Konrad Lorenz

Have you ever wondered how animals recognize their parents? Ever wondered how animals can perform certain actions without prior training? Well, an Austrian did!

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist and is recognized as one of the founding fathers of ethology, the science of animal behaviour. He developed the idea of an “innate releasing mechanism” to explain instinctive behaviour among animals aka “fixed action pattern”. His most notable works were on greylag geese, where he studied the phenomenon of imprinting.

Lorenz and his PhD scholars bred geese in a lab separate from the wild. The scholars would be the parents the geese would ever know. While still unhatched, they began to learn the sound of their voice and thus imprinting began. The newly hatched goslings saw only Lorenz’s students and nobody else for the first few days. The goslings learnt to follow them and consider them as their parents. Lorenz thus developed a theory of instinctive behaviour that saw behaviour patterns as largely innate but triggered through environmental stimuli.

Lorenz’s influence on a younger generation of ethologists and his popular works, were important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public. Recognizing his contributions he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch.

Aside from his notable scientific contributions Lorenz did have a controversial political carrier. He joined the Nazi party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. His publications during that period led to allegations later, that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies. Salzburg university posthumously stripped the honorary doctorate conferred upon Lorenz due to his fervent embrace of Nazism, which he had denied after world war II.