Konrad Lorenz years of life. Konrad Lorenz - biography and interesting facts from life. Konrad Lorenz in the USSR

Few people know where memory begins. The memory of a prisoner of war absorbs everything down to the smallest detail, because on the other side of life something begins that cannot even be defined. Rewinding his past, Konrad Lorenz, nicknamed “the Einstein of the animal soul,” once again tried to restore the outline of the events that broke the peaceful course of his life.

In the slushy October of 1941, he, a novice physiologist, was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Relying on his good knowledge of anatomy, they assigned him to a rear hospital in the Polish city of Poznan. He will remember that cloudless time more than once, lying on his bunks in the prisoner of war camps near Kirov, where he was entrusted with a department with 600 beds. Most of his charges suffered from “field neuritis” caused by stress, cold and lack of vitamins. When he put most of them back on their feet, putting them on vitamin C and providing them with warmth and peace, Soviet doctors appreciated his efforts, recommending that he be transferred to Armenia, to camp No. 115, where, according to Lorenz’s recollections, it was warm and satisfying. Moreover, it was there that he received freedom of movement. However, where was there to run?! But before he got there, to the land with the piercing blue sky above his head, he went through a series of trials. He will no longer remember anything more nauseating than being sent to the Eastern Front, where the air seemed to be stale with fear.

It was April 1944.

Having survived the loss of the 6th Army of Field Marshal Paulus at Stalingrad and a crushing defeat at the village of Prokhorovka on the Kursk Bulge, the German armies inexorably rolled back to the west.

Transferred to a field hospital near Vitebsk, Conrad observed the agony of the German spirit: the soldiers groaned not so much from their wounds, but from the thought of the inevitability of the collapse of the hopes pumped into them for a quick victory.

Pleasant to the eye, spring splashed in the wind the greenery of the blossoming foliage. By June, Vitebsk found itself surrounded by Soviet troops, and, like many others, he too was captured. He had no weapons with him, only a volume with Goethe’s Faust was found in his inner pocket. After interrogation by a military counterintelligence officer SMERSH, due to an acute shortage of medical personnel with experience working in hospitals, he was sent to a camp for German prisoners of war.

If at the beginning of the war thousands of Soviet soldiers were captured, then at its turn the same thing increasingly happened to Wehrmacht soldiers.

At first there was a hospital for prisoners of war in Smolensk. Then, from August to September 1944, he brought his compatriots to their senses in special camp No. 3160 near the city of Kirov, in Khalturin. After staying there for a year, I changed a couple more camps nearby - in Orichi. Then he will bless the day when he was transferred to Armenia, to the town of Kanaker. More than two thousand anonymous soldiers were employed there in the construction of an aluminum plant near the railway station.

Lorenz remained a camp doctor until the memorable September 19, 1947, when he was sent home in stages to his native Altenburg near Vienna. From the words of the camp orthopedist who favored him, Dr. Osip Grigoryan, who was familiar with the works of his father, a revered scientist in Europe, Konrad knew that he owed his early release to the petition of the head of the Military Medical Academy in Lenin.

city, Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Leon Orbeli, to whom he turned with a letter of help, which Grigoryan and Captain Karapetyan, the camp’s staff translator, helped him draft.

From Armenia, Conrad took with him two birds he raised in Yerevan - a lark and a starling, a tin spoon, a wooden duck carved with his own hands, and a homemade pipe from a corn cob. He also had with him a tattered volume of Goethe. Konrad Lorenz also remembers a funny incident: in Kanaker, a starling he had tamed joined a flock of arriving brothers. With a characteristic whistle, he returned it back.

The touching life story of a man who endured the hardships of war, who experienced the humiliation of captivity, but who did not lose his thirst for creativity, prompted me to intrude into his biography.

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz, the youngest son of Emma and Adolf Lorenz, was born on November 7, 1903 in Vienna. Grandfather Konrad, the best master of horse harnesses, was known throughout Austria. The father, who also remembered the hungry times, decided to take a different path: he grew into a successful orthopedic surgeon, gaining fame no less widely. Having already become rich, he built an estate in Altenburg near Vienna. Surrounded by swamps and fields, it fascinated Conrad with the delights of wild nature. He himself would later describe his passion as “excessive love of nature.”

