Konrad Lorenz

For more information on Konrad Zacharias Lorenz, visit Britannica.com.

Austrian ethologist (1903–1989)

Alfred Lorenz, father of Konrad, was a very wealthy Viennese orthopedic surgeon who had developed a new operation for a congenital dislocation of the femur, a common complaint of the period. He was keen for his son to follow him into medicine and consequently, though reluctantly, Lorenz studied medicine at Columbia in New York and at the University of Vienna, where he gained his MD in 1929. He remained at Vienna to complete his PhD in 1933 on the comparative anatomy and evolution of avian wings. Lorenz was appointed lecturer in animal psychology in 1937.

Alfred Lorenz had bought a sizeable estate at Altenberg, a site about twenty miles outside Vienna. It was on this family estate that Lorenz first began his researches on animal behavior. Here he studied a jackdaw colony that had settled on the roof of his father's house. He also began to rear goslings; wild geese had proved to be too difficult to study profitably. Among other tasks Lorenz systematically classified the signals and behavior patterns of his goslings. Before long he had constructed a ‘glossary’ of their various calls and behavior patterns. They presented a number of problems. What did they mean? How did they originate in the individual? And how could such behavior patterns evolve?

In his bird studies Lorenz made good use of the phenomenon of imprinting, first described by Heinroth in 1911. Goslings, as they hatch tend to take the first object they encounter to be their mother. Lorenz would allow goslings and other birds to imprint themselves upon him and thereby gain easy access to them without actually taming them. It became a common sight at Altenberg to see Lorenz followed by a line of goslings who, if threatened, would scurry to him in alarm. He noted some of the properties of the process and defined it as “a developmental process by which behavior becomes attached to a particular object.” No reinforcement is required; mere passive exposure will suffice. It is also irreversible, and is clearly innate.

In 1937 Lorenz began to offer an explanatory system – a new theory of instinct – to account for many aspects of animal behavior. Much complex behavior, he noted, came perfectly formed and required no initial learning period. Nor did it necessarily arise from external stimuli. For example, Lorenz noted starlings in mid-winter hunting nonexistent flies, presumably responding to some internal drive – a form of behavior he described as ‘vacuum activities’.

He went on to characterize instincts in terms of four properties: they were clearly innate; they were species-specific; they involved stereotyped behavior; and instincts also involved what Lorenz termed ‘action specific energies’, which were discharged by the presence of innate releasing mechanisms, also known as ‘releasers’.

Thus the sight of a male stickleback's red belly (releaser) in the breeding season induces a stereotyped aggressive response in a rival male. The response is species and action specific. Lorenz likened the process to liquid in a reservoir. Just as water is released by opening a valve, the instinctive behavior innate in the system is discharged when presented with the appropriate releaser. Later ethologists have objected that Lorenz's model underestimates environmental influences.

Lorenz's work at Altenberg was interrupted by the onset of World War II. He served as a physician in the German army and was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1944. He was released in 1948 and on his return to Austria he was invited by the Max Planck Institute to establish a Department of Comparative Ethology at Buldern, Westphalia. The department moved in 1961 to the Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Seewiesen, Bavaria. On his retirement in 1973 Lorenz returned, along with his geese, to Grunau in Austria where he established his own research institute with funds provided by the Austrian Academy.

By this time Lorenz had become world famous. Two books published in the 1950s, King Solomon's Ring (1952) and Man Meets Dog (1954), were immensely popular and have remained in print. He assumed a more controversial role in 1966 with his On Aggression, in which he argued that aggression was not necessarily an evil as it also served a number of evolutionary purposes. Man, he claimed, actually suffered from “an insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.” Equally controversial was Man's Eight Deadly Sins (1974), in which he warned against the genetic deterioration of the human race.

For his work on ethology Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch.

The animal psychologist Konrad Z. Lorenz (1903-1989) did much work in the field of the physiology of animal behavior and on the development of social relationships, particularly imprinting. He also explored the relationship between animal behavior and human sociology.

