All of this contradicted the then prevailing notion that animals, including humans, are born blank slates. Instead, Mother Nature's handwriting seems all over them. Lorenz's insistence that we pay attention to the natural context of behavior, its innate character, its function, and its evolution was new and exciting, producing what has rightfully been called "a blast of fresh air and intellectual vigor into a blinkered laboratory setting." 8
Behind the Mirror
A charismatic, colossal Austrian with a big beard and a thick accent when he spoke English, Konrad Lorenz dominated scientific conferences with his mesmeric lecture style, boyish humor, inimitable animal imitations, affability, and approachability. Many ethologists with reservations about his scientific contributions nevertheless remember hire as larger than life, a charming, irresistible father figure. One can imagine how his followers worshipped him.59
He wrote in a manner that everyone could relate to. Being the chief engine behind the popularization of ethology, he related the behavior of animals to that of people in freely moving, engaging prose rich in anecdotes, metaphors, and philo sophical asides. He called behavior "the liveliest aspect of all that lives," and made sure that no one was bored when he had their ear.
Philosophy was from the beginning part of his work. This is perhaps not so surprising for a man who, born in 1903, grew up in Vienna playing cowboy with Karl Popper, later to become one of this century's foremost philosophers of science. Before World War II, Lorenz occupied Immanuel Kant's chair of psychology at Konigsberg, in Germany. Lorenz became interested in the Kantian concept of the a priori: the built-in way in which the human mind organizes reality. In his very first book, he explored the possibility that what Kant saw as two parallel universes-the world outside and the a priori blueprint in the mind-were actually connected. What if a priori schemata were a product of evolution, a set of instructions for the human mind to sift through the huge amounts of information it encounters?
This splendid idea fits well with current thinking, such as the neo-Chomskian concept of inborn templates for language acquisition. Linguistic information enters a prepared mind that sorts it into the right boxes. Children absorb this information at impressive speed, but-as with the imprinting of young birds-there exists an optimal age. After this age the ability is sharply reduced, and it becomes nearly impossible to attain native levels of language proficiency.
Lorenz was far ahead of his time. His ideas about the "back side of the mirror" (his metaphor for a priori knowledge) were already developed between 1944 and 1948, in a camp in Armenia. As a prisoner of war, he wrote everything down on hundreds of cut-up pieces of cement sack under the most trying circumstances, often with frozen fingers and an empty stomach. The text was lost for a long time, but fortunately surfaced again. Wrapped in a newspaper, it had been hidden in one of the far corners of his library. His daughter posthumously published "the Russian manuscript" in 1992.60
But how did Lorenz end up in a prison camp?
The Dark Side
Initially, Lorenz could not get employment due to the dominant influence of the Catholic Church in Austria, which strongly opposed evolutionary views. Without a salary, he worked on fish and birds in the same house, in Altenberg near Vienna, where he had been born to a prominent family. His father was a famous orthopedist who introduced procedures that are still in common use.
Already in the late 1930s, during the rise of Nazism, it became clear that Lorenz looked with admiration at the new situation in Germany, and that he made friends with scientists with similar "brown" sympathies, such as zoologist Otto Koehler. This connection probably helped him get a job in Germany. In 1940, Lorenz accepted a position in comparative psychology at Konigsberg, which he owed Koehler. There were outcries of protest against his appointment, not for politi cal reasons, but because he was a biologist entering a psychology department.
Until 1996, when Ute Deichmann published Biologists under Hitler, I had known these facts only vaguely. Now the evidence was succinctly reviewed by someone unwilling to pull any punches. It went well beyond what I had expected.
Like many people today, Lorenz believed he lived in a period of moral decline. He saw parallels with animal domestication, a comparison that became a staple of his writings on the subject. Liberated from the harsh selection forces of nature, domesticated animals tend to lose adaptive traits; they become unfit for survival on their own. Similarly, Lorenz believed, human civilization supports more and more "degenerative types," which multiply freely because of "their larger reproductive rates and their coarser competitive methods towards the fellow members of the species." He argued that in the same way that one cannot remove a cancer from the body without drastic measures, race-hygienic (rassenhygienische) defense mechanisms are required to eradicate asocial elements from society. Like the Nazis, he emphasized the population as a whole-the common people, or this Volk-which he compared with a body.
Let me illustrate the disturbing tone of his statements:61
Just as healthy tissue generally treats tumor as identical ... the healthy volkish body often does not "notice" how it is being pervaded by elements of decay.
Any attempt to reconstruct elements that have fallen out of their relationship with the whole is hopeless. Fortunately, their elimination is easier for the people's doctor [Volksarzt] and much less dangerous for the supra-individual organism than the operation of a surgeon is for the individual body. The great technical difficulty lies in recognizing them.
The racial idea as the foundation of our form of government has already accomplished a very great deal.
