Konrad Lorenz - Contributions and Legacy

Contributions and Legacy

Lorenz has been called 'The father of ethology', by Niko Tinbergen. Perhaps Lorenz's most important contribution to ethology was his idea that behavior patterns can be studied as anatomical organs. This concept forms the foundation of ethological research.

Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Lorenz developed the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors (fixed action patterns). They experimented with "supernormal stimuli" such as giant eggs or dummy bird beaks which they found could release the fixed action patterns more powerfully than the natural objects for which the behaviors were adapted. Influenced by the ideas of William McDougall, Lorenz developed this into a "psychohydraulic" model of the motivation of behavior, which tended towards group selectionist ideas, which were influential in the 1960s. Another of his contributions to ethology is his work on imprinting. His influence on a younger generation of ethologists; and his popular works, were important in bringing ethology to the attention of the general public.

Lorenz claimed that there was widespread contempt for the descriptive sciences. He attributed this to the denial of perception as the source of all scientific knowledge: "a denial that has been evaluated to the status of religion." He wrote that in comparative behavioral research, "it is necessary to describe various patterns of movement, record them, and above all, render them unmistakably recognizable."

There are three Konrad Lorenz Institutes in Austria; one is housed in his family mansion at Altenberg, and another at his field station in Grünau.

Lorenz, like other ethologists, performed research largely by observation, or when experiments were conducted, they were conducted in a natural setting. Animal welfare advocates like to point out that Lorenz won a Nobel Prize without ever using invasive techniques.