Konrad Z. Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903, in Altenberg, Austria. His father was already a world-renowned surgeon, having created a hip-joint operation procedure. Young Lorenz studied medicine at Columbia University and at the University of Vienna. In addition to his medical degree, he obtained the Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Vienna where in 1937 he was appointed lecturer in comparative anatomy and animal psychology. In 1940 he was appointed professor of comparative psychology and head of the department at the University of Konigsberg; however, in 1943 he was drafted into the German army as a psychiatrist. He was taken prisoner of war by the Russians in 1944 and released in 1948. Shortly thereafter he became head of the Research Station for the Physiology of Behavior at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology. In 1956 he became co-director, along with ethologist Gustav Kramer and physiologist Erich von Helst, of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seeweisen, Bavaria, a position he retained until his retirement in 1973. It was also in 1973 that, along with two other zoologists, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the first time any individual in the behavioral sciences had been so honored. From 1973 to 1982, Lorenz served as director of the Department of Animal Sociology, Institute of Comparative Ethology, Austrian Academy of Science. He was later director of the Ethological Research Station at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Lorenz's contributions to the study of animal behavior were immense, but his work on the development of social relationships, especially the phenomenon of imprinting, deserves special note. In his research Lorenz emphasized the importance of the direct observation of animal behavior under natural conditions. One of the theoretical strengths of Lorenz's work was his attempt to combine evolutionary and causal explanations of behavior. The fledgling science of ethology was founded in the early 1930s by Oscar Heinroth, director of the Berlin aquarium, with whom Lorenz had a long-standing friendship. That relationship profoundly affected Lorenz's view of the science of studying behavior. One of Lorenz's earliest contributions was the introduction of the concept of angeborener Auslösemechanismus ("innate releasing mechanism" or IRM). Also, in 1935 Lorenz coined the term Prägung, or "imprinting, " to denote the rapid process of learning during the sensitive period in early development.

Lorenz's best-known book among social scientists, On Aggression (1966), prompted considerable discussion because of his contention that for animals intragroup aggression might have beneficial consequences. Prior to the publication of On Aggression, however, Lorenz had published three other books: King Solomon's Ring (1952), a charming introduction to the evolution of behavior; Man Meets Dog (1954); and what Lorenz himself considered his most important contribution, The Evolution and Modification of Behavior (1965), a reply to Donald Lehrman's 1953 critique of his work published in the Quarterly Review of Biology. In 1970 and 1971, Harvard University Press published a two-volume compendium of Lorenz's papers, most of which were originally published in German, entitled Studies in Animal and Human Behavior. The volumes brought together in one place much of Lorenz's thinking on studies of genetically-determined patterns of behavior to describe evolutionary sequences and relationships among species.

However, there was another side of Konrad Lorenz which showed a psychologist of great breadth who was interested in learning theory, social psychology, psychology of science, and the political implications of evolutionary genetics. In 1973 he published Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, in which he explained in dramatic didactic tones that humans' capacity for genocide is based on social devices that separate cultures and make individuals from different cultures seem nonhuman. His next book, Die Rückseite des Spiegels (translated as Behind the Mirror or The Other Side of the Mirror), published in 1977, makes a valuable contribution to a basic problem in the philosophy of psychology - namely, the question of conscious experience in other animals and the mind-body relationship. A later book, The Year of the Greylag Goose (1979), is a return to some of his original concerns in the study of animal behavior.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Lorenz received numerous professional honors. He held eight honorary degrees from universities in Europe and North America. He received the Gold Medal from the New York Zoological Society and the Austrian Award for Distinction in Science and Art, as well as many other awards and prizes. Konrad Lorenz did most of his post-retirement work from his childhood home in Altenberg, Austria. Lorenz died February 27, 1989, of kidney failure at his home. He was 85 years old.

Further Reading

The major intellectual positions and views on science and human nature of Konrad Lorenz are traced in Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas (1975) by Richard I. Evans. A critical review of some of Lorenz's work is found in Lehrman's "A critique of Konrad Lorenz's theory of imitative behavior, " published in the Quarterly Review of Biology (1953). Other reviews of Lorenz and his work are found in the November 1974 issue of Psychology Today and in Science 182 (1973).

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) became famous for his work in the field of avian ethology, particularly in his studies of imprinting. By raising goslings from the time they were hatched, Lorenz was able to make the goslings follow him rather than their own mother. This work led to the theory that the goslings were genetically programmed to exhibit a certain behavior with regard to any large organism that was near them during a critical early period of their life. In his publications he applied comparative methods to the study of behavior and the psychology of perception.

Quotes:

"Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species."

"Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing."

"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young."

"Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one."

Konrad Lorenz
Born	November 7, 1903(1903-11-07) Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	February 27, 1989 (aged 85) Vienna, Austria
Nationality	Austrian
Fields	Ethology
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1973)

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (November 7, 1903 in Vienna – February 27, 1989 in Vienna) was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, ornithologist, and Nobel Prize winner. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he rediscovered the principle of imprinting (originally described by Douglas Spalding in the 19th century) in the behavior of nidifugous birds.

He wrote numerous books, some of which, such as King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression became popular reading. In later life his interest shifted to the study of man in society.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Politics 3 Contributions and legacy 3.1 Lorenz's vision of the challenges facing humanity 3.2 Philosophical speculations 4 Works 5 References 6 External links

Biography

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 Lagerlof's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which filled him with a great enthusiasm about wild geese.

At the request of his father, Adolf, Lorenz began a premedical curriculum in 1922 at Columbia University, 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).
In 1936, at an international scientific symposium on instinct, Lorenz met his great friend and colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen. Together they studied geese - wild, domestic, and hybrid. One result of these studies was that Lorenz "realized 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." Lorenz began to suspect and fear "that analogous processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity."