Our species-specific feeling for the beauty and ugliness of the fellow members of our species is most intimately related to the manifestations of decay that are caused by domestication and threaten our race. One can see in this feeling almost a distinction of species-preserving importance for the elimination of such manifestations of decay.
Between 1940 and 1943, Lorenz repeatedly called for a deliberate, scientific race policy in order to improve Volk and race through the elimination of defective and inferior elements. What Skinner later would propose to achieve through brainwashing, Lorenz felt required harsh selection procedures. Two years after the introduction of the yellow star, he urged people to "beware of those who are marked." Theodora Kalikow, who studied the relation between Lorenz's writing and Nazi ideology, concluded that there was mutual stimulation between the two, "a process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby Nazis lent political power to ideas which were already part of Lorenz's world view... which may help explain Lorenz's increasing emphasis on animal and human degeneration after 1938. Lorenz's `scientific evangelism' may have moved him to try to explain and justify Nazi racial policies ethologically." 6'Z
This interpretation is perhaps far-fetched, as it remains unclear that Lorenz's ideas carried much weight in Nazi circles. There is also no evidence that Nazi ideology affected Lorenz's theories about animals in any way. But it is true that Lorenz volunteered dangerous opinions cloaked in scientific jargon. Moreover, he acted upon his sympathies. Almost as soon as it was possible to do so after Austria's Anschluss, he joined the National Socialist party and obtained a permit from the party's Office of Race Policy to give lectures. In 1941 he was drafted into military service. Stationed as a military psychologist in Posen, he became involved in research on the deleterious effects of interbreeding. The study concerned hundreds of offspring from mixed Polish-German marriages: did these hybrids (Mischlinge) lack in noble German traits, such as an aptitude for hard work? The ultimate goal was to evaluate people's psychological "worthiness," ranking them on a four-point scale. Those on the bottom were to be deported.
Lorenz was only marginally involved in this gruesome enterprise, however. While Deichmann concludes that his involvement casts doubt upon later claims that he had known nothing about Nazi intentions,63 it must be noted that he had nothing to do with the planning of these projects, spent most of his time at another post in a military hospital, and was mentioned
in publications only as an honorary (as opposed to central) member of the research team.64
In 1944 Lorenz was transferred as medical officer to the Soviet Union. In the same year, he fell into Russian captivity. In 1948, well after the war was over, he returned to Austria with two hand-raised birds-a lark and a starling-as well as his mammoth manuscript.
After the War
It is impossible to fairly judge a man's character during a tumultuous period in history that one hasn't experienced firsthand. Only the arrogant think that they would have been heroes, doing the right thing, all others realize the frailty of the human spirit under trying circumstances.
Lorenz's opinions, moreover, were typical of racist attitudes of psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists at the beginning of the twentieth century.65 Talk of superior and inferior types was common, often accompanied by drawings purportedly showing how people considered inferior were close to monkeys. But whereas it is one thing to express opinions like these as a theoretical exercise, in the Germany of the late 1930s things were rapidly moving from theory to praxis. In this political climate, Lorenz did not need to write about the removal of parasitic elements from the population. He did not need to become a member of the party. There may have been pressures to conform, but there was no obligation for scientists to publicly legitimize Nazi race policies. We cannot blame Lorenz for believing in his theory of human degeneration, but one wonders how he could have been blind to its application, or potential application, in this charged atmosphere.66
Even if we buy the excuse that Lorenz didn't know until after the war what the Nazis had been up to, the fact remains that he made no effort to correct his earlier views once he knew the full story. Instead, he maintained until his death that he had been too busy with his research to pay much attention to what went on during the war. In an interview on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday, in 1988, he stated: "In fact, I always avoided all politics because I was absorbed with my concerns. I also shirked a confrontation with the Nazis in a very disgraceful way, I simply did not have the time for it.... I reproach myself for it." 67
Niko Tinbergen
One can hardly imagine a starker contrast with Lorenz than his Dutch counterpart, Nikolaas Tinbergen, who was a few years younger. The personalities, scientific methods, and war experiences of the cofounders of ethology differed enormously.
Tinbergen conducted experiments to test evolutionary by potheses. He was particularly interested in behavior as an adaptation to the environment. For example, he wondered why birds remove eggshells after their chicks have hatched. They take off with an empty shell in their bill, and then drop it away from the nest. Do they make this effort because chicks hurt themselves at the sharp edges of shells? Or is it because eggs are camouflage-colored on the outside but not the inside (which is exposed in the shells)? The second function was confirmed: predators, such as crows, find eggs much more readily if an experimenter has placed empty shells next to them. The parent birds themselves do not need to learn this costly lesson: eggshell removal is an automatic response favored by natural selection because birds that do it have more surviving offspring than birds that do not.
With his interest in adaptation, elegant tests to compare alternative explanations, and emphasis on statistical evaluation, Tinhergen pioneered the modern scientific approach to animal behavior. He was a more systematic and careful scientist than Lorenz, who was more of an animal-loving visionary. Reading current issues of Animal Behaviour, the foremost journal in my field, it is easy to recognize Tinbergen's lasting legacy.
