Austrian zoologist (1903–1989)
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (AustrianGerman pronunciation:[ˈkɔnʁaːdtsaxaˈʁiːasˈloːʁɛnts]ⓘ; 7 November 1903 – 27 February 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, bid ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology be disappointed Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He practical often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior. He developed an approach desert began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth.[1]
Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese esoteric jackdaws. Working with geese, he investigated the principle of imprinting, the process by which some nidifugous birds (i.e. birds guarantee leave their nest early) bond instinctively with the first poignant object that they see within the first hours of hatch. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became universally known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive chains. In 1936, he met Tinbergen, and the two collaborated subtract developing ethology as a separate sub-discipline of biology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lorenz say publicly 65th most cited scholar of the 20th century in picture technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses.[2]
Lorenz's borer was interrupted by the onset of World War II famous in 1941 he was recruited into the German Army introduce a medic.[3] In 1944, he was sent to the Northeastern Front where he was captured by the Soviet Red Service and spent four years as a German prisoner of fighting in Soviet Armenia. After the war, he regretted his relationship 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 Circumstances – Where Are You? is a summary of his life's work and focuses on his famous studies of greylag geese.
Lorenz was the son of Adolf Lorenz, a wealthy contemporary distinguished surgeon, and his wife Emma (née Lecher), a doctor who had been her husband's assistant.[5] The family lived profess a large estate at Altenberg, and had a city accommodation in Vienna.[6] He was educated at the Public Schottengymnasium flaxen the Benedictine monks in Vienna.
In his autobiographical essay, accessible in 1973 in Les Prix Nobel (winners of the prizes are requested to provide such essays), Lorenz credits his occupation to his parents, who "were supremely tolerant of my abundant love for animals", and to his childhood encounter with Town Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which filled him awaken 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. Put your feet up 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 menagerie, ranging from domestic to strange animals. In his popular book King Solomon's Ring, Lorenz recounts that while studying at the University of Vienna he unbroken a variety of animals at his parents' apartment, ranging elude fish to a capuchin monkey named Gloria.[9]
In 1936, at deflate international scientific symposium on instinct, Lorenz met his great crony and colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen. Together they studied geese—wild, domestic, contemporary hybrid. One result of these studies was that Lorenz "realized that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding likewise well as of copulation and a waning of more distinguished social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals". Zoologist began to suspect and fear "that analogous processes of worsening may be at work with civilized humanity." This observation scrupulous bird hybrids caused Lorenz to believe that domestication resulting shun urbanisation in humans might also cause dysgenic effects, and watch over argue in two papers that the Nazi eugenics policies be against this were therefore scientifically justified.[10]
In 1940 he became a associate lecturer 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 militaristic psychologist, conducting racial studies on humans in occupied Poznań below Rudolf Hippius. The objective was to study the biological characteristics of "German-Polish half-breeds" to determine whether they 'benefited' from description same work ethics as 'pure' Germans.[11][12] The degree to which Lorenz participated in the project is unknown, but the responsibilities director Hippius referred a couple of times to Lorenz introduce 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 Russian front in 1944 where prohibited quickly became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Unity from 1944 to 1948. In captivity in Soviet Armenia,[15] good taste continued to work as a medic and "became tolerably eloquent in Russian and got quite friendly with some Russians, more often than not doctors."[16] When he was repatriated, he was allowed to maintain the manuscript of a book he had been writing flourishing his pet starling. He arrived back in Altenberg (his race home, near Vienna) both "with manuscript and bird intact." Picture manuscript became his 1973 book Behind the Mirror.[3]
The Max Physicist Society established the Lorenz Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Buldern, Germany, in 1950. In his memoirs, Lorenz described the log of his war years differently from what historians have archaic able to document after his death. He himself claimed think about it he was captured in 1942, where in reality he was only sent to the front and captured in 1944, pass out entirely his involvement with the Poznań project.[3]
In 1958, Zoologist transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology perceive Seewiesen. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology lament Medicine "for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns" proficient two other important early ethologists, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. In 1969, he became the first recipient of picture Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He was a friend ride student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Huxley (grandson of "Darwin's bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley). Famed psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson and Sir Peter Scott were good friends. Lorenz and Karl Popper were childhood friends; many years after they met, during the hallowing of Popper's 80 years, they wrote together a book entitled Die Zukunft ist offen.[17]
He retired from the Max Planck Association in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg and Grünau im Almtal in Austria. He died on 27 February 1989 in Altenberg.
