Kimdir ? Nobel ödüllü bilim adamları

 

Alfabetik Ödüllü kişi arama

 

Konrad Lorenz

 

 

 

I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development. I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals. My nurse, Resi Führinger, was the daughter of an old patrician peasant family. She possessed a "green thumb" for rearing animals. When my father brought me, from a walk in the Vienna Woods, a spotted salamander, with the injunction to liberate it after 5 days, my luck was in: the salamander gave birth to 44 larvae of which we, that is to say Resi, reared 12 to metamorphosis. This success alone might have sufficed to determine my further career; however, another important factor came in: Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson was read to me - I could not yet read at that time. From then on, I yearned to become a wild goose and, on realizing that this was impossible, I desperately wanted to have one and, when this also proved impossible, I settled for having domestic ducks. In the process of getting some, I discovered imprinting and was imprinted myself. From a neighbour, I got a one day old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time my interest became irreversibly fixated on water fowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Bölsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx. Even before that I had struggled with the problem whether or not an earthworm was in insect. My father had explained that the word "insect" was derived from the notches, the "incisions" between the segments. The notches between the worm's metameres clearly were of the same nature. Was it, therefore, an insect? Evolution gave me the answer: if reptiles, via the Archaeopteryx, could become birds, annelid worms, so I deduced, could develop into insects. I then decided to become a paleontologist.

At school, I met one important teacher, Philip Heberdey, and one important friend, Bernhard Hellmann. Heberdey, a Benedictine monk, freely taught us Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection. Freedom of thought was, and to a certain extent still is, characteristic of Austria. Bernhard and I were first drawn together by both being aquarists. Fishing for Daphnia and other "live food" for our fishes, we discovered the richness of all that lives in a pond. We both were attracted by Crustacea, particularly by Cladocera. We concentrated on this group during the ontogenetic phase of collecting through which apparently every true zoologist must pass, repeating the history of his science. Later, studying the larval development of the brine shrimp, we discovered the ressemblance between the Euphyllopod larva and adult Cladocera, both in respect to movement and to structure. We concluded that this group was derived from Euphyllopod ancestors by becoming neotenic. At the time, this was not yet generally accepted by science. The most important discovery was made by Bernhard Hellmann while breeding the aggressive Cichlid Geophagus: a male that had been isolated for some time, would kill any conspecific at sight, irrespective of sex. However, after Bernhard had presented the fish with a mirror causing it to fight its image to exhaustion, the fish would, immediately afterwards, be ready to court a female. In other words, Bernhard discovered, at 17, that "action specific potentiality" can be "dammed up" as well as exhausted.

On finishing high school, I was still obsessed with evolution and wanted to study zoology and paleontology. However, I obeyed my father who wanted me to study medicine. It proved to be my good luck to do so. The teacher of anatomy, Ferdinand Hochstetter, was a brilliant comparative anatomist and embryologist. He also was a dedicated teacher of the comparative method. I was quick to realize not only that comparative anatomy and embryology offered a better access to the problems of evolution than paleontology did, but also that the comparative method was as applicable to behaviour patterns as it was to anatomical structure. Even before I got my medical doctor's degree, I became first instructor and later assistant at Hochstetter's department. Also, I had begun to study zoology at the zoological institute of Prof. Jan Versluys. At the same time I participated in the psychological seminars of Prof. Karl Bühler who took a lively interest in my attempt to apply comparative methods to the study of behaviour. He drew my attention to the fact that my findings contradicted, with equal violence, the opinions held by the vitalistic or "instinctivistic" school of MacDougall and those of the mechanistic or behavioristic school of Watson. Bühler made me read the most important books of both schools, thereby inflicting upon me a shattering disillusionment: none of these people knew animals, none of them was an expert. I felt crushed by the amount of work still undone and obviously devolving on a new branch of science which, I felt, was my responsibility.

Karl Bühler and his assistant Egon Brunswick made me realize that theory of knowledge was indispensable to the observer of living creatures, if he were to fulfill his task of scientific objectivation. My interest in the psychology of perception, which is so closely linked to epistemology, stems from the influence of these two men.

Working as an assistant at the anatomical institute, I continued keeping birds and animals in Altenberg. Among them the jackdaws soon became most important. At the very moment when I got my first jackdaw, Bernhard Hellmann gave me Oskar Heinroth's book "Die Vögel Mitteleuropas". I realized in a flash that this man knew everything about animal behaviour that both, MacDougall and Watson, ignored and that I had believed to be the only one to know. Here, at last, was a scientist who also was an expert! It is hard to assess the influence which Heinroth exerted on the development of my ideas. His classical comparative paper on Anatidae encouraged me to regard the comparative study of behaviour as my chief task in life. Hochstetter generously considered my ethological work as being comparative anatomy of sorts and permitted me to work on it while on duty in his department. Otherwise the papers I produced between 1927 and 1936 would never have been published.

During that period I came to know Wallace Craig. The American Ornitologist Margaret Morse Nice knew about his work and mine and energetically put us into contact. I owe her undying gratitude. Next to Hochstetter and Heinroth, Wallace Craig became my most influential teacher. He criticized my firmly-held opinion that instinctive activities were based on chain reflexes. I myself had demonstrated that long absence of releasing stimuli tends to lower their threshold, even to the point of the activity's eruption in vacuo. Craig pointed out that in the same situation the organism began actively to seek for the releasing stimulus situation. It is obviously nonsense, wrote Craig, to speak of a re-action to a stimulus not yet received. The reason why in spite of the obvious spontaneity of instinctive behaviour, I still clung to the reflex theory, lay in my belief, that any deviation from Sherringtonian reflexology meant a concession to vitalism. So, in the lecture I gave in February 1936 in the Harnackhaus in Berlin, I still defended the reflex theory of instinct. It was the last time I did so.

During that lecture, my wife was sitting behind a young man who obviously agreed with what I said about spontaneity, murmuring all the time: "It all fits in, it all fits in." When, at the end of my lecture, I said that I regarded instinctive motor patterns as chain reflexes after all, he hid his face in his hands and moaned: "Idiot, idiot". That man was Erich von Holst. After the lecture, in the commons of the Harnackhaus, it took him but a few minutes to convince me of the untenability of the reflex theory. The lowering thresholds, the eruption of vacuum activities, the independence of motor patterns of external stimulation, in short all the phenomena I was struggling with, not only could be explained, but actually were to be postulated on the assumption that they were based not on chains of reflexes but on the processes of endogenous generation of stimuli and of central coordination, which had been discovered and demonstrated by Erich von Holst. I regard as the most important break-through of all our attempts to understand animal and human behaviour the recognition of the following fact: the elemental neural organisation underlying behaviour does not consist of a receptor, an afferent neuron stimulating a motor cell and of an effector activated by the latter. Holst's hypothesis which we confidently can make our own, says that the basic central nervous organisation consists of a cell permanently producing endogenous stimulation, but prevented from activating its effector by another cell which, also producing endogenous stimulation, exerts an inhibiting effect. It is this inhibiting cell which is influenced by the receptor and ceases its inhibitory activity at the biologically "right" moment. This hypothesis appeared so promising that the Kaiser-Wilhelmsgesellschaft, now renamed Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, decided to found an institute for the physiology of behavior for Erich von Holst and myself. I am convinced that if he were still alive, he would be here in Stockholm now. At the time, the war interrupted our plans.