Swimming in a pond with domestic ducks, which he raised himself, young Conrad marveled at their grace. Rare observation allowed him to establish social, that is, environmentally determined connections in recognizing each other. So, having borrowed a one-day-old duckling from a neighbor, to his unspeakable joy, Conrad discovered that it followed him everywhere, like a duck. Since then, waterfowl have become his passion. Soon the young naturalist had a wonderful collection of animals, including wild ones, that lived on the territory of their estate. The study of the mechanism of instinct becomes the meaning of his scientific interests. He asks the question: how and why the behavior of animals that do not possess human intelligence is characterized by complex and appropriate patterns?

Having received his primary education at a private school, Conrad enters the Schottengymnasium, an educational institution with a high level of education, which is headed by his own aunt. Within its walls, Conrad learns zoological methods and the principles of evolution. Now his mind is occupied by zoology and paleontology. However, heeding his father’s advice, he is closely involved in medicine. In 1922, he was already a student at Columbia University in New York. Upon returning to Austria, he entered the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, soberly reasoning that practicing medicine would not prevent him from devoting time to ethology - the science of animal behavior in natural conditions.

An analytical look at the essence of phenomena will give Lorenz the opportunity to draw an important conclusion: the comparative method can be equally applicable to behavioral models and to anatomical structures. Work begins on a dissertation to obtain a medical degree.

Studying the instinctive behavior of animals becomes the meaning of Conrad's life. Having received his doctorate in 1928, Lorenz works as an assistant in the department of anatomy at the University of Vienna. Now, even while lecturing on the comparative behavior of animals, he, without interrupting his studies in zoology, plunges headlong into ethology. By the time he came to the scientific community, two main theories were in conflict in the science of instincts - vitalism and behaviorism. Proponents of the first attributed instincts to the “wisdom of nature.” Followers of the second studied the behavior of animals in laboratory conditions, testing their ability to solve experimental problems, for example, finding a way out of a maze. Having become interested in behaviorism, Lorenz eventually noticed that the instinctive behavior of animals is internally motivated. I realized that in order to activate instinct, a certain threshold of stimulation must be reached. I noticed that in an animal that has been in isolation for a long time, this threshold decreases. In a series of articles he published in 1927–1928, he explains this. Based on his conclusions, he expresses an original point of view: instincts are caused not by reflexes, but by internal motivations.

Almost at the same time, at a symposium in Leiden, he will meet Nicholas Tinbergen. Their views coincide in the smallest details, giving rise to a hypothesis: the instinctive behavior of animals begins with internal motives that force the animal to seek stimuli due to its environment. They will also agree on the issue of variability in the animal’s behavior when triggering “key” stimulants, the so-called signal stimuli. The conclusion was clear: each animal has its own distinctive fixed motor pattern (FMP) system and associated signal stimuli, characteristic of each species. It turned out that they, too, were evolving in response to the demands of natural selection.

In one of his last works, before his capture, Lorenz gives a classic description of the “ceremony of triumph” during the formation of pairs among geese. The male, after simulating an attack on a non-existent rival, returns to the female, pompously performing this very “ceremony of triumph”. Lorenz, along with a description of aggression in predators, made observations regarding ritual behavior and special mechanisms. The scientist is trying to find common roots of human and animal behavior in terms of sexuality and aggressiveness. The forced absorption of Austria by Germany in 1938 upset Lorenz, but he hoped to see world transformers in the assertive Nazis. He was captivated by the fact that they zealously and seriously took up genetics.

Based on Lorenz’s letters and interviews, R. Evans wrote a book, citing his revelations from that time: “Of course, I hoped that something good could come from the Nazis. People better than me, more intelligent, believed this, and among them was my father. I never believed they meant murder when they said "selection." I never believed in Nazi ideology, but like a fool, I thought that I could improve on them, lead them to something better. It was a naive mistake."