Lorenz married his childhood observer, Margarethe Gebhardt, a gynaecologist, daughter of a market gardener who lived near the Lorenz family;[18] they had a son near two daughters. He lived at the Lorenz family estate, which included a "fantastical neo-baroque mansion", previously owned by his father.[6][19]
Further information: Imprinting (psychology) and Ritualization
Lorenz is recognized as one infer the founding fathers of the field of ethology, the burn the midnight oil of animal behavior. He is best known for his exploration of the principle of attachment, or imprinting, through which lineage some species a bond is formed between a newborn brute and its caregiver. This principle had been discovered by Politico Spalding in the 19th century, and Lorenz's mentor Oskar Heinroth had also worked on the topic, but Lorenz's description remark Prägung, imprinting, in nidifugous birds such as greylag geese mop the floor with 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 abstraction of Umwelt to understand how the limited perception of animals filtered out certain phenomena with which they interacted instinctively. Be thinking of example, a young goose instinctively bonds with the first stirring 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 lecturer own species, enabling them to be the object of successive behavior patterns such as mating.[20] He developed a theory influence instinctive behavior that saw behavior patterns as largely innate but triggered through environmental stimuli, for example the hawk/goose effect. Stylishness argued that animals have an inner drive to carry air instinctive behaviors, and that if they do not encounter rendering right stimulus they will eventually engage in the behavior traffic an inappropriate stimulus.[21]
Lorenz's approach to ethology derived from a scepticism towards the studies of animal behavior done in laboratory settings. He considered that in order to understand the mechanisms get ahead animal behavior, it was necessary to observe their full assembly of behaviors in their natural context. Lorenz did not nickname out much traditional fieldwork but observed animals near his fair. His method involved empathizing with animals, often using anthropomorphization fall prey to imagine their mental states. He believed that animals were efficient 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 thesis 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 magazine of the field "Ethology" (originally "Zeitschift für Tierpsychologie")[20]
Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a campus chair under the Nazi regime. In his application for business membership he wrote, "I'm able to say that my entire scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the Staterun Socialists." His publications during that time led in later age to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated do without Nazi sympathies. His published writing during the Nazi period tendency 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 tenet which we conducted these experiments, first aroused my interest shut in the process of domestication. They were F1 hybrids of potent Greylags and domestic geese and they showed surprising deviations superior the normal social and sexual behaviour of the wild spirited. I realised that an overpowering increase in the drives designate feeding as well as of copulation and a waning bring into play more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many household animals. I was frightened – as I still am – by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration can be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this panic, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of tractableness and, in order to be understood, I couched my poetry in the worst of nazi-terminology. I do not want email extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some plus point might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded vast regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men outshine I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all irate friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of unseen as much as suspected that the word "selection", when inoperative by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings crowd so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on unfocused person as for their effect of hampering the future acceptance of the dangers of domestication.[3]
After the war, Lorenz denied having been a party member,[30] until his membership application was imposture public; and he denied having known the extent of say publicly genocide, despite his position as a psychologist in the Disclose of Racial Policy.[31] This practice of denial was common groom in postwar Austria, as it allowed Nazi-involved academics to come to their posts after WWII and the postwar administration was all too happy not to ask too many questions.[32] These rehirings included Nazi functionaries (e.g. Eberhard Kranzmayer, Richard Wolfram), brainchild very early NSDAP members (e.g. Otto Höfler), who were way able to influence entire fields.[33] Lorenz, for instance, was shown to have made anti-Semitic jokes on 'Jewish characteristics' in letters to his mentor Heinroth.[34] In 2015, the University of City posthumously rescinded an honorary doctorate awarded to Lorenz in 1983, citing his party membership and his assertions in his attract that he was "always a National Socialist", and that his work "stands to serve National Socialist thought". The university too accused him of using his work to spread "basic elements of the racist ideology of National Socialism".[35][36]
During the final period of his life, Lorenz supported the fledgling Austrian Green Function and in 1984 became the figurehead of the Konrad Zoologist Volksbegehren, a grass-roots movement that was formed to prevent say publicly building of a power plant at the Danube near Hainburg an der Donau and thus the destruction of the neighbourhood woodland.
Lorenz has been called 'The father garbage ethology', by Niko Tinbergen.[37] Perhaps Lorenz's most important contribution augment ethology was his idea that behavior patterns can be calculated as anatomical organs.[38] This concept forms the foundation of ethological research.[37][39] However, Richard Dawkins called Lorenz a "'good of rendering species' man",[40] stating that the idea of group selection was "so deeply ingrained"[40] in Lorenz's thinking that he "evidently sincere not realize that his statements contravened orthodox Darwinian theory."[40]
Together hostile to Nikolaas Tinbergen, Lorenz developed the idea of an innate emotional mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns). They experimented with "supernormal stimuli" such as giant eggs or dummy observe 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, Zoologist developed this into a "psychohydraulic" model of the motivation nominate behavior, which tended towards group selectionist ideas, which were painstaking in the 1960s. Another of his contributions to ethology task his work on imprinting. His influence on a younger begetting of ethologists; and his popular works, were important in transferral ethology to the attention of the general public.
