Conrad Lorenz is a Nobel laureate, a famous zoologist and zoopsychologist, 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 development of scientific knowledge. However, it is not only scientists who know and appreciate it: the books of Konrad Lorenz are able to turn the worldview of anyone, even a person far from science.
Biography
Conrad Lorenz lived a long life - when he died, he was 85 years old. Years of his life: 11/7/1903 - 02/27/1989. He was practically the same age as the century, and turned out to be not only a witness to large-scale events, but sometimes their participant. In his life there was much: world recognition and painful periods of lack of demand, membership in the Nazi party and later repentance, many years in war and captivity, students, grateful readers, a happy sixty-year marriage and a beloved affair.
Childhood
Conrad Lorenz was born in Austria in a fairly wealthy and educated family. His father was an orthopedic surgeon who came out of the rural environment, but reached the heights in the profession, universal respect and world fame. Conrad is the second child; he was born when his older brother was already almost an adult, and his parents were over forty.
He grew up in a house with a large garden and from an early age was interested in nature. So the love of life of Konrad Lorenz - animals. Parents reacted to his passion with understanding (albeit with some anxiety), and allowed him to do what he was interested in - to observe, to explore. Already in childhood, he began to keep a diary in which he recorded his observations. His nanny had a talent for breeding animals, and with her help, Conrad once received offspring from a spotted salamander. As he later wrote about this case in an autobiographical article, “this success would be enough to determine my future career.” Once Conrad noticed that the recently hatched duckling was following him, as if he was a duck mother - this was the first acquaintance with a phenomenon that later, 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, most likely, was formed in his childhood, filled with careful observations. Reading scientific works in his youth, he was disappointed that researchers did not really understand the animals and their habits. Then he realized that he was to transform the science of animals and make it what it, in his opinion, should be.
Youth
After the gymnasium, Lorenz thought to continue studying animals, but at the insistence of his father he entered the medical faculty. After his graduation, he became a laboratory assistant at the Department of Anatomy, but at the same time began to study the behavior of birds. In 1927, Konrad Lorenz was married to Margaret Gebhardt (or Gretl, as he called her), whom he had known since childhood. She also studied medical and later became an obstetrician-gynecologist. Together they will live until death, they will have two daughters and a son.
In 1928, after defending his dissertation, Lorenz received a medical degree. Continuing to work at the department (as an assistant), he began to write a dissertation on zoology, which he defended in 1933. In 1936 he became an 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 enthusiastic discussions, collaborative research, and articles from this period, what later became the science of ethology was born. However, shocks will soon come to an end, putting an end to their joint plans: after the German occupation of the Netherlands, Timbergen falls into a concentration camp in 1942, Lorenz is on the other side, which caused many years of tension between them.
Maturity
In 1938, after Austria was incorporated into Germany, Lorenz became a member of the National Socialist Workers 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. A dark spot is associated with this period in the biography of Konrad Lorenz. At that time, one of the topics he was interested in was the process of “domestication” in birds, in which they gradually lose their original properties and the complex social behavior inherent in their wild relatives, and become simpler, mostly 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, arguing in it about the problem of “domestication” of a person and what can be done about it - to bring the struggle to life, exert all your strength, get rid of inferior individuals. This text was written in line with 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 repentance.
In 1939, Lorenz heads the Department of Psychology at the University of Koenigsberg, 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 including 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 the performance of medical duties, he observed the behavior of animals and people and reflected on the subject of cognition. Thus was born his first book, “The Back of the Mirror.” Konrad Lorenz wrote it with a potassium permanganate solution on scraps of paper bags made of cement, and during the repatriation, with the permission of the head of the camp, he took the manuscript with him. This book (in a very modified form) was published only in 1973.
Returning to his homeland, Lorenz was happy to discover that none of his family had died. However, the situation was difficult: in Austria there was no work for him, and the situation was aggravated by his reputation as a supporter of Nazism. By then, Gretl had left medical practice and worked on a farm providing them with food. In 1949, work for Lorenz was found in Germany - he began to manage a research 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.
