Biography. Main scientific results and scientific views
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz - an outstanding Austrian scientist - biologist, one of the founders of ethology - the science of animal and human behavior, laureate Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine.
Konrad Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903 near Vienna, brought up in best traditions European culture. Lorenz graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, was a student of outstanding physicians and biologists, but, having received a medical degree, he did not practice medicine, but devoted himself to the study of animal behavior. Initially, he completed an internship in England under the guidance of the famous biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, and then engaged in independent research in Austria.
Lorenz began by observing the behavior of birds, determining that animals communicate knowledge to each other through learning. In the 1930s, Lorentz was already one of the leaders in biology. At this time, he collaborated with his friend, the Dutchman Tinbergen, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize in 1973 decades later.
In 1940 he became a professor at the University of Königsberg, working in a prestigious department. During the Second World War, he was mobilized by the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front. He worked as a doctor doing operations in a military hospital in Belarus. In 1944, during the retreat of the German army, Lorenz was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Armenia.
Lorenz said that in his camp the authorities did not steal, and it was possible to survive. There was not enough protein food and the "professor", as he was called in the camp, caught scorpions and, to the horror of the guards, ate them raw, throwing out their poisonous tail. The prisoners were taken to work, and while observing goats, he made a discovery: under natural conditions, the formation of conditioned reactions contributes to the preservation of the species when the conditioned stimulus is in causation with unconditional.
In 1948, Lorentz, as a forcibly mobilized German army released from captivity. In the camp, he began to write a book on the behavior of animals and humans, which was called The Reverse Side of the Mirror. He wrote with a nail on cement paper, using potassium permanganate instead of ink. The "professor" was respected by the camp authorities. He asked to take his "manuscript" with him. The state security officer gave the opportunity to reprint the book and allowed to take it with him under the assurance that there was nothing about politics in the book.
Lorenz returns to Austria to his family, soon he is invited to Germany and he heads the Institute of Physiology in Bavaria, where he gets the opportunity to lead research work.
In 1963, his book "The So-Called Evil" was published, which brought Konrad worldwide fame. In this book, he talks about aggression and its role in the formation of behaviors.
In addition to scientific research, Lorenz is engaged in literary activity His books are still popular today.
According to his scientific views, Lorentz was a consistent evolutionist, studied the behavior of gray geese for many years, discovering the phenomenon of imprinting in them, and also studied aspects aggressive behavior animals and humans. After analyzing the behavior of animals, Lorentz confirmed Z. Freud's conclusion that aggression is not only a reaction to external stimuli, and if stimuli are removed, then aggressiveness will accumulate. When aggression is caused by an external stimulus, then it can be redirected to someone else or to inanimate objects.
Lorenz concluded that heavily armed species developed strong innate morality. Conversely, a weakly armed species has a weak innate morality. Man is by nature a weakly armed species, and although with the invention of artificial weapons man became the most armed species, his morality remained at the same level.
Conscious of his responsibility, Lorenz speaks on the radio with lectures on the biological situation in modern world and publishes the book The Eight Deadly Sins of Civilized Mankind. In it, he criticizes modern capitalist society, provides answers to the controversial questions of modernity, highlighting eight main trends leading to decline: overpopulation, devastation of living space, high pace of life caused by competition, increasing intolerance for discomfort, genetic degeneration, break with traditions, indocrination and the threat of nuclear weapons.
A person adapted to survive in a small team and in the conditions of a metropolis cannot restrain his natural aggressiveness. As an example of two extremes, Lorenz observes the hospitality of people living far from cities and the explosive nervousness in the camps. The concentration of people in the city, where nature is disturbed, leads to aesthetic and ethical degradation of the inhabitant. Each person is forced to work harder than is required for survival. This process is not limited by anything, but is accompanied by a number of chronic diseases in active people. Thus, achieving the goal is associated with discomfort. Modern medicine and living conditions deprive a person of the habit of enduring.
The compassion that civilized man can express to all people weakens natural selection and leads to genetic degeneration. It should be emphasized that the "diseases" of capitalist societies exist only in combination with other problems.
Konrad Lorenz is an outstanding popularizer of science; a whole generation of biologists was brought up on his popular science books.
Notable books include:
Ring of King Solomon; Man finds a friend;
Year gray goose, Evolution and behavior change;
Aggression is the so-called "evil"; Reverse side of the mirror;
The study of human and animal behavior, the basis of ethology;
8 deadly sins of civilized mankind;
The extinction of the human.
Since the 1970s, these ideas of Lorentz have been developed in the study of the evolution of cognition. He gives a detailed presentation of his views on the problems of cognition in the book "The Reverse Side of the Mirror", where life itself is considered as a process of cognition, combining the behavior of animals and humans with the general picture of biology.
Speaking about the philosophical content of the book, Lorentz focuses on the cognitive abilities of a person. As Lorentz explains, scientific knowledge is preceded by knowledge about the world around us, about human society, and about ourselves. Human existence itself is a cognitive "cognitive" process based on "inquisitive" behavior. Behavior cannot be understood without studying the very forms of human and animal behavior. This is what ethology does - the science of the behavior of animals and humans. Each act of cognition is an interaction between the external part of the organism and the organism itself.
