Jackdaws
(Corvus monedula), widespread crows
throughout Ireland, make delightful pets.
A school friend of mine in Dublin, Sean Farrell, kept one for a few
months back in the late 1970s when we were both in our early teens. The bird had broken its wing and Sean nursed
it back to health. The jackdaw was a
noisy fellow and had his species' penchant for shiny things. Sometime later I was happy to read that
Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), the Austrian ethologist, published a behavioral study
of a colony of Jackdaws that he maintained and included an account of the birds
in his charming book King Solomon’s Ring. King
Solomon’s Ring, (the title is taken from the legend that Solomon had a ring
that allowed him to talk to the animals), was a popularization of the emerging science
of ethology, that is, the biological study of behaviour, and was perhaps the first
book that confirmed to me that there was a to make a living out of what I
happened to like to do.
I
progressed from the lighter but nonetheless delightful accounts of animal
behavior in King Solomon’s Ring and in
Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists
to the greater heft of Lorenz’s classic On
Aggression (1966) which I read as a zoology undergrad at University College
Dublin in the 1980s. In this book,
published later in his career when he was in his sixties, Lorenz shared his
mature analysis of how insights from the study of the instinctual behaviour of
animals can be helpful in thinking about the human condition. As we shall see, as a good Darwinian he regarded
human conduct as revealing much about our essentially animal nature, but unlike
other animals we posses, he argued, a characteristic of being able to overcome
this legacy. In fact, he deemed it
critical to our species survival that we simultaneously evaluate the evolution
of aggressiveness in a clear-headed way while we find cultural solutions to
discharging these unavoidable tendencies in a harmless way. More harmless than war, that is. Lorenz had lived through a war and he was
committed to helping humanity avoid another one on that scale.
Before
looking at the details of Lorenz’s analysis of human nature (in the post to follow
this one) a word or two about the science of ethology which emerged as biological
subdiscipline in the 20th Century under Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s
influence. Together with Karl von
Frisch, who worked out the details on the so-called “waggle-dance” of honeybees
that allowed the hive to share information on the location of a food source,
Lorenz and Tinbergen shared the Nobel Prize (in medicine) in 1973. A primary task of ethology was to place
questions about the behaviour of animals in an evolutionary context. How does the behavior function to increase
the success of the animal; what are the triggers for the expression of that
behavior, how does the behavior develop in the life of that individual; and,
finally, what was the pattern in the evolutionary development of the behavior?[1],[2] Some regarded it as a strength of the discipline
that it simultaneously asked questions about the adaptive nature of the
behavior, the mechanism by which the behavior is displayed, and how functions in
the ecology of the organism. Critics, however, saw in this the danger that teleological
thinking could creep into the analysis: the assumption that behavior developed
to the point of ever increasing perfection as the behavior reached a
preordained goal.
One
of Lorenz’s early contributions to the development of the discipline was his
discovery of imprinting, where, in one of the earliest observations of it, a
newly hatched flock of Graylag goose goslings would follow the first organism
they were introduced to after hatching, including Lorenz himself. Oftentimes, Lorenz was pictured ambling in
front of his little brood of goslings. As
the birds grew they could apparently have confused species identities, even at
times attempting to mate with people. Imprinting
can come in a variety of forms in different circumstances – sexual imprinting
which determine that appropriate potential mate is distinct from filial
imprinting where goslings follow their parent or parent surrogate, although the
two can be connected. Elements of
imprinting appear to be at play in the processes whereby birds learn their song. Another Lorenzian proposal concerns the
accumulation of energy directed at a specific energy – his hydraulic model of
behavioral motivation. He called this “action
specific energy”. Each behavior has its
own associated internal force and the behavior is regulated by an innate
releasing mechanism. As the force builds,
ultimately it is discharged in response to the appropriate sign stimulus. In places Lorenz discussed the “unexpected
correspondences” between his understanding of motivation and that emerging from
Freudian psychoanalysis.
Between
the Dutch-born Niko Tinbergen and the Austrian Konrad Lorenz the discipline of
ethology developed as an influential evolutionary account of animal behaviour during
the middle years of the 20th Century. By all accounts these men, who rarely met in
person, developed a synergetic research program that was highly influential not
only because both men were persuasive advocates of their discipline, but also
because they did not shy away from translating their insights from the study of
birds and fishes into prescriptions about our human predicament. During the cold-war years, where fears of
nuclear annihilation and environmental destruction were mounting ethology
pronounced on those aspects of behavior that were hard-wired and those that
could be redirected. Despite the eminence
and appeal of the discipline, ethology has largely disappeared, at least in its
classical form (the theoretical constructs of Tinbergen and Lorenz are sometimes
dubbed “classical ethology”). The
reasons for the demise are summarized below.
I remark on them, not just because it is an interesting case study in
the process whereby an academic discipline recedes from power, but because it
serves to remind us that the clout that accompanies disciplines instructing us
on the best path forward need to be tempered by humility and some caution is needed in regarding their
findings.
***
Some
species go extinct when their entire population diminishes to zero and they are
supplanted by a new species; others disappear from the record when the
population simple evolves into a new species over time. Although ethology lingers as a discipline, to
a large extent ethology as a discipline was eclipsed and absorbed by other
developments in behavioral disciplines.
Ethology, it seems, conforms to the second extinction pattern.
