KONRAD LORENZ, 85; NOBEL LAUREATE PIONEERED STUDY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Author: Associated Press
Date: Wednesday, March 1, 1989
Page: 37
Section: OBITUARY
VIENNA -- Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian scientist who won a Nobel Prize in
1973 for his pioneering studies of human and animal behavior, died of kidney
failure Monday in his home in Altenburg, 30 miles northeast of Vienna. He was
85.
Dr. Lorenz, Austria's most famous scientist, held doctorates in medicine,
zoology and psychology.
His studies on the organization of individual and group behavior patterns
won him the Nobel Prize in medicine together with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas
Tinbergen.
Dr. Lorenz turned to research in animal behavior shortly after obtaining
his medical degree. He had become an animal lover as a child, collecting a
variety of animals at his expansive boyhood home outside Vienna. The
collection included fish, dogs, monkeys, insects and especially ducks and
geese.
His first important findings concerned the social life of birds. Those
studies convinced him that many aspects of the birds' behavior were innate and
instinctive, rather than learned.
His views were controversial, and they became even more controversial when
he suggested that such instinctive behavior might be important in humans, too.
One of his best known findings was that young animals will, at some time
in their lives, become strongly attached to their biological mothers, a
process known as imprinting.
He showed that the process could be altered, however, by demonstrating
that mallard ducklings would happily follow a human who greeted them shortly
after birth and imitated a mother's quacking.
In 1939, Dr. Lorenz was given a chair in psychology at Immanuel Kant
University in Koenigsberg, then a German town and then the Soviet port of
Kaliningrad.
His tenure there and publications during that time led in later years to
allegations that Lorenz was a Nazi sympathizer.
When accepting the Nobel Prize, he apologized for a 1940 publication
judged to reflect Nazi views of science, saying that "many highly decent
scientists hoped, like I did, for a short time for good from National
Socialism, and many quickly turned away from it with the same horror as I."
After World War II, Dr. Lorenz returned to Vienna, where he lectured at
the university and published dozens of books.
One of his most controversial publications was the 1966 study, "On
Aggression," in which he asserted that aggressive impulses are to some degree
innate, drawing on analogies between human and animal behavior.
Later best-selling books included "The Eight Deadly Sins of Civilized
Humanity," a plea against overpopulation and environmental destruction, and
''The Decay of the Humane," a gloomy look at mankind's future that sold
390,000 copies.
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