Lorentz believed that a person by nature from birth has the basic forms of thinking and the acquired life experience is added. "A priori knowledge", i.e. knowledge, which precedes all experience, consists of the basic ideas of logic and mathematics.
The magazine "Zerkalo" once called Kornad Lorenz "Einstein of the soul of animals", which very accurately characterizes his colossal work in this direction. The philosophical significance of Lorenz's works is not limited to epistemology. Integral part philosophy has always been reflections on the nature of man, his place in the world, the fate of mankind.
These questions worried Lorentz, and he approached their study from natural science positions, using data from the theory of behavior and the theory of knowledge - essentially new biological disciplines. Lorenz opened new ways in the study of human nature and human culture - this is an objective analysis of the relationship between instinctive and programmed urges in human behavior. His article, titled: "Kant's theory of the a priori in the light modern biology”, has become the main directive of biology.
It is interesting to note that in old age Konrad Lorenz spoke out as an environmental critic and became the leader of the "green" movement in Austria.
In our time, the conclusions of K. Lorenz are becoming more and more relevant and are a kind of foundation for their further development.
Konrad Lorenz died on February 27, 1989 in Vienna, having lived a long and bright creative life.
- Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) - an outstanding Austrian scientist, Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of ethology, the science of animal behavior. In this book, the author traces very interesting analogies in the behavior of various species of vertebrates and the species Homo sapiens, which is why the book is published in the series "Library of Foreign Psychology". Arguing that aggressiveness is an innate, instinctively determined property of all higher animals - and proving this with many convincing examples - the author concludes; “There are good reasons to consider intraspecific aggression the most serious danger that threatens humanity in the current conditions of cultural, historical and technical development.” K. Lorenz's books were published in Russian: "The Ring of King Solomon", "A Man Finds a Friend", "The Year of the Gray Goose".
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- The name of the remarkable Austrian biologist and philosopher, Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), his books about animals are known all over the world and are well known to our readers. This edition contains the works of Lorenz, in which he tries to find an answer to the most pressing problems social life, to the problems of a global nature that modern humanity faces, as well as to reveal those deep roots of human behavior and the process of human cognition that unite us with the "smaller brothers". Two of the three works of Lorentz included in the book are published in Russian for the first time. The publication is addressed to a wide range of readers.
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- The author is a modern scientist, Nobel Prize winner, one of the founders of the science of animal behavior - ethology. scientific research, awakening in the reader the desire for a deep knowledge of the world around us.
Konrad Zakharia Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903 in Vienna in the family of a successful orthopedic surgeon. He received his primary education at a private school. To continue his education, Lorenz entered the Schottengymnasium - a prestigious educational institution where he was able to reinforce his interest in zoology by learning the principles of evolution. In 1922, Lorenz, having decided to go into medicine, entered Columbia University in New York, but six months later he continued his studies already at medical faculty University of Vienna. After receiving his medical degree in 1928, Lorenz began working on a dissertation in zoology. At the same time, he served as an assistant in the department of anatomy and managed to read a lecture course on the comparative behavior of animals. Lorentz throughout his life experienced, by his own admission, "passionate love for animals", which resulted in one of Lorentz's first discoveries - the phenomenon of imprinting (imprinting), which is special form learning that is observed in the early stages of animal life. For newborn ducklings, for example, the first object that comes into their field of vision acts as a certain attractive symbol, which they are ready to follow, not realizing the role and purpose of this object. Until the beginning of the 30s. 20th century in views on the nature of instincts, two main paradigms prevailed - vitalism and behaviorism. For vitalists, the behavior of animals in the natural environment was determined by the rather abstract concept of “wisdom of nature” or by the same factors as human behavior. According to behaviorists, who usually studied the behavior of animals in experiments in the laboratory, the behavior of animals depends entirely on reflexes, and not on instincts. Lorentz, who at first shared the views of behaviorists, through his own research came to the conclusion that it is the instinctive behavior of animals that is intrinsically motivated. In 1936, Lorentz deduced the following rule: instincts are caused not by reflexes, but by internal impulses. At a symposium in Leiden, Lorenz met the Dutchman Nicholas Tinbergen, with whom they began to work together. Their fruitful collaboration resulted in the hypothesis that the instinctive behavior of animals is derived from internal motives that prompt the search for environmental, or social, stimuli. Their hypothesis about the so-called orienting behavior also contains the following definition: as soon as the animal encounters some “key stimuli”, the role of which can be performed by certain signal stimuli, it automatically performs a stereotyped set of movements (the so-called FDP - a fixed motor pattern). Each animal species has its own system of FDP and signal stimuli associated with it. In 1937, Lorentz lectured on animal psychology in Vienna, and in 1940 he received a position at the Department of Psychology at the University of Königsberg. At this time, he studied the process of domestication of the goose, which suggested the loss of the goose skills acquired in the struggle for survival in the natural environment, the increasing role of food and sexual stimuli. Generalizing, Lorenz came to the conclusion that such manifestations could well occur in humans, the result of which was an article, by Lorenz's own admission, using "the worst examples of Nazi terminology." This article gave reason to reproach Lorenz with collaboration with the Nazis, although, most likely, it was the result of political short-sightedness. He stopped working with Tinbergen as a result of the latter's arrest by the Nazis. Lorenz himself was drafted into the army, in 1942 he was taken prisoner and worked in a hospital for prisoners of war until 1948. Upon his return to Austria, Lorenz could not get any official position, but he tried to continue his research, using the material support of friends. So, in 1950, together with Eric von Holst, he managed to found the Max Planck Institute for the Physiology of Behavior. Lorenz is the founder of ethology as the science of "biology of behavior" - the general biological foundations and patterns of animal behavior. Until his death, Lorentz was engaged in ethological research, and he paid special attention to the study of the behavior of waterfowl. Despite his officially recognized status as an expert in the field of ethology, for