Lorenz Konrad: biography, books, quotes, photos

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Konrad Lorenz - Nobel Prize winner, famous zoologist and animal psychologist, writer, popularizer of science, one of the founders of a new discipline - ethology. He devoted almost his entire life to the study of animals, and his observations, conjectures and theories changed the course of scientific knowledge. However, not only scientists know and appreciate him: Konrad Lorenz's books can turn the worldview of anyone, even a person far from science.

Biography

Konrad Lorenz lived a long life - when he died, he was 85 years old. The years of his life: 1903-07-11 - 1989-27-02. He was practically the same age as the century, and turned out to be not only a witness to large-scale events, but sometimes also a participant in them. There was a lot in his life: world recognition and painful periods of lack of demand, membership in the Nazi Party and later repentance, many years in the war and in captivity, students, grateful readers, a happy sixty-year-oldmarriage and love.

Childhood

Konrad Lorenz was born in Austria into a fairly we althy and educated family. His father was an orthopedic doctor who came from a rural environment, but reached heights in the profession, universal respect and world fame. Konrad is the second child; he was born when his older brother was almost an adult, and his parents were in their forties.

He grew up in a house with a large garden and was interested in nature from an early age. This is how the love of Konrad Lorenz's life appeared - animals. His parents reacted to his passion with understanding (albeit with some anxiety), and allowed him to do what he was interested in - to observe, explore. Already in childhood, he began to keep a diary in which he recorded his observations. His nurse had a talent for breeding animals, and with her help Conrad once had offspring from a spotted salamander. As he later wrote about this incident in an autobiographical article, “this success would have been enough to determine my future career.” One day, Konrad noticed that a newly hatched duckling was following him like a duck mother - this was the first acquaintance with a phenomenon that later, already as a serious scientist, he would study and call imprinting.

A feature of the scientific method of Konrad Lorenz was an attentive attitude to the real life of animals, which, apparently, was formed in his childhood, filled with attentive observations. Reading scientific works in his youth, he was disappointed that researchers did not really understandanimals and their habits. Then he realized that he had to transform animal science and make it what he thought it should be.

Youth

After high school, Lorenz thought to continue studying animals, but at the insistence of his father, he entered the Faculty of Medicine. After graduation, he became a laboratory assistant in the department of anatomy, but at the same time began to study the behavior of birds. In 1927, Konrad Lorenz married Margaret Gebhardt (or Gretl, as he called her), whom he had known since childhood. She also studied medicine and later became an obstetrician-gynecologist. Together they will live until their death, they will have two daughters and a son.

In 1928, after defending his dissertation, Lorenz received his medical degree. Continuing to work at the department (as an assistant), he began to write a thesis in zoology, which he defended in 1933. In 1936 he became assistant professor at the Zoological Institute, and in the same year he met the Dutchman Nicholas Timbergen, who became his friend and colleague. From their passionate discussions, joint research and articles of this period, what would later become the science of ethology was born. However, soon there will be upheavals that put an end to their joint plans: after the occupation of Holland by the Germans, Timbergen ends up in a concentration camp in 1942, while Lorenz finds himself on the other side, which caused many years of tension between them.

Maturity

In 1938, after the incorporation of Austria into Germany, Lorenz became a member of the National Socialistlabor party. He believed that the new government would have a beneficial effect on the situation in his country, on the state of science and society. This period is associated with a dark spot in the biography of Konrad Lorenz. At that time, one of his topics of interest was the process of "domestication" in birds, in which they gradually lose their original properties and complex social behavior inherent in their wild relatives, and become simpler, mainly interested in food and mating. Lorentz saw in this phenomenon the danger of degradation and degeneration and drew parallels with how civilization affects a person. He writes an article about this, discussing in it the problem of “domestication” of a person and what can be done about it - to bring struggle into life, to strain all one’s strength, to get rid of inferior individuals. This text was written in line with the Nazi ideology and contained the appropriate terminology - since then, Lorenz has been accompanied by accusations of “adherence to the ideology of Nazism”, despite his public remorse.

In 1939, Lorenz headed the Department of Psychology at the University of Königsberg, and in 1941 he was recruited into the army. At first he ended up in the department of neurology and psychiatry, but after some time he was mobilized to the front as a doctor. He had to become, among other things, a field surgeon, although before that he had no experience in medical practice.

In 1944, Lorenz was captured by the Soviet Union, from which he returned only in 1948. There, in his spare time from performing medical duties, he observed the behavior of animals and people and reflected on the topic of knowledge. So was bornhis first book, The Other Side of a Mirror. Konrad Lorenz wrote it with a solution of potassium permanganate on scraps of cement paper bags, and during the repatriation, with the permission of the head of the camp, he took the manuscript with him. This book (in a heavily modified form) was only published in 1973.

Returning to his homeland, Lorenz was happy to find that none of his family had died. However, the situation in life was difficult: there was no work for him in Austria, and the situation was aggravated by his reputation as a supporter of Nazism. By that time, Gretl had left her medical practice and was working on a farm providing them with food. In 1949, a job was found for Lorenz in Germany - he began to lead a scientific station, which soon became part of the Max-Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, and in 1962 he headed the entire institute. During these years, he writes books that brought him fame.