In
1975 E. O. Wilson published his groundbreaking and controversial book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis which drew upon ethological insights. However, sociobiology defined questions about
the emergence of social behavior in a way that relied more on population
biology rather than on the methods of ethology. Wilson predicted that ethology would simply be
subsumed by behavioral ecology, neurophysiology, and psychology. Shortly afterwards Richard Dawkins, a student
of Tinbergen’s, published The Selfish
Gene (1976) which popularized the gene-centric approach to understanding
social behavior that had been developing among evolutionary biologists since
the 1960s. Though Dawkins defined
himself as an ethologist in The Selfish
Gene nevertheless he had some pointed criticisms of the evolutionary
approach of the early ethologists. “The
trouble with these books [the books of Lorenz and some other ethologists]”,
Dawkins fulminated, “is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong
because they misunderstood how evolution works”. Wrong because in attempting to locate an
adaptive explanation for a behavior ethologists looked to that behavior’s
species preserving function, rather that asking how it increased individual
fitness, or fitness at the level of the gene.
Lorenz, for example, when querying the role of aggression between individual
of the same species enumerated a number of ways in which “intra-specific
aggression assists the preservation of an animal species.”
A
yet more recent outgrowth of ethology, evolutionary psychology continues some
of the research program inaugurated by both ethology and sociobiology. A major emphasis in evolutionary psychology and
building upon foundational books by Donald Symons The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) and The Adapted Mind by husband and wife team John Tooby and Leda Cosmides
(1992) are questions concerning the influence of pre-historic environments of
the evolution of the human mind.
Finally,
behavioral ecology reinvigorated the evolutionary focus of classical ethology
and true to its ethological roots examines a wide range of organisms, often in
the wild. This is in contrast to
evolutionary psychology, for instance, that is primarily concerned with the
human animal. Behavioral ecology has its
own questions on habitat selection, foraging behavior, group behavior, reproductive
and life history strategies, and so forth that are distinct from its
ethological antecedents. John Krebs, an influential
behavioral ecologist was also one of Tinbergen’s students.[3]
It
is clear that the ethology of Lorenz and Tinbergen got absorbed into a number
of derivate disciplines. Part of this
seems like ordinary academic development.
For example, my academic training is as a zoologist. These days zoology departments have become
rarer, and those who can claim to be zoologists oftentimes identify by their specialty:
ecologist, physiologist and so forth.
However, some of the reasons for the decline of ethology may relate to
broader politics. There has always been
a level of discomfort over Lorenz’s relationship with the Third Reich and this
may have tarnished the reputation of ethology (see an interesting comment on
this from Michael Ruse). Certainly when
I become aware of this when I was in college, I found my infatuation with
Lorenz waned rather quickly, though I still regarded his findings to be relevant and
interesting.
The
facts are these: Lorenz applied to join the Nazi in June of 1938 shortly after
the Anschluss, Gemany’s annexing of Austria in March 1938. Furthermore, he claimed at the time that his
work was compatible with the aims of National Socialism.[4] In
his writing at that time he stressed some points of convergence between his work
and Nazi ideology. It appears that
Lorenz’s enthusiasm was rewarded. In
1940 he was appointed as professor at Königsberg University (the professorial chair
that had been Immanuel Kant’s). From
1942–44 he was a physician in the German army, serving in Poland. His work at that time included efforts to psychologically
distinguish Poles from Germans.[5] [6] At the time of receiving the Nobel Prize in
1973 Lorenz apologetically claimed that he had been naïve about the regime and
had cooperated in order to maintain his career. For Tinbergen, who had been interned in the
Netherlands by the Nazis in 1942, Lorenz’s apologies were enough, and they
continued to collaborate after the war. For
some this was not apology enough. However,
questions about the political implications of ethology and its descendents
continue to be raised. Dawkins, for
instance, addressed what might seem like “disagreeable social, political or
economic implications of The Selfish Gene” in prefaces to more recent reissues of his book.
Although the cruder versions of all of
these disciplines seems to open to charges of determinism, it is a change that
is resisted forcefully by most behavioral scientists.
Whether
or not ethology has declined or has been transformed into a set of new
disciplines its influence has been undeniable.
One of its distinctive qualities was the degree to which its founders
devoted themselves to issues of environmental protection. Late in his life Lorenz was supportive of the
Austrian Green Party. In his writing a
significant concern was that we apply an understanding of animal behavior to humans
in an effort to solve our environmental problems. This can be done, he and Tinbergen imagined, by
recognizing what in humans is instinctive and what could be culturally modified.
If these days we no longer maintain
quite as crisp a distinction between what seemed fixed and what seemed flexible in human behavior, nonetheless their
work provides us with a significant model of the human as being both part of
nature, and in some ways set apart from the rest of nature. The details of this model I’ll address in my
next post.
[1]
Tinbergen, N. 1963. “On aims and methods of ethology.” Zeitschrift für
Tierpsychologie 20:410-433.
[2]
Tinbergen, N On War and Peace in Animals
and Man Science, Volume 160, Issue 3835,
pp. 1411-1418. 1968.
[3]
For an excellent introduction to the themes, methods, and results of this
discipline see Nicholas B. Davies and John R. Krebs An Introduction to Behavioural
Ecology. Wiley-Blackwell (original edition 1981)
[4]
A good account of Lorenz’s politics and his behavior during WWII is provided by
Richard W. Burkhardt's Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and
the Founding of Ethology (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[5]
Reader's Guide to the History of Science, s.v. "Lorenz, Konrad
1903-1989," accessed July 05, 2012,
[6]
The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. "Lorenz, Konrad
Zacharias (1903–1989), accessed July 05, 2012,
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