some of the theories, Lorenz was subjected to well-founded criticism. His most famous work is a book called "The So-Called Evil", published in 1963. Here, Lorentz defines aggressive behavior as an element inherent in all living beings and having a deep natural basis. According to Lorenz, the instinct of aggression is extremely important, since it contributes to the implementation of almost all functions in the animal world, including the establishment of a social hierarchy, maintaining control over a certain territory, etc. This book might have been much less criticized if Lorenz had not extended his conclusions, intended exclusively for the animal kingdom, to human behavior. Lorenz even attempted to make recommendations for mitigating hostility in human society and preventing wars. These "quasi-scientific" recommendations caused a stormy public outcry, expressed in endless discussions, ongoing, by the way, to this day, about the nature of aggressiveness. However, according to the opinion expressed by Erich Fromm in his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, who analyzed the work So-Called Evil quite deeply, Lorentz's recommendations are "either trivial or simply naive." In 1973, Konrad Lorenz, together with Nicholas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Moreover, the main achievement of Lorenz was considered that he “observed behavior patterns that, apparently, could not be acquired through training and had to be interpreted as genetically programmed.” Lorentz contributed in no small measure to the realization of the fact that behavior in to a large extent determined by genetic factors and subject to natural selection. However, it is impossible to dispute the fact that some of Lorentz's generalizations about human nature and human behavior seem to be rather controversial. In 1973, Konrad Lorenz retired from the Max Planck Institute, but despite this, he continued to do research at the Department of Animal Sociology at the Institute for Comparative Ethology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Altenberg. The scientist died in 1989. The merits of Konrad Lorenz to world science are truly invaluable: during his lifetime he was awarded many awards and distinctions, among which gold medal New York Zoological Society, presented in 1955, Vienna Prize for scientific achievements, awarded by the Vienna City Council in 1959, the Kalinga Prize, awarded by UNESCO in 1970. Lorenz was also elected a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the American National Academy of Sciences.
LORENZ Konrad
(1903-1989) - Austrian biologist and zoopsychologist, one of the founders of ethology. Graduated from Vienna University ( MD, 1928; doc. degree in zoology, 1933). One of the founders of Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, which became the leading publication on ethology (1937). In 1950, together with E. von Holst, he founded the Institute of Physiology of Behavior in Germany, which became one of the main ethological scientific centers. In 1961 - 1973 was its director. After his resignation, L. returned to Austria and headed the department at the Institute for the Comparative Study of Behavior of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and since 1982 - Konrad-Lorenz-Institut tier Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Together with N. Tinbergen, he founded ethology as a science, developed ethological approaches to human psychology and to the analysis of sociocultural problems and dangers that modern technological civilization poses to humanity. Being one of the founders of evolutionary epistemology (a very influential trend in modern philosophy of knowledge), he did a lot of psychology cognitive activity. The ethological theory of L., created in the 1930s, in a number of points resembles the psychoanalysis of 3. Freud, although when it was created, he treated Freud's ideas sharply negatively and only later recognized the significant similarity of their views in the section on the theory of motivation. In the 1950s L. modified his ethological concept, ceasing to divide behavior into innate and acquired, but insisted on the existence of characteristics of behavior, fixed genetically and not capable of adaptive change as a result of learning. He argued that learning is based on complex genetic programs, and that human behavior is also based on innate genetic programs that are much more complex than in animals, and that the presence of these programs provides the ability to cultural development. The main results of L.'s research in the field of learning mechanisms, psychology, and evolutionary epistemology in the 1940s and 1960s. contained in his book back side mirrors (Die Ruckseite des Spiegels, Munchen, 1973). The main thesis of L. is that the innate forms of perception and thinking, which Kant called a priori, and the entire human cognitive apparatus as a whole are the product of evolution through natural selection, and that consideration of the features of this evolution is necessary to understand the principles of functioning of this apparatus and the process of cognition. According to L., a number of cognitive functions, genetically fixed in the course of evolution, are prerequisites for linguistic abilities and symbolic thinking. A special place was occupied by L. analysis of the aggressive command, to which he dedicated the book The So-Called Evil (Das Sogenannte Bosc, Wicn, 1963), which caused a heated debate that has not subsided so far. Having outlined in it ethological ideas about the innate mechanisms of aggressive behavior in animals, minimizing the likelihood of physical harm, L. further argues that aggressive behavior in humans also has an innate basis, has spontaneity and actively seeks its way out if it has not manifested itself for a long time, and therefore it cannot be excluded only by education and change of external conditions. It shows that aggressive behavior and its motivation are included in all other subsystems of behavior, including those associated with creativity, research activity, love and friendship. Troubles associated with aggression, L. explains the failure of innate mechanisms developed in the course of anthropogenesis, when a person began to quickly change the conditions of his existence (the invention of weapons, drastic changes in social organization, the emergence of mass ideologies, etc.). L. believes that the most effective means of controlling aggressive behavior is the conscious use of the mechanisms developed biological evolution, which translate aggression into a safe and even useful channel (redirection of aggressive behavior, its sublimation and cultural ritualization by analogy with biological). Later, L. continued to develop the theme of the contradiction between the natural constitution of man, which determines the innate laws of his behavior, and the conditions generated by technical civilization, devoting many articles and two books to this: sins of civilized mankind / Questions of Philosophy, 1992, No. 3) and Der Abbau des Menschlichen, 1983 (The Decline of the Human). However, L. hoped that humanity will cope with these problems due to the innate ability to sense values, regardless of whether they are associated with genetically programmed or cultural norms of behavior. Being a devout Darwinist, L. nevertheless assumed that our innate sense of beauty, harmony and goodness are not only the result of natural selection, since they also have an independent non-utilitarian value. In Russian per. also published: Ring of King Solomon, M., 1970, 2002; Man finds a friend, M., 1971, 1992, 2001; Aggression (the so-called evil), 2001. EL. Gorokhovskaya
Konrad Lorenz photography
Konrad Lorenz received his primary education at a private school.