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 medic. He was Captured by the Russians very near the start of his service and became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1948. In captivity he continued to work as a medic and "got quite friendly with some Russians, mostly doctors." When he was repatriated, he was allowed to keep the manuscript of a book he had been writing, and his pet starling. He arrived back in Altenberg "with manuscript and bird intact." The manuscript became his book Behind the Mirror. The Max Planck Society established the Lorenz Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Buldern, Germany, in 1950.

In 1958, Lorenz transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns" with two other important early ethologists, Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. In 1969, he became the first recipient of the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Lorenz retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg (his family home, near Vienna) and Grünau im Almtal in Austria.

Konrad Lorenz died on February 27, 1989, in Altenberg.

Lorenz was also a friend and student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Huxley (grandson of "Darwin's bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley). Famed psycho-anatomist Ralph Greenson and Sir Peter Scott were good friends.

Politics

Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. In his application for membership to the Nazi-party NSDAP he wrote in 1938: "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.^[1] See also Martin Heidegger.

During the final years of his life Lorenz supported the fledgling Austrian Green Party and in 1984 became the figurehead of the Konrad Lorenz Volksbegehren, a grass-roots movement that was formed to prevent the building of a power plant at the Danube near Hainburg an der Donau and thus the destruction of the surrounding woodland.

Contributions and legacy

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With Nikolaas Tinbergen (left), 1978

Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Lorenz developed the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns). They experimented with "supernormal stimuli" such as giant eggs or dummy bird beaks which they found could release the fixed action patterns more powerfully than the natural objects for which the behaviors were adapted. Influenced by the ideas of William McDougall, Lorenz developed this into a "psychohydraulic" model of the motivation of behavior, which tended towards group selectionist ideas, which were influential in the 1960s. Another of his contributions to ethology is his work on imprinting. His influence on a younger generation of ethologists; and his popular works, were important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public.

There are three Konrad Lorenz Institutes in Austria; one is housed in his family mansion at Altenberg [1], and another at his field station in Grünau.

Lorenz, like other ethologists, performed research largely by observation, or where experiments were conducted they were conducted in a natural setting. Occasionally there were long-term problems from his research, for example when geese imprinted on baby buggies as goslings were later released into Vienna's parks, some later had an unforeseen propensity for attempting to mate with similar objects^{[citation needed]}. Nevertheless, animal welfare advocates like to point out that Lorenz won a Nobel Prize without ever using invasive techniques.

Lorenz's vision of the challenges facing humanity

Lorenz also predicted the relationship between market economics and the threat of ecological catastrophe. In his 1973 book, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, Konrad 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" ^[2]

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' theory of ecology is the function of feedback mechanisms, especially negative ones 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.

Lorenz does not see human independence from natural ecological processes as necessarily bad. Indeed, 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..." pp45–47.

In this book, Lorenz proposes that the best hope for mankind lies in our looking for mates based on the kindness of their hearts rather than good looks or wealth. He illustrates this with a Jewish story, explicitly described as such.

Lorenz was one of the early scientists who recognised the significance of overpopulation. The number one deadly sin of civilized man in his book is overpopulation, what leads to aggression.

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.

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; they became widely known to English-speaking scientists through the descriptions of it 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 Geese and Waste Behavior.

• King Solomon's Ring (1949)
• Man Meets Dog (1950)
• Evolution and Modification of Behavior (1965)
• On Aggression (1966)
• Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume I (1970)
• Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II (1971)
• Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (1973)
• Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins (1974)
• The Year of the Greylag Goose (1979)
• The Foundations of Ethology (1982)
• Here Am I - Where Are You? - The Behavior of the Greylag Goose (In collaboration with Michael Martys and Angelika Tipler). (1988). Translated by Robert D. Martin from Hier bin ich - wo bist du?. ISBN 0151400563
• The Natural Science of the Human Species: An Introduction to Comparative Behavioral Research - The Russian Manuscript (1944-1948)(1995)

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2009)

1. ^ Eisenberg, L. 2005. "Which Image for Lorenz?" American Journal of Psychiatry 162:1760
2. ^ Gli otto peccati capitali della nostra civiltà. - Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, Adelphi edizioni, Milano, 1974, p26; the citation is translated from the Italian version of the book.

External links

• Short Autobiography on the Nobel Foundation website
• Review of Biologists Under Hitler
• Konrad Lorenz Institutes:
  • Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
  • Konrad Lorenz Research Station, Grünau im Almtal
  • Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology

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Persondata
NAME	Lorenz, Konrad
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Austrian zoologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.
DATE OF BIRTH	November 7, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Vienna, Austria
DATE OF DEATH	February 27, 1989
PLACE OF DEATH	Vienna, Austria

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