Insight will come years later. And by 1937, Lorenz, a well-known expert in animal psychology, was actively involved in the domestication of wild geese. He was depressed by the thought that with the loss of skills and the increase in food and sexual stimuli, this process could be observed in people. His worries grew as the start of the war in the air approached. Lorenz was shocked that “having succumbed to bad advice, he wrote and published an article about the dangers of domestication, allowing himself the terminology of the worst examples of fascist ideology: “in order to get our best individuals, it is necessary to establish a standard model of our people.” As a member of the National Socialist Party (in one of the questionnaires he will indicate that he was only a candidate member of the party), he could afford even this. Now he would give a lot so that she would not be remembered.

Having not worked even two years at the department of the University of Koenigsberg, Lorenz was drafted into the army as a military doctor, although he had no medical practice. In 1942, as part of the 2nd ambulance company of the 206th infantry division, he went to the Eastern Front. Captivity, and this day, June 28, 1944, will not only be etched in his memory for the rest of his life, but, oddly enough, it will save his life, allowing him in the future to engage in his favorite science - ethology, in which there are few equals to him you can call it.

One sunny morning, Captain Karapetyan called Conrad for a walk. He led me to an old house and said:

– The classic of Armenian literature Khachatur Abovyan, the creator of the modern Armenian language, lived here. He studied in Dorpat, spoke German perfectly, and was even married to a German woman from the Baltic region. A hundred years ago he left home and never returned...

Lorenz's return to his family in 1947 was like a resurrection from the dead: he had long been considered dead. For some reason, the first thing he remembered was that sunny day in Kanaker near Abovyan’s house. He's back. But upon his happy return, no one offered him any position. Without the financial support of his surviving friends, he would not have been able to continue his research in his native Altenburg. In 1950, Erich von Holst founded the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, where Lorenz spent twenty years studying his favorite ethology, focusing on waterfowl: apparently, childhood impressions turned out to be indelible. The book “So-Called Evil: On the Nature of Aggression” appears. Believing aggression to be just a manifestation of “anger,” Lorenz refers to the choice of marriage partners, the establishment of a social hierarchy, and the preservation of territory. In response to the barrage of criticism against him, Lorenz argues that human aggressiveness becomes even more dangerous because “the invention of artificial weapons upsets the balance between destructive potentials and social prohibitions.”

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1973 was shared between Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and Nicholas Tinbergen. With the latter, as we know, Lorenz largely agreed.

But that happened years later.

And at the end of the war, the German prisoners of war atone as best they could for their guilt before the Soviet people, partially making up for the damage caused to the country during the war years: in Yerevan they built the Victory Bridge across the Hrazdan River, and in Sevan, not without their participation, a cascade of hydroelectric power stations was born. There, during his work at Sevanhydrostroy, the scientist’s assumption about the role of training was confirmed. At the same time, Lorenz refers to the behavior of mountain goats that lived in the area of ​​quarries and were not afraid of explosions.

Captain Karapetyan, a staff translator, took a special liking to this intelligent man with blue eyes. Wanting to find out more about a person who was pleasant in all respects, one evening, having laid out the personal file of the prisoner of war Lorenz in front of him, he began to delve into it: he was Austrian, his native language was German. Employee, poor. Behind me are five years of public school, five years of medical university, two years of studying zoology. He was drafted into the army as a professor of psychophysiology at the University of Königsberg. No military education. There are no awards. In one of the questionnaires he indicated that he was a believer, but later he stated that he had no religion. Position in the army - junior doctor. With the rank of junior lieutenant. When asked whether he surrendered or was captured, he answered - he was captured. He does not deny belonging to the National Socialist Party. Before captivity, he visited America, France, Belgium, Holland, and England. Afterwards a registration was made - in Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece. The signature on the questionnaires is clear, legible, and begins with “Dr.” I noticed that a good photograph was attached to the Armenian sheet. The questionnaire includes a verbal portrait of Konrad Lorenz. Height - 183 cm, normal build, dark brown hair, oval face, long nose, gray-blue eyes (in the Kirov version - blue), a scar on the arm below the elbow.

The main thing that Karapetyan understood for himself was that Lorenz mainly worked in hospitals. Apparently, the SMERSH officer, who was determining who went where, also drew attention to this same circumstance.