Then Konrad entered the prestigious Schottengymnasium gymnasium. Then Lorenz became a student at the medical faculty of the University of Vienna.
Having received a medical degree, Lorenz did not engage in medical practice, but devoted himself to ethology - the science of the behavior of animals and humans as a biological being, or rather, became the founder of this discipline.
While writing his dissertation, Konrad Lorenz systematized the features of the instinctive behavior of animals.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, there were two perspectives on instinct in biology: vitalism and behaviorism. Vitalists explained the rational behavior of animals by the wisdom of nature and believed that the instincts of animals are based on the same factors as human behavior. Behaviorists tried to explain everything by reflexes - conditional and unconditional. Often their conclusions came into conflict with the very concept of instinct as a complex set of innate, but not acquired reactions.
In the twenties, Konrad Lorenz was trained in England under the guidance of the famous biologist Julian Huxley.
After returning to Austria, Lorenz completed a joint work with the famous ornithologist Oskar Heinroth.
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Even in his youth, Lorenz discovered that animals are able to transfer knowledge acquired through training to each other. This phenomenon was called imprinting (imprinting).
In the thirties, Lorentz became a leader in the science of instincts. At first, leaning towards behaviorism, he tried to explain instinct as a chain of reflexes. But after collecting the evidence, Lorenz came to the conclusion that instincts have intrinsic motivation. In particular, Lorenz showed that in the so-called territorial animals, the social instinct is opposed by another, to which he gives the name "the instinct of intraspecific aggression." The behavior of animals occupying a certain hunting area is determined by the dynamic balance between the instinct of intraspecific aggression and any of the attracting instincts: sexual or social. Lorentz showed that from the combination and interaction of these instincts, the highest emotions of animals and humans were formed: recognition of each other, limitation of aggression, friendship and love.
After the absorption of Austria by Nazi Germany, Lorentz was left without a job, but then he receives an invitation to the Department of Psychology at the University of Königsberg.
Two years later, Lorenz was mobilized into the army as a military doctor, where, despite the lack of medical practice, he even performs surgical operations - in the field and in a military hospital in Belarus.
In 1944, during the retreat German army Konrad Lorenz was taken prisoner and ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Armenia. Lorenz made up for the lack of protein food by eating scorpions - only their tail is poisonous, so the abdomen can be eaten even without special treatment.
Watching the semi-wild goats of the Armenian Highlands, Lorentz noticed how, at the very first distant peals of thunder, they search for suitable caves in the rocks, preparing for a possible rain. They do the same when explosive work is being carried out nearby. Konrad Lorenz came to the conclusion that "under natural conditions, the formation of conditioned reactions only contributes to the preservation of the species when the conditioned stimulus is in a causal relationship with the unconditioned."
In 1948, Konrad Lorenz, among the Austrians who were forcibly mobilized into the Nazi army, was released from captivity. In the camp, he began writing the book The Other Side of the Mirror: An Experience in the Natural History of Human Knowledge. The final version of this book was published in 1973.
In 1950, Konrad Lorenz, together with Erik von Holst, created the Institute of Physiology in Bavaria, where he continued his observations, focusing mainly on the study of the behavior of waterfowl.
In 1963, the book "The So-Called Evil: On the Nature of Aggression" was published, which brought Lorenz worldwide fame. In this book, the scientist spoke about intraspecific aggression and its role in the formation of higher forms of behavior.
At the end of the sixties, Lorentz returned to Austria, at the invitation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which organized for him the Institute for the Comparative Study of Behavior.
Somewhat later, Konrad Lorenz's book "The Eight Sins of Modern Humanity" was published, which he considered overpopulation, the devastation of living space, running a race with oneself, the heat death of feelings, genetic degeneration, a break with tradition, indoctrination and nuclear weapons.