Recent years

In 1973, Lorenz returned to Austria and worked there at the Institute of Comparative Ethology. In the same year, he, together with Nicholas Timbergen and Karl von Frisch (the scientist who discovered and deciphered the bee dance language), received the Nobel Prize. During this period, he gives popular radio lectures on biology.

Konrad Lorenz died in 1989 of kidney failure.

Scientific theory

The discipline finally shaped by the work of Konrad Lorenz and Nicholas Timbergen is called ethology. This science studies geneticallydeterministic behavior of animals (including humans) and is based on the theory of evolution and field research methods. These features of ethology largely intersect with the scientific predispositions inherent in Lorentz: he met Darwin's theory of evolution at the age of ten and was a consistent Darwinist all his life, and the importance of directly studying the real life of animals was obvious to him from childhood.

Unlike scientists working in laboratories (such as behaviorists and comparative psychologists), ethologists study animals in their natural, not artificial, environment. Their analysis is based on observations and a thorough description of the behavior of animals under typical conditions, the study of congenital and acquired factors, and comparative studies. Ethology proves that behavior is largely determined by genetics: in response to certain stimuli, an animal performs some stereotyped actions characteristic of its entire species (the so-called “fixed motor pattern”).

Imprinting

However, this does not mean that the environment does not play any role, which demonstrates the phenomenon of imprinting discovered by Lorenz. Its essence lies in the fact that ducklings hatched from an egg (as well as other birds or newborn animals) consider their mother the first moving object that they see, and not even necessarily animate. This affects all their subsequent relationship to this object. If during the first week of life the birds were isolated from individuals of their own species, but were in the company of people, then in the future they prefer the company of a person.their relatives and even refuse to mate. Imprinting is possible only during a brief period, but it is irreversible and does not fade away without further reinforcement.

So all the time Lorenz was exploring the ducks and geese, the birds followed him.

Aggression

Another famous concept of Konrad Lorenz is his theory of aggression. He believed that aggression is innate and has internal causes. If you remove external stimuli, then it does not disappear, but accumulates and sooner or later will come out. Studying animals, Lorenz noticed that those of them who have great physical strength, sharp teeth and claws, have developed “morality” - a ban on aggression within the species, while the weak do not have this, and they are able to cripple or kill their relative. Humans are inherently a weak species. In his famous book on aggression, Konrad Lorenz compares man to a rat. He proposes to conduct a thought experiment and imagine that somewhere on Mars there is an alien scientist observing the life of people: “He must draw the inevitable conclusion that the situation with human society is almost the same as with the society of rats, which are just as social and peace-loving within a closed clan, but real devils in relation to a kindred who does not belong to their own party.” Human civilization, says Lorenz, gives us weapons, but does not teach us to control our aggression. However, he expresses hope that one day culture will still help us cope with this.

The book “Aggression, or the so-called evil” by Konrad Lorenz, published in 1963,is still hotly debated. His other books focus more on his love for animals and try to infect others in one way or another.

Man finds a friend

Konrad Lorenz's book A Man Finds a Friend was written in 1954. It is intended for the general reader - for anyone who loves animals, especially dogs, wants to know where our friendship came from and understand how to deal with them. Lorenz talks about the relationship between people and dogs (and a little - cats) from antiquity to the present day, about the origin of breeds, describes stories from the life of his pets. In this book, he returns to the theme of "domestication" again, this time in the form of inbringing - the degeneration of purebred dogs, and explains why mongrels are often smarter.

As in all his work, with the help of this book, Lorenz wants to share with us his passion for animals and life in general, because, as he writes, “only that love for animals is beautiful and instructive, which gives rise to love for every life and which should be based on love for people.”

King Solomon's Ring

The book "King Solomon's Ring" was written in 1952. Like the legendary king, who according to legend knows the language of animals and birds, Lorenz understands animals and knows how to communicate with them, and he is ready to share this skill. He teaches his powers of observation, the ability to peer into nature and find meaning and meaning in it: “If you throw on one scale everything that I learned from books in libraries, and on the other - the knowledge that reading “the book of a running stream gave me”, probably the second cupoutweigh.”

Year of the Gray Goose

“The Year of the Gray Goose” is the last book by Konrad Lorenz, written by him a few years before his death, in 1984. She talks about a research station that studies the behavior of geese in their natural environment. Explaining why the gray goose was chosen as the object of study, Lorenz said that its behavior is in many ways similar to the behavior of a person in family life.

He advocates the importance of understanding wild animals so that we can understand ourselves. But “in our time, too much of humanity is alienated from nature. The daily life of so many people passes among the dead products of human hands, so that they have lost the ability to understand living creatures and communicate with them.”

Conclusion

Lorenz, his books, theories and ideas help to look at man and his place in nature from the other side. His all-consuming love for animals inspires and makes him look with curiosity into unfamiliar areas. I would like to finish with another quote from Konrad Lorenz: “Trying to restore the lost connection between people and other living organisms living on our planet is a very important, very worthy task. Ultimately, the success or failure of such attempts will decide whether humanity will destroy itself along with all living creatures on earth or not.”