Konrad Lorenz

Categories: 1903 births | 1989 deaths | Columbia alumni | Ethologists | Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winners | Zoologists

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Lorenz being followed by his imprinted geese

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (November 7, 1903–February 27, 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, and ornithologist. 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.

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Biography

Lorenz was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1928 to 1935 and a professor of psychology at the Immanuel Kant University in Königsberg (later the Soviet port of Kaliningrad) in 1940. He joined the Wehrmacht in 1941, and was a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1948. 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. Lorenz retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg (his family home, near Vienna) and Grünau in Austria. Lorenz died on February 27, 1989, in Altenberg.

Lorenz was also a friend and student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (grandson of "Darwin's bulldog," Thomas Henry Huxley).

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Politics

Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. 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. When accepting the Nobel Prize, he apologized for a 1940 that included Nazi views of science, saying that "many highly decent scientists hoped, like I did, for a short time for good from National Socialism, and many quickly turned away from it with the same horror as I." It seems highly likely that Lorenz's ideas about an inherited basis for behavior patterns were congenial to the Nazi authorities, but there is no evidence to suggest that his experimental work was either inspired or distorted by Nazi ideas. 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 grassroots movement that was formed to prevent the building of a power plant at the Danube near Hainburg and thus the destruction of the yet untouched woodland surrounding the planned site.

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Contributions and legacy

Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Lorenz developed the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns). Influenced by the ideas of William McDougall, Lorenz developed this into a "psychohydraulic" model of the motivation of behavior. These ideas were influential as ethology became more popular in the 1960s, but they are now regarded as outdated because of their use of an energy flow metaphor; the nervous system and the control of behavior are now normally treated as involving information transmission rather than energy flow. Lorenz's writings about evolution are also now regarded as outdated, because he tended towards group selectionist ideas that were debunked by the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s. Lorenz's most enduring contributions thus seem to be his empirical work, especially on imprinting; his influence on a younger generation of ethologists; and his popular works, which were enormously important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public and are still widely read and appreciated today.

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

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Works

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The Russian Manuscript

Lorenz's most well-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 Animal and Human Behavior.

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External links

cs:Konrad Lorenz de:Konrad Lorenz es:Konrad Lorenz fr:Konrad Lorenz gl:Konrad Lorenz it:Konrad Lorenz he:קונראד לורנץ nl:Konrad Lorenz ja:コンラート・ローレンツ pl:Konrad Lorenz pt:Konrad Zacharias Lorenz sk:Konrad Lorenz sr:Конрад Лоренц fi:Konrad Lorenz sv:Konrad Lorenz