In the book The Other Side of the Mirror, Konrad Lorenz presented evolution as the formation of new regulatory circuits. A linear sequence of processes acting on each other in a certain order is closed in a loop, and the last process begins to act on the first - a new one arises. Feedback. It is she who causes a leap in evolution, creating qualitatively new properties of a living system. Lorenz called this surge a fulguration (from the Latin term for a thunderbolt). The application of this approach led to the formation of a new science: theoretical biology.
In 1973, Konrad Lorenz, together with Nicolas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries related to the creation and establishment of models of individual and group behavior of animals."
November marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Konrad Lorenz, and 40 years ago Lorentz, Karl von Frisch and Nicholas Tinbergen were awarded the Nobel Prize "for discoveries related to the creation and establishment of models of individual and group behavior of animals."
Since ancient times, the psyche and behavior of animals have been of interest to philosophers and naturalists, but their systematic, purposeful study began at the end of the 19th century with the advent of zoopsychology. In the 30s of the twentieth century, a new direction arose in this area, which, thanks to the works of the Austrian Konrad Lorenz and the Dutchman Nicholas Tinbergen, gradually took shape in an independent science - ethology (from the Greek "ethos" - behavior, character, disposition). The term existed before, but ethology in the modern sense originates from these works.
But after all, zoopsychology already existed, in the formation and development of which many classics contributed: Darwin, Fabre, V.A. Wagner and others. Why was it necessary to create a new science of the behavior of our smaller brothers? What is the difference between ethology and animal psychology?
Zoopsychology (it is no coincidence that the term is used in English comparative psychology, comparative psychology) has historically considered animal behavior in terms of what was known about human psychology. This does not mean that zoopsychologists were sliding into anthropomorphism: at the turn of the century, Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) formulated a rule named after him, the “Occam’s razor” of behavioral science: do not explain the actions of animals involving higher psychological functions in cases where low enough. For example, one cannot claim that an animal "thought of it" to solve a problem if it could use trial and error. However, Lorentz and his associates chose a different path: to understand the behavior of an animal through what we know about the animal, about its biology and, of course, evolutionary history.
Excessive love for animals
The Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz was born in Altenberg near Vienna on November 7, 1903. He was the younger of two sons of Emma Lorenz née Lecher and Adolf Lorenz. Lorenz's grandfather was directly related to animals - he was a master in the manufacture of horse harnesses. The father of the future scientist, having become a successful orthopedic surgeon, built an estate in Altenberg.
As a child, wandering through the fields and swamps around Lorenz Hall, Conrad "fell ill" with what he later called "an excessive love of animals". Soon the boy collected a wonderful collection of animals, not only domestic, but also wild. “From a neighbor,” Lorenz later recalled, “I took a one-day-old duckling and, to great joy, found that he had developed a reaction to follow my person everywhere. At the same time, an indestructible interest in waterfowl woke up in me, and as a child I became an expert in the behavior of its various representatives.
Having received elementary education in a private school run by his aunt, Lorenz entered the gymnasium at the Scottish monastery in Vienna. The gymnasium was Catholic, but representatives of other denominations and religions could also study there, and the level of teaching was very high. Interestingly, Karl von Frisch, who later received the Nobel Prize along with Lorentz and Tinbergen, studied at the same gymnasium for studying communication in bees. There, Conrad's habit of observing animals was reinforced by training in zoological methods and the principles of evolution. Lorenz, in his "Nobel" autobiography, recalls one of the teachers - Philip Heberdey, a Benedictine monk and aquarist who taught boys not only zoology, but also Darwin's theory. After graduating from high school, Lorenz wanted to continue studying zoology and paleontology, but his father insisted on medicine.
In 1922, Lorenz entered Columbia University in New York, but six months later he returned to Austria and began to study at the medical faculty of the University of Vienna. After graduating from the course, Lorenz remained at the university as a laboratory assistant in the anatomy department and worked on a dissertation in medicine, while simultaneously conducting systematic studies of the instinctive behavior of animals.
In the 20th century, the leading scientists-biologists stood on the positions of Darwinism, not only because evolutionism won the position of the dominant scientific paradigm. Darwinism provided the researcher with a methodological advantage in the study of natural phenomena. Having completed an internship in England in the 1920s under the guidance of Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley (Huxley) - the famous associate of Charles Darwin and the founder of a dynasty of scientists and writers - Lorenz became an expert not only on Darwinism, but also on the English language and literature. Independent studies of animal behavior following his teacher, the famous ornithologist Oskar Heinroth, he began with observations of birds.
In 1927, Conrad married Margarethe (Gretl) Gebhardt, whom he had been friends with since childhood; it was a marriage for life. The couple had two daughters and a son.
After defending his dissertation and receiving a medical degree in 1928, the scientist moved to the post of assistant, but he was still interested in ethology, so he began work on a dissertation in zoology, while teaching a course on comparative animal behavior. In his research, Lorentz was the first to successfully apply the comparative method to behavior patterns - he began to compare the same behaviors in different species. Recall that the comparative method was classical in animal anatomy, but was practically not used in the study of behavior.
spirit or machine
The most important concepts of physiology nervous system and the related sciences of animal and human behavior at the beginning of the 20th century were “reflex” and “reflex activity”, introduced by Descartes (1596–1650).
