Konrad Lorenz and Nazism

In 1973 Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.  In the awards ceremony Professor Börje Cronholm of the Royal Karolinska Institute identified ethology, behavioral physiology in his words, as an important new science.  In addition to its significance for the understanding of lower organisms, insects, birds and so on, Cronholm noted that ethology had had a far-reaching influence on “social medicine, psychiatry, and psychosomatic medicine”.  Ethology, he said will provide us with “new approaches to the human mind, human behavior and human disbehavior.”  Not only had ethology the distinction of being a new discipline, this new discipline could be brought to bear on an understanding of the human condition.  If it were not for the potential for an anthropic shift – that moment when an expert switches from ants, geese, or other organism and opines on the human condition – it would have been unlikely that ethology would have had won a Nobel Prize.[1][2] 

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), an Austrian, was perhaps the least reluctant of the first generation of ethologists to dare the anthropic shift, translating insights derived from behavioral observations of other animals to humans.  His enthusiasm for the task had some pronounced political implications and his involvement with and contribution to the ideology of National Socialism trailed him for the latter half of his career. 

After the Anschluss, the unification of Austria and German in March 1938, a political union which Lorenz gustily welcomed in letters to several colleagues, he hastened to illustrate the usefulness of ethology in assessing human behavior.  In a paper published in 1940 he hypothesized that both the domestication of animals and, by analogy, of people living in civilized conditions, especially in large cities, sported deficiencies compared with wild types of those species.[3]  People, Lorenz argued, instinctively disincline from the domesticated versions of most species, finding them uglier.  Since the direction in which “big-city humanity” was moving was towards more not less domestication, with all the adherent ugliness and pathology that Lorenz predicted in this, one solution, he argued, was for “the preservation and care of our people of the highest hereditary goodness.”  

Rats “R” Us: the Rat-Human comparison in the work of Konrad Lorenz

An unbiased observer from another planet reflecting on human behavior from a perch close enough to capture the broad strokes of human conduct, but far enough away not to sweat the details of our separate behaviors would conclude that we are rats.  Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian co-founder of classical ethology (the evolutionary study of animal behavior), concluded this in his classic 1966 account of aggression in animals including humans called On Aggression.  The extraterrestrial would surmise this based upon the observations that both rats and humans are “social and peaceful beings within their clans, but veritable devils towards all fellow-members of their species not belonging to their own communities.”[1] Our Martian would have more optimism about the future of rats than humans, says Lorenz, since rats stop reproducing when a state-of overcrowding is reached.  We do not.

The comparison of rats to humans is a provocation, one assumes.  Presumably the unflattering parallel was contrived to collar us and press us into remedial action on those aspects of our social behavior considered by Lorenz to be malfunctioning.  At the same time, objective scientist as Lorenz saw himself as being, there had to be something more than invidious comparison at work in the twinning of rat and man.  There must be some ethological meat on these insalubrious bones.  Brown rats, like men, rely on the transmission of experience to other members of the community.  That is, rats learn, rats have culture.  Additionally, and most significantly rats, oftentimes models of cordiality towards their neighbors can “change into horrible brutes as soon as the encounter members of any other society of their own species”.[2] On these counts – rats as startling comparison, rats as cultured, rats as murderers – rats can stand in for humans in speculations about nationalism, war, and other dangerous aspects of human behavior.  Rats have the additional advantage of not directly objecting to being experimented upon.

The Anthropic Shift – Learning to be Human from Geese and Fishes and Rats

There is a special moment in many works on animal behavior where the author switches from their account of chimps, bees, fishes, geese, rats or another favored organism and tells us what it means to be human.  I call this the anthropic shift.  The behavior of the human animal need not be an area of particular expertise for the author; the switch is presumed to be validated by the evolutionary continuity of humans with other animals.

Animals will have both generic similarities with their evolutionary relatives as well as having attributes that are specific to them alone. Not all behaviors will therefore have direct homologues in species-to-species comparisons.  Humans don’t, for instance, have a direct equivalent to the waggle-dance that bees use to share foraging information with hive-members, nevertheless, since humans also forage and share information symbolically, insight into waggling can be, not implausibly, regarded as useful in speculating about the evolutionary roots of certain human behaviors.  In addition to such general comparisons, studies on animal homologues of quite specific human behaviors are often of particular interest.  The specifics of human mating systems and family structure have been analyzed comparatively with that of related species, chimps, baboons, and macaques for instance. It is in the light of an anthropic shift from apes and monkeys to humans that debates about the “naturalness” of human family arrangements are often assessed, though often irresolvably.  

One of the distinctions of classical ethological research was that its practitioners took the behavior of a wide range of vertebrates very seriously on their own terms (see here for more on classical ethology).   Though it may have been the case that the work was motivated in part by the prospect of an anthropic shift to human behavioral situations, it is nonetheless clear in the work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the disciplinary founders of ethology, that they were naturalists of an evolutionary bent first and foremost.  The anthropic shift in ethology was armed with years’ worth of cross-species research on specific behavioral processes.  Since their work oftentimes focused on species at some genetic remove from humans, the application to our own predicament is fairly coarse-grained in terms of the behavioral category, e.g. aggressive drives, learning, communication and so on.   That it not to say that their recommendations on the amelioration of less delightful human behaviors, war, for example, is not quite specific, merely that a strength of ethology emerged from its examining a general behavior in the context of its evolution development in a broad range of species.

Spat out of Nature by Nature: Konrad Lorenz and the Rise and Fall of Ethology

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 20^th 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.