Konrad Lorenz: The Man the Goslings Followed
A line of greylag goslings paddling in single file behind a bearded Austrian in wading boots is among the twentieth century's defining scientific images. Lorenz had shown that a newly hatched bird bonds to the first moving thing it encounters, and that instinct could be dissected with the rigour an anatomist brings to bone. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and wrote that his scientific work was devoted to National Socialist ideas — a fact that has shadowed the achievement ever since.
Early Life
Lorenz was born in Vienna on 7 November 1903, the son of Adolf Lorenz, a celebrated orthopaedic surgeon, and Emma Lecher, herself a physician. The family divided its time between a Vienna apartment and an estate at Altenberg on the Danube, and it was the estate — with its ponds, birds and unpoliced hours — that shaped him. He kept animals from childhood and never really stopped. Among his boyhood friends was Karl Popper, who would go on to reshape the philosophy of science while Lorenz reshaped the study of behaviour.
Education
He was schooled at the Schottengymnasium, the Benedictine institution in Vienna, then sent to Columbia University in New York for a premedical programme in 1922–23. He returned to the University of Vienna and took his MD in 1928, working from that year until 1935 as an assistant professor at the Institute of Anatomy. A doctorate in zoology followed in 1933. The medical training mattered: Lorenz approached behaviour as a comparative anatomist would approach a limb, looking for homologies across species and reading them as evidence of descent.
Imprinting and the Birth of Ethology
His foundational contribution concerned nidifugous birds — species whose young leave the nest almost immediately after hatching. Lorenz established that such chicks form an instant and largely irreversible attachment to the first moving object they meet, normally the mother but, in his experiments, a human in wading boots. His account remains the foundational description of imprinting.
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The Nazi Years
In 1938 Lorenz joined the Nazi Party. He wrote at the time: "I'm able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists." His publications of the period lent support to the regime's doctrine of racial hygiene. In 1940 he was appointed professor of psychology at the University of Königsberg, and while in occupied Poznań he took part in racial studies on so-called German-Polish half-breeds. For years afterwards he denied party membership, until documentation surfaced proving it, and he maintained that he had known nothing of the genocide.
Prison and Return
Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941 as a military psychologist, Lorenz was captured and spent four years, from 1944 to 1948, as a Soviet prisoner of war in Armenia. He came back to an Austria in ruins and to a career that had to be rebuilt from the estate at Altenberg. It was rebuilt quickly. In 1950 the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology was established at Buldern with Lorenz at its centre, moving to Seewiesen in 1958. He retired in 1973 but continued research at Altenberg until the end of his life.
Books for the World
Few scientists of his rank wrote as well for general readers. *King Solomon's Ring* (1949) presented animal behaviour as a set of stories about jackdaws, geese and fish, and made Lorenz internationally famous. *On Aggression* (1966) advanced the far more contentious thesis that aggression is an instinct with adaptive function, in humans as in other animals — a book fiercely disputed and enormously influential. *Behind the Mirror* (1973) turned to the evolution of human knowledge, and *Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins* (1974) to what he saw as the pathologies of modern life.
His view of instinct's grip on history was unsentimental. An observer of pure reason, he wrote, "devoid of instincts himself... would be at a complete loss how to explain history at all."
Recognition and Reckoning
The Royal Society elected him a Foreign Member in 1964. The Kalinga Prize came in 1969, and in 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch — the only time the prize has gone to the study of animal behaviour. He died at Altenberg on 27 February 1989, aged eighty-five, survived by his wife Margarethe Gebhardt, a gynaecologist, and their three children.
The reckoning came after. In 2015 the University of Salzburg revoked the honorary doctorate it had awarded him in 1983, citing his National Socialist assertions and his promotion of racist ideology.
Why Lorenz Matters
Before Lorenz, animal behaviour was mostly anecdote or laboratory conditioning. He made it a field with its own concepts, methods and evolutionary logic, and everything from modern behavioural ecology to attachment theory in human psychology carries his imprint. He is also a permanent test case for the question of whether a scientist's work can be separated from his politics. Salzburg's decision in 2015 was one answer; the fact that ethology remains his discipline is another.