Rene Descartes, or Cartesius, from the Latin spelling of the surname, was a mathematician, philosopher, physicist, physiologist, creator of analytic geometry and modern algebraic symbolism, author of the method of radical doubt in philosophy and mechanism in physics. Cartesius, in the spirit of his time, compared any living organism with complex mechanical devices, such as clocks. According to Descartes, a reflex is a mechanical response of the body to external influences that does not require the intervention of the soul.
In 1654, the English anatomist Glisson introduced the concept of "irritability" as a property of living bodies. In 1730, English explorer Stephen Gales discovered that a decapitated frog would withdraw its leg when pricked. From this moment, an experimental study of reflex activity begins, in which the response occurs without the participation of the will of the subject, following a certain pattern exactly after the irritation. In the middle of the 18th century, the Swiss scientist Albrecht von Haller developed the doctrine of irritability and sensitivity, making them the basis of his physiology. By the way, he also introduced the term "physiology" to refer to the science that was called "living anatomy" before him. German physiologist Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832–1920) established the first laboratory in 1879 experimental psychology, where he conducted the first experiments on rats in labyrinths and on chimpanzees reaching high-hanging bananas. English scientist Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932, received jointly with Edgar D. Adrian, studying reflex activity, laid the foundations of neurophysiology.
By the beginning of the 20th century, two opposing points of view were established in the science of animal behavior: vitalism and behaviorism. Vitalism, or the doctrine of vitality (from lat. vita- life; vis vitalis - life force), has by no means disappeared from the scientific arena, contrary to the hasty claims of reductionists, mechanists and vulgar materialists. “Have you succeeded in synthesizing substances formed during the life of organisms? And what does this prove? the vitalists argued. - After all, the Homunculus has not yet been created! It is impossible to overcome the line between living and non-living matter by creating the living from the non-living, therefore, it is too early to put the theory of vitalism in the archive. Instinctivist vitalists observed the complex behavior of animals in their natural habitat and admired the biological expediency and precision of instincts (lat. instinctus- motivation) of animals - everything that since ancient times was customary to explain the vague concept of "wisdom of nature". Sometimes the behavior of animals was attributed to motivation by the same factors that underlie human activity. Obviously, such explanations could not satisfy serious researchers.
Behaviorism arose as a counterbalance to vitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. John Brodes Watson (1878-1958) and Barrus Frederick Skinner (1904-1990) are considered its founders. In essence, the behaviorists developed the Cartesian view of the animal as a machine. They sought to make zoopsychology an exact science, to decompose the continuous flow of behavior into the simplest, objectively observable "stimulus-response" elements, and achieved significant success in laboratory experiments. It was also important that they identified behavior (that is, the totality of the body's reactions to the external environment) as the central object of psychological research.
At first, behaviorists tried to avoid talking about the concept of "instinct", considering it abstract, indefinite and beyond scientific research. Later they declared the instincts to be complexes of unconditioned reflexes developed in the process historical development organisms, as one of the forms of adaptation to conditions environment. Behaviorists explained the behavior of animals by chains of reflex reactions linked together through classical conditioning, that is, the development of conditioned reflexes, studied by I.P. Pavlov (1849–1936).
The study of animal behavior in the twentieth century proceeded, so to speak, from opposite directions. Some scientists began the study of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes, and then proceeded to instincts and insights. (Insight is a complex but very attractive phenomenon for psychologists - a sudden, intuitive finding of a solution to a problem; it would be impossible to fruitfully study the phenomenon of insight within the rigid framework of behaviorism at the beginning of the century.) Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, as well as Watson and Skinner, moved towards the truth in such an inductive way.
Konrad Lorenz and Nicholas Tinbergen entered the history of science as the authors of an alternative - deductive - approach to the study of behavior, which led them to create a new science - ethology.
Innate response to an external stimulus
Lorentz initially read Watson's work with interest. But both Watson and behaviorist opponent William McDougall, who introduced the concept of " social Psychology”And to explain human behavior, he attracted not only instincts, but also“ vital energy ”,“ did not know animals, ”as Lorenz himself put it in his autobiography. They did not have that deep understanding of the habits of animals and birds, which the enthusiastic naturalist was looking for and which he later met with Heinroth. They seemed to ignore all the variety of behavioral forms that can be observed in the natural environment.
Behaviorists believed that a living being comes into the world as a "blank slate". Watson’s statement became textbook: “Give me a dozen healthy babies ... and I guarantee that, choosing one at random, I will prepare him for any specialty - a doctor, lawyer, artist, businessman, and even a beggar or a thief ...” Lorenz came to the belief that instinctive behavior is intrinsically motivated. It has become important first step towards the study of the genetic component of animal behavior. In relation to animals, interspecific variability is especially important - innate actions characteristic of a species, what Lorentz called "morphology of behavior."
