, both written for a popular audience. His scientific work appeared mainly in journal articles, written in German; it became widely known to English-speaking scientists through its description in Tinbergen's 1951 book
The Study of Instinct, though many of his papers were later published in English translation in the two volumes titled Studies in Animal and Human Behavior.

See also

References

  1. ^
    PMID 11616215
    .
  2. S2CID 145668721
    .
  3. ^
    Nobel prize
    The Official Web Site of The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 7 November 2013.
  4. ISBN 978-0-15-147285-7
    .
  5. ^ Konrad Lorenz, Alec Nisbett, Dent, 1976, p. 15
  6. ^ a b Sullivan, Walter (March 1989). "Konrad Lorenz, Pioneer in Study of Animals' Behavior, Dies at 85". The New York Times.
  7. ISBN 978-0-15-147286-4
    .
  8. ^ Columbia College (Columbia University). Office of Alumni Affairs and Development; Columbia College (Columbia University) (1989). Columbia College today. Columbia University Libraries. New York, N.Y. : Columbia College, Office of Alumni Affairs and Development.
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-26747-2
    .
  10. S2CID 141222261
    .
  11. ISBN 978-0-674-07404-0
    .
  12. S2CID 141222261
    .
  13. ^ a b Burkhardt, R. W. (2005). Patterns of behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the founding of ethology. University of Chicago Press.
  14. ISBN 0-15-147286-6
    , page 94.
  15. ^ Sullivan, Walter (1 March 1989). "Konrad Lorenz, Pioneer in Study Of Animals' Behavior, Dies at 85". The New York Times.
  16. ^ "Konrad Lorenz: Biographical". nobelprize.org.
  17. ^ Karl Popper and Konrad Lorenz, Die Zukunft ist offen: das Altenberger Gespräch, mit den Texten des Wiener Popper-Symposiums, ed. Franz Kreuzer (Munich: Piper, 1985). Reprinted by Chicago: Northwestern University, 2011.
    ISBN 978-3-492-00640-8
    For an English-language discussion of the Vienna of Popper and Lorenz's early years, see Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31–34.
    ISBN 978-0-521-89055-7
    Google books
  18. ^ Konrad Lorenz, Alec Nisbett, Dent, 1976, p. 22
  19. ^ Anatomy of Restlessness- Uncollected Writings, Bruce Chatwin, Picador, 1997, p. 141
  20. ^
    OCLC 42328566
    .
  21. ^ Yount, L. (2009). A to Z of Biologists. Infobase Publishing. pp. 183–184
  22. S2CID 45373309
    .
  23. ^ Tinbergen, N. (1963). On Aims and Methods of Ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.
  24. PMID 16135651
    .
  25. ISBN 978-1-57233-472-4
    .
  26. doi:10.1163/156853097X00196
    .
  27. ^ Föger, B., & Taschwer, K. (2001). Die andere Seite des Spiegels: Konrad Lorenz und der Nationalsozialismus. Czernin-Verlag.
  28. S2CID 26788185
    .
  29. ^ Kalikow, T. J. (1978). Konrad Lorenz's "brown past": A reply to Alec Nisbett.
  30. ^ World Jewish Congress (18 December 2015). "Late Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz stripped of doctorate for lying about Nazi past". World Jewish Congress. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
  31. ^ Klopfer 1994; Deichmann 1992.
  32. ^ Pfeffer & Pfeffer. 2014. Glimpflich entnazifiziert [Softly denazified]: Die Universität Wien nach dem 2. Weltkrieg. Vienna U Press.
  33. ISSN 0957-9265
    .
  34. ^ Klopfer 1994.
  35. ^ Anonymous, "Austrian university strips Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz of doctorate due to Nazi past", Associated Press, 17 December 2015.
  36. ^ "Uni Salzburg entzieht Konrad Lorenz die Ehrendoktorwürde". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). 18 December 2015. Retrieved 19 December 2015.
  37. ^
    doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x
    .
  38. S2CID 41134631
    .
  39. ISBN 978-0-19-286088-0
    .
  40. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-857519-1
    .
  41. Eyre Methuen
    . p. 6.
  42. ^ Lorenz (1979), p. 7.
  43. ^ Gli otto peccati capitali della nostra civiltà [Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins]. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni. 1974. p. 26. The citation is translated from the Italian version of the book.
  44. ^ LORENZ, Konrad. On Aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson. Originally published in Austria under the title DAS SOGENANNTE BÖSE. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression. Viena: Dr. G. Borotha-Schoeler Verlag, 1963, p. 263.
  45. ^ "Konrad Zacharias Lorenz". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  46. ^ "Konrad Lorenz". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  47. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  48. ^ "Titel "erschlichen": Uni Salzburg entzieht Konrad Lorenz die Ehrendoktorwürde". Faz.net – via www.faz.net.
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