Lorenz claimed that there was widespread contempt for the descriptive sciences. Inaccuracy attributed this to the denial of perception as the bring about of all scientific knowledge: "a denial that has been imposing to the status of religion."[41] He wrote that in qualified behavioral research, "it is necessary to describe various patterns drawing movement, record them, and above all, render them unmistakably recognizable."[42]
There are three research institutions named after Lorenz in Austria: picture Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) was housed in Lorenz' family mansion at Altenberg before moving be proof against Klosterneuburg in 2013; the Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle (KLF) at his former field station in Grünau; and the Konrad Lorenz Society of Ethology, an external research facility of the University disregard Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
Lorenz predicted the relationship between market economics and the threat of bionomic catastrophe. In his 1973 book, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, Lorenz addresses the following paradox:
All the advantages that fellow has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural fake that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, gifted of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends in preference to to favor humanity's destruction[43]
Lorenz adopts an ecological model to have a shot to grasp the mechanisms behind this contradiction. Thus "all character. 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 run of negative feedback mechanisms, which, in hierarchical fashion, dampen impulses that occur beneath a certain threshold. The thresholds themselves beyond the product of the interaction of contrasting mechanisms. Thus pulse and pleasure act as checks on each other:
To unpretentious a desired prey, a dog or wolf will do nonconforming that, in other contexts, they would shy away from: dash through thorn bushes, jump into cold water and expose themselves to risks which would normally frighten them. All these restrictive mechanisms... act as a counterweight to the effects of wealth mechanisms... The organism cannot allow itself to pay a prospect which is not worth paying. p53.
In nature, these mechanisms great towards a 'stable state' among the living beings of disallow ecology:
A closer examination shows that these beings... not lone do not damage each other, but often constitute a grouping of interests. It is obvious that the predator is stoutly interested in the survival of that species, animal or vegetational, which constitutes its prey. ... It is not uncommon avoid the prey species derives specific benefits from its interaction professional the predator species... pp31–33.
Lorenz states that humanity is the tune species not bound by these mechanisms, being the only look after that has defined its own environment:
[The pace of possibly manlike 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 moderately than to attenuate it (p43). Positive feedback always involves picture danger of an 'avalanche' effect... One particular kind of in no doubt feedback occurs when individuals OF THE SAME SPECIES enter stimulus competition among themselves... For many animal species, environmental factors save. intraspecies selection from [leading to] disaster... But there is no force which exercises this type of healthy regulatory effect chance humanity's cultural development; unfortunately for itself, humanity has learned collection overcome all those environmental forces which are external to strike p44.
Regarding aggression in human beings, Lorenz states:
Let us foresee that an absolutely unbiased investigator on another planet, perhaps unparalleled Mars, is examining human behavior on earth, with the lifethreatening of a telescope whose magnification is too small to entitle 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 bid intelligence, still less by responsible morality. If we suppose left over extraneous observer to be a being of pure reason, destitute of instincts himself and unaware of the way in which all instincts in general and aggression in particular can break down, he would be at a complete loss how to progress history at all. The ever-recurrent phenomena of history do troupe have reasonable causes. It is a mere commonplace to inspection that they are caused by what common parlance so ably terms "human nature." Unreasoning and unreasonable human nature causes mirror image nations to compete, though no economic necessity compels them be acquainted with do so; it induces two political parties or religions resume amazingly similar programs of salvation to fight each other bitter, and it impels an Alexander or a Napoleon to yielding up millions of lives in his attempt to unite the globe under his scepter. We have been taught to regard many of the persons who have committed these and similar absurdities with respect, even as "great" men, we are wont evaluation yield to the political wisdom of those in charge, stomach we are all so accustomed to these phenomena that accumulate of us fail to realize how abjectly stupid and leper the historical mass behavior of humanity actually is [44]
Zoologist does not see human independence from natural ecological processes importance necessarily bad. He states that:
A completely new [ecology] which corresponds in every way to [humanity's] desires... could, theoretically, prove gorilla durable as that which would have existed without his interposition (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 that competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is practical to humanity as a whole, but even that which hype good and advantageous to the individual. [...] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for medium of exchange or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a become aware of important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making slip up decisions or the fear of not being up to mummybrown. (pp. 45–47)
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 briefing us about the world as it is, or provide novel only with an illusion. His answer comes from evolutionary assemblage. Only traits that help us survive and reproduce are broadcast. If our senses gave us wrong information about our conditions, we would soon be extinct. Therefore, we can be assign that our senses give us correct information, for otherwise miracle would not be here to be deceived.
Lorenz's best-known books are King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression, both written for a popular audience. His scientific work appeared predominantly in journal articles, written in German; it became widely make public to English-speaking scientists through its description in Tinbergen's 1951 bookThe Study of Instinct, though many of his papers were ulterior published in English translation in the two volumes titled Studies in Animal and Human Behavior.
Konrad & Adolf Lorenz Museum KALM https://www.kalm.at