Of course, this does not mean that the influence of the environment is not important. Already in his youth, raising domestic ducks, the future Nobel Prize winner discovered imprinting (imprinting) - a specific form of learning observed in the early stages of animal life, with the help of which they recognize each other and establish connections with their own kind. Thanks to imprinting, little ducklings remember the first large moving object that came into their field of vision (for example, Konrad Lorenz), in the future they consider it their mother and follow it everywhere. The phenomenon of imprinting has been known to practicing poultry farmers since antiquity, there was not only a scientific term and an appropriate theory.
In the first chapter of the book The Eight Deadly Sins of Civilized Mankind (1973), Lorenz speaks of the goals and objectives of his science: “Ethology considers the behavior of animals and humans as a function of a system that owes its existence and its form to the historical course of its formation, reflected in the history of the species, in the development of the individual and, in man, in the history of culture. A distinctive characteristic of ethology was the use of field methods in the study, in particular, the obtaining of ethograms with the help of filming, fixing the key moments of animal behavior.
If before Lorentz and Tinbergen, scientists studied mainly the effect on animal behavior external factors in artificially created conditions, the Austrian and Dutch researchers shifted their focus towards the influence of internal factors on the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They described behaviors that could not be acquired through training and therefore were genetically programmed. The founders of ethology proved that behavior is highly determined by genetics and therefore must be subject to the action of natural selection and other evolutionary genetic factors (mutations, migrations, genetic drift, assortative crossing).
According to Lorentz himself, his acquaintance with the young physiologist Erich von Holst forced him to completely abandon the idea of a complex behavioral act as a chain of reflexes. And in 1936, at a symposium in Leiden, the fateful meeting of Lorentz and Tinbergen took place. The scientists discovered an incredible similarity in their views, and so began their friendship and cooperation, the result of which was a joint scientific article, and most importantly, the final version of the theory published by Lorenz in 1939.
Lorenz argued that instinctive behavior begins with internal motives that cause the animal to seek a specific set of environmental stimuli. This behavior is often highly variable. Once an animal encounters certain "key" stimuli (signals or triggers), it automatically performs a stereotypical set of movements called a fixed motor pattern or "hereditary coordinations" ( fixed action pattern). Each animal has a distinctive system of such patterns and associated cues that are species specific and evolve in response to the demands of natural selection.
Under the influence of various key stimulants that turn off the inhibitory mechanism in the brain, a complex set of instinctive reactions is activated. These stimuli can be sounds, smells, and morphological features- the shape and color of, for example, a potential marriage partner.
In addition to instincts, animals are endowed with communicative means by which they exchange information, learn, develop new forms of behavior and respond more flexibly to environmental changes. Animals, like people, have a psyche, although more elementary. They resemble hyper-emotional people. Before Lorenz, scientists tried to anthropomorphically interpret the psyche of animals. Lorentz began to explain the mind of animals on the basis of objective data about their behavior.
dark time
In Austria in the mid-1930s, reactionary clerics were in power, and scientists who appealed to Darwinism were persona non grata. Lorentz held the position of Privatdozent at the University of Vienna, gave lectures on behavior for free, and did not have a permanent income. At the same time, he studied the changes that occur during the domestication of geese. He noted in them the loss of complex forms of behavior, the increase in the role of food and sexual stimuli. The founder of ethology was deeply concerned about the possibility that the process of "self-domestication" could take place in humans. Do not the comfortable conditions that civilized people have created for themselves lead to degradation, not only physical, but also mental and behavioral?
Like many Austrians, Lorenz expected a change for the better from the annexation of Austria to Germany in March 1938. Soon after the Anschluss, he joined the National Socialist Workers' Party, and at the beginning of World War II, under the influence of public sentiment, fascist propaganda, and following someone's "bad advice", Lorentz published an article about the dangers of the domestication process in relation to humans, using "in his writing the worst examples of Nazi terminology." Alas, it was said there both about "selection" and about the potential danger of crossing two races, which the author likened to crossing breeds in animals. Reflections on the degradation of mankind and eugenic ideas were widespread at that time, and no one could foresee how bad they would look after a practical attempt to divide people into higher and lower races. Later, the scientist repented and condemned his act.
There is an opinion that the reactionary article drew attention to the author, as a result of which he received an invitation to head the department of psychology at the University of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) - the prestigious department of Kant. Membership in the Kantian society, communication with philosophers was very fruitful for Lorentz. The evolutionist view of the theory of knowledge did not attract the attention of the humanities, but interested Max Planck himself. Together with Rupert Riedl and Gerhard Vollmer, Konrad Lorenz is considered the main exponent of evolutionary epistemology.
In 1942, Lorenz was drafted into the German army as a military doctor, despite the fact that he had never practiced medicine. His military service began in the specialty "psychiatry and neurology" in a hospital stationed first in Poland, in Poznan, later near Vitebsk (Belarus), where he had to perform the duties of a field surgeon for about a month. It is known that in the Poznan hospital at that time "studies" of Polish-German half-bloods were carried out, including on the subject of their mental usefulness, and Lorenz, apparently, took part in them, albeit in a low position; he never commented on it himself.
In May 1944, during the retreat of German troops, Lorenz was captured. Fate threw the future Nobel Prize winner into a prisoner-of-war camp near Kirov, where he led a department with 600 beds for a whole year; he learned to speak Russian and communicated freely with Russians, "chiefly doctors". Then there were other camps; Lorenz spent about a year and a half in Armenia, near Yerevan. In captivity, the “professor,” as everyone called him, wrote a book. In the absence of notebooks, he wrote on pieces of cement bags, a nail served him as a pen, a solution of potassium permanganate as ink. The name, "The reverse side of the mirror," was suggested by a fellow prisoner, a certain Zimmer. When publishing, the author also prefaced it with a subtitle: "Experience in the natural history of human knowledge." The book has been translated into Russian, and if one of the readers of Chemistry and Life is not familiar with it, we recommend that you read it.
When the time came for the repatriation of the Austrians drafted into the Nazi army, the "professors" were transferred to a camp in Krasnogorsk near Moscow, allowed to retype the manuscript and sent to the censor. The answer was delayed, and then the head of the camp made an extraordinary act: calling the scientist into the office, asked him to give his word of honor that there was only science in the manuscript and no politics, shook his hand and allowed him to take the handwritten text (as well as tamed starling and lark). The typewritten manuscript of the book, titled The Natural Science of the Human Species: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Behavior, remained in Russia and is now in the State Military Archives. It is interesting that it is quite different from the handwritten version that formed the basis of the book - extensive fragments have been replaced, the wording has been significantly changed (Gorokhovskaya E.A. "Questions of the history of natural science and technology" 2002, 3, 529–559).
After the war
Lorenz returned home in 1948. Scientific career in Austria did not work out, I had to move to Germany. Erich von Holst set up a research station for Lorenz and his colleagues at Buldern near Münster under the auspices of the Max Planck Society. Later, when the Institute for the Physiology of Behavior in Seewiesen was founded, Lorenz headed a department in it and was deputy director - von Holst, and after his death in 1962 he headed the institute.
Lorentz continued ethological research and, in addition, became famous as an outstanding popularizer of science. His books "King Solomon's Ring" (1952), "A Man Finds a Friend" (1954), "The Year of the Gray Goose" (1979) were a huge success with readers in many countries, including the USSR. His other books were not published until the 1990s. The author's "Nazi past" also had an effect, as well as a wary attitude towards science, which claims that not everything in behavior is determined by upbringing. However, our famous physiologist, a specialist in higher nervous activity animals L.V. Krushinsky was familiar with the works of Lorenz and corresponded with him.
In 1963, So-Called Evil: Toward a Natural History of Aggression was published. The debate about it continues to this day. In this book, Lorentz argued that aggression in humans, as in animals, is innate reaction and has intrinsic motivation. However, civilization, having provided man with a variety of tools for killing and torturing fellow species, could not or did not have time to give him the appropriate ability to extinguish and redirect aggression. A man is better armed than a wolf, and in terms of the ability to control emotions is comparable to other primates, we are reaping the consequences of this. Lorentz, however, expressed the conviction that culture will help us bridge the gap between the ability to harm and self-control.
Having comprehended from the position of ethology the experience gained on both sides of the front, Lorentz also wrote about the "reaction of enthusiasm." It is useful to quote this fragment - it will never lose its relevance. “Across the back and - as it turns out on closer observation - a “sacred awe” runs along the outer surface of the hands. Man feels himself to have emerged from all the bonds of the everyday world and risen above them; he is ready to give up everything to obey the call of the Sacred Duty. All obstacles that stand in the way of the fulfillment of this duty lose all importance; instinctive prohibitions to maim and kill relatives are lost, unfortunately, most of his strength."
A specialist in "behavior morphology", Lorenz notes the similarity of the heroic facial expressions and posture of a person obsessed with a Sacred Duty with the reactions of a male chimpanzee protecting his family - up to the "goosebumps" that raise the hair to make the silhouette seem larger and more menacing. “If our courageous stand up for what seems to us the highest value flows along the same neural pathways as the social defense reactions of our anthropoid ancestors, I take this not as a sobering reminder, but as an extremely serious call to self-knowledge. A person who does not have such a reaction is a cripple in the sense of instincts, and I would not like to have him as my friend; but he who is carried away by the blind reflexivity of this reaction is a threat to humanity.” It seems that these lines atone for the sin of his pro-Nazi publications.
For a long time it was believed that ethologists' research was not directly related to physiology and medicine, but later it turned out that discoveries made on animals help to better understand the complex human psyche. These arguments probably played a role in the decision of the Nobel Committee.
In 1973, Lorenz retired from the Institute of Behavioral Physiology, but returned to Austria and continued his research work at the Institute for Comparative Ethology. He settled again in Altenberg.
Among the awards and honors awarded to Lorenz are the gold medal of the New York Zoological Society (1955), the Vienna Prize for Scientific Achievement awarded by the Vienna City Council (1959), the Kalinga Prize awarded by UNESCO (1970). He was also a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and the American National Academy of Sciences.
Konrad Lorenz died on February 27, 1989. His last book, published in 1988, was called “Here I am - where are you? Accurate ethological description wild goose". "Where are you? - I'm here! - Are you here? - I'm here!" - so translated into human language goose cackle Selma Lagerlöf in her famous fairy tale, and Lorenz has repeatedly noted that the translation is absolutely correct.