Here is an extract from the description of prisoner of war Lorenz Konrad Adolf, issued on September 19, 1947 in a camp in Armenia: “Prisoner of war Lorenz is characterized positively, has a conscientious attitude to work, is politically developed, takes an active part in anti-fascist work and enjoys authority among prisoners of war. The lectures and reports he gave were eagerly listened to by prisoners of war. The prisoner of war Lorenz visited different countries, such as the USA, England, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Greece, Czechoslovakia, etc. He has a broad outlook on theoretical issues, and also has a correct orientation in politics, is an agitator in the camp department, and conducts propaganda campaigns. mass work among prisoners of war of German and Austrian nationalities, speaks French and English. Compromising materials on Lorenz K.A. We don’t have it.”

A German who showed exemplary behavior, who soon mastered Russian, an active agitator, a persuasive lecturer, and also a medic who became skilled during the war years, who also served as a group psychologist in the camp, and who enjoyed great authority among prisoners, was decided to give an indulgence and allow him to do science. In his free time, Conrad also made his comrades laugh as a clown and mime. I regretted that I didn’t have a motorcycle at hand. He even managed to do the unimaginable with the heavy Tsundap in the army.

From confidential conversations with Konrad, Karapetyan learned under what circumstances Lorenz found himself in captivity. It all started with the Red Army's attack on the forces of Army Group Center. They, several soldiers and junior officers, tried for three days to escape from Vitebsk, which found itself in a cauldron. The desperate decided to stay. Then he went alone. To cross the highway, he even managed to join a column of Russian soldiers. Lucky to sneak away once again. Then, exhausted and hungry, he fell asleep in an open field, where he was discovered.

- We have an emergency! From the third detachment, sixteen people were taken in a Studebaker to some church in the city center and ordered to dismantle it. The officer who ordered the demolition of the temple was extremely surprised by the unanimous reluctance to do this. Raising his voice, he cried:

– But during the war you calmly destroyed churches. What's the matter?

The answer of one of the prisoners stunned him:

- During the war, we did everything according to orders. On our commander’s dagger was engraved “Got mit uns” - “God is with us.” And if the Lord turned away from Hitler, had mercy on us and we survived, why should we destroy the temple of God?! We were soldiers then. Now we are free to act according to our conscience. You can put him in a punishment cell and cut your rations, but we won’t do that, excuse me.

That day, everyone got it - both the detachment commander and the supervising officer. However, no one began to punish them. For disobedience, they only increased the production rate.

Work on the Victory Bridge was coming to an end. All that remained was to strengthen the hillside on which the monument to Stalin, the largest in the world, was supposed to stand: the bronze figure of the leader, 16 meters high, was supposed to be raised on a pedestal 30 meters high. Apparently it was placed for centuries, because every tuff block of its pedestal managed to lie in vegetable oil for at least a year. They, the obstinate ones, were entrusted with fitting the rubble stones from basalt at the foot of the hill. Lorenz found out about this when he returned from his construction site: that day they were pouring concrete for the foundation of the future repository of ancient manuscripts. The work was supervised by the chief architect of Yerevan, Mark Grigoryan, the creator of the ensemble of government buildings on the central square of the Armenian capital. Undoubtedly, the talented architect had a noticeable limp, which is why his creation, at the hands of someone unkind, received the nickname among the people - the Square of Lame Mark.

The first thing the prisoners noticed when they set foot on Armenian soil was the friendly attitude of the local population towards them. According to Captain Karapetyan, they all knew that the Armenians lost a third of the male population during the war. However, no one showed outright hostility towards them. In exchange for cigarette cases and crosses made from aluminum spoons, the children brought them bread, white cheese and grapes. It was forbidden to take only clothes and shoes. Smiling was not prohibited. And the rations were pleasing - no one had to die of hunger: the authorities decided to use this organized workforce, as they say, to the fullest. That’s why they were entrusted with responsible objects. Once, even the most important leader of the republic came to look at their work. He walked around, taking a closer look at everything, then, apparently, told the architect that he needed to start landscaping around the building being erected, because the whole next day they planted trees on the slope. That day, for dinner, everyone was given a glass of red wine.

Remembering his work at Sevanhydrostroy, Conrad thanked the Lord that he had the good fortune to end up not in Siberia, but here, in a relatively calm region, and also warm and welcoming... Here, observing semi-wild goats, he found confirmation of his theory: with the most distant peals thunder, the goats of the Armenian Highlands looked for suitable caves in the rocks, expediently preparing for possible rain. They did the same when the roar of explosions was heard nearby. He clearly remembers that during this observation he suddenly realized: under natural conditions, the formation of conditioned reactions only contributes to the preservation of the species when the conditioned stimulus is in a causal connection with the unconditioned. This was the most important step in understanding open I.P. Pavlov's conditioned reflexes. Who knows if this observation was the cornerstone of the “discovery concerning the structure and liberation of individual and social patterns of behavior”?!

Lorenz began writing his book with a nail on paper from cement bags, carefully smoothing it out, using potassium permanganate instead of ink. Everyone, including the camp authorities, was sympathetic to his activities. Later, in Krasnogorsk, where he will be allowed to print the results of scientific observations in two copies, the state security officer will even give him a “safe conduct letter” so that the manuscript will not be taken away at the stages.

Both copies of the manuscript of the survey and philosophical study “Introduction to the Comparative Study of Behavior,” which formed the basis of his fundamental work “The Other Side of the Mirror” and gave impetus to the creation of “Fundamentals of Ethology,” will remain in the Soviet Union. Now they are stored in the Russian State Central Archive of the USSR. Lorenz will be allowed to take the handwritten copy with him, although by that time he will have time to make a lot of changes and additions to it.

Mobilized to the hospital, he knew the war more by the condition in which the wounded arrived. Every day the number of crippled people grew, and there was clearly not enough money to transfer them to the rear. The Russian breakthrough seemed to leave no chance of salvation for anyone. Providence led him to Armenia. No one stopped him from observing wild animals and birds, keeping a diary and taking notes in the light of day of the thoughts that visited him at night.

Time passed, the Matenadaran building rose, and with it the hope and hope of returning home, to family and beloved work, filled. A call to the authorities could mean either a refusal, or... At times I didn’t even want to think about it. But the day of sending home, as it turned out, was approaching. I also came up with a big book about my stay in the camps.

In his obituary on the occasion of the death of Konrad Lorenz, his colleague P. Bateson, emphasizing the horrors of Soviet captivity, pointed out that Konrad survived in captivity by eating mainly flies and spiders. In fact, although the diet was quite adequate, there was indeed little protein in the diet. The biologist Lorenz made up for their shortage by eating grape snails and scorpions, tearing off the tail of the latter.

Today it is difficult to imagine that before being transferred to Armenia, Lorenz lived in a barracks with stove heating and bunks in two or three tiers. But he lived in labor camps, not in extermination camps. A surviving plan of one of the labor camps shows that for every 10–20 barracks there was one latrine per 20 “points.” One can imagine the psychophysical state of the Austrian professor, but this is how the whole country lived at that time. In camp reports on the loss of ability to work by prisoners, the reasons for this phenomenon are also indicated. In first place is poor nutrition. In the worst times, prisoners received 2015 kilocalories a day, which did not restore strength. The decision to increase the norm was made only in 1945, when the daily diet included 600 g of rye bread, 90 g of cereal, 30 g of meat, 100 g of fish, 15 g of vegetable oil, 17 g of sugar, 600 g of potatoes, etc. . In the health camps, the norm of meat was increased to 150 g, sugar - to 30 g, milk was given 300 g. At least that’s how everything looked on paper, but how things really turned out is unknown.

There was also a norm of clothing allowance: two pairs of underwear, an overcoat, a tunic and trousers, boots, shoes or bast shoes for soldiers, for officers - a belt, a bowl, a kettle (one for 10 people), for soldiers - a tank for 10 people.

Awarded with numerous awards and distinctions, Konrad Lorenz, favored by fate, left a legacy of his own as a publicist: entertaining books by the famous naturalist about the culture of communication between man and animals and between them - “The Ring of King Solomon”, “A Man Finds a Friend”, “The Year of the Gray Goose” ”, - having gone through several editions, they became popular in the USSR, where interest in ethology began to grow year after year after the war.

In his book “The Eight Sins of Humanity,” Lorenz named them: overpopulation, devastation of living space, racing against oneself, heat death of the senses, genetic degeneration, break with tradition, intolerance of discomfort and nuclear weapons. The author also points out that the media develops in people the habit of uncritical thinking, which