Last 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 (a scientist who discovered and deciphered the bee language of dances) received the Nobel Prize. During this period, he gives popular lectures on biology on the radio.
Conrad Lorenz died in 1989 from kidney failure.
Scientific theory
The discipline, finally formed thanks to the works of Konrad Lorenz and Nicholas Timbergen, is called ethology. This science studies the genetically determined behavior of animals (including humans) and is based on the theory of evolution and field research methods. These features of ethology largely overlap 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 (for example, behaviorists and comparative psychologists), ethologists study animals in their natural rather than artificial environment. Their analysis is based on observations and a thorough description of the behavior of animals in typical conditions, the study of congenital and acquired factors, comparative studies. Ethology proves that behavior is largely determined by genetics: in response to certain stimuli, the animal performs some stereotypic 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 Lorentz. Its essence is that the ducklings hatched from the egg (as well as other birds or newborn animals) consider their mother the first moving object that they see, and not even necessarily animate it. This affects all their subsequent relationship to this object. If the birds during the first week of life were isolated from individuals of their species, but were in the company of people, then they further prefer the human society to their relatives and even refuse to mate. Imprinting is possible only during a short period, but it is irreversible and does not fade away without further reinforcement.
Therefore, all the time while Lorenz examined ducks and geese, 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 comes out. Studying animals, Lorenz noticed that those who have great physical strength, sharp teeth and claws have developed a “morality” - a ban on aggression inside the species, but the weak ones don’t, and they can cripple or kill their relative. People are an initially weak species. In his famous book on aggression, Konrad Lorenz compares a man with a rat. He offers to conduct a thought experiment and imagine that an alien scientist is sitting somewhere on Mars, observing the life of people: “He must make 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 peaceful in a closed clan, but real devils with respect to a relative who does not belong to their own party. ” Human civilization, says Lorenz, gives us weapons, but does not teach us how to control our aggression. However, he expresses the hope that one day culture will still help us deal with this.
The book “Aggression, or the so-called evil” by Konrad Lorenz, published in 1963, still causes heated debate. His other books focus more on his love for animals and, in one way or another, try to infect others with her.
Man finds a friend
Conrad Lorenz’s book “Man Finds a Friend” was written in 1954. It is intended for the general reader - for everyone who loves animals, especially dogs, wants to find out where our friendship has come from and understand how to manage them. Lorenz talks about the relationship between people and dogs (and a little cats) from antiquity to the present day, about the origin of the breeds, describes the stories from the life of his pets. In this book, he again returns to the topic of “domestication,” this time in the form of imbrinding, the degeneration of thoroughbred dogs, and explains why mutts are often smarter.
As in all his work, with the help of this book, Lorenz wants to share his passion for animals and life in general, because, as he writes, “only love for animals is beautiful and instructive, which gives rise to love for all life and which must be the love of people. ”
Ring of King Solomon
The book “The Ring of King Solomon” was written in 1952. Like the legendary king, who according to legend knows the language of animals and birds, Lorentz understands animals and knows how to communicate with them, and he is ready to share this skill. He teaches his observation skills, the ability to peer into nature and find meaning and meaning in it: “If you drop on one scale everything that I learned from books in libraries, and on the other - the knowledge that gave me reading“ books of a running stream ", Probably the second bowl will outweigh."
Year of the gray goose
“The Year of the Gray Goose” is Konrad Lorenz’s last book, written by him several 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 his behavior is much like 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 lives of so many people are passing among the dead products of human hands, so that they have lost the ability to understand living creatures and communicate with them.”
Conclusion
Lorentz, his books, theories and ideas help to look at man and his place in nature from a different perspective. His all-consuming love of animals inspires and makes one gaze curiously at unfamiliar areas. I would like to end 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 solve the question of whether humanity will destroy itself along with all living creatures on earth or not. ”