Walking between the two giants of ethology as a young student, Robert Hinde-himself later to become a highly respected ethologist-listened in on a conversation. At issue was how often one needs to have witnessed a particular behavior in a species before one can claim it to be typical. Lorenz ventured that five times would do, whereupon Tinbergen slapped him on the shoulder, laughing "But sure, Konrad, you have never hesitated to describe things that you've seen only once." Lorenz could not deny it.
Hinde found that this little exchange captured in a nutshell the difference between these two men.68 The one had a descriptive approach, and was a wonderful teller of animal stories, whereas the other was an experimentalist who wanted to see many observations with all sorts of controls before he would claim to have found something. Lorenz himself generously characterized their relationship as follows: "If ever two research workers depended on each other and helped each other, it is the two of us. I am a good observer, but a miserable experimenter and Niko Tinbergen is ... the past master of putting very simple questions to nature, forcing her to give equally simple and unambiguous answers." 69
Even if many now believe Tinbergen to have been the better scientist, for a young science to grow and develop one needs all kinds. Lorenz and Tinbergen not only complemented each other in many ways; they stimulated and needed each other, even though it must have been emotionally difficult for Tinbergen, who refused to speak German after the war, to pick up their relationship where they had left off. Tinbergen had spent two years in a hostage camp in the Netherlands because he was part of a group of professors at the University of Leiden who had resigned their positions in protest against German efforts to "cleanse" the faculty. Nevertheless, from postwar correspondence it is clear that Tinbergen made a conscious effort to bring back to life the collaboration and exchange that ethology needed in order to survive. It is doubtful that at the time he knew the full magni tude of Lorenz's Nazi sympathies, but he decided that "through the bonds of personal friendship I hope to persuade them [ethologists, including Germans] to agree to a new start towards international cooperation."%°
Between Science and Ideology
Exoneration by influential scientists, such as Tinbergen, goes a long way toward explaining the rehabilitation of Lorenz. His past never became a major issue in ethological circles, even though it was often referred to in passing.7' The most outspoken resistance concerned not Lorenz's support of race policies, but a theoretical point he made over and over in the course of his career: the concept of species preservation (Arterhaltung).
Lorenz believed that animals behave in certain ways for the sake of their species. For example, they restrain aggressive impulses because otherwise they might drive their species into extinction. This whole idea went out the window with the rise of sociobiology in the 1970s. Sociobiologists firmly opted for the individual as the unit of selection, seeing selection at the group level as a rather limited phenomenon. Individuals who care only about themselves will outcompete individuals who care for their group. This doesn't mean that the group is unimportant, but rather that it is important only insofar as it serves its members. Selection at the species level was not even seriously considered: there doesn't seem to be any reason why animals should care about their species.
The now outdated concept of species preservation is along the same lines as Lorenz's insistence, during the war years, that the individual is insignificant compared to the people (Lorenz literally said "Race and Volk are everything to us, the individual almost nothing"). By stressing the health and purity of this Volk, he placed the welfare of the whole above that of its parts. Such an outlook does have moral implications. A German anthropologist and primatologist, the late Christian Vogel, openly criticized this line of thought, warning against the value judgment implicit in the equation of "adaptive" with "good." If the definition of "good" refers to the condition of the population-as advocated by Lorenz-there is great risk that the moral rights of individuals, especially those who don't conform, will be trampled.
In this respect, sociobiology parted ways in no uncertain terms with Lorenzian ethology. Those who, in the 1970s, denounced sociobiology as a fascist theory got it all wrong. They were blinded by the possible link between biology and human behavior, and the dangers they felt this link represented. Sensitivity in this regard is fully understandable, yet fascist ideology is quite different. It stresses the supraindividual level, whereas sociobiology focuses
on much smaller units, mostly individuals. This emphasis alone should render sociobiology unsuitable as a tool for totalitarian ideology.
Not that emphasis on the individual is free from political implications. It plays into the hands of conservatives, who love to argue that societies are artifacts, and that each individual should simply follow its own greedy genes.72 Seeking to weaken the social contract, these ideologies make the opposite error from those that place the whole above its parts: they try to pry the parts loose from the whole.
Evolutionary biologists should face these debates head-on. We are so familiar with the tension between unity and diversity that we have no trouble exposing the flaws in both forest-forthe-trees and trees-for-the-forest ideologies. Surely, fascists have no evolutionary leg to stand on when they treat populations as organic wholes. Similarly, radical individualism is untenable in a world in which many species, including our own, survive through mutualism and cooperation. Both the pursuit of individual happiness and community-level morality have a place within evolutionary thought. We have an obligation to make sure that the metaphors and simplifications of our field are not used to downplay one or the other, and that it is understood where the realm of science ends and that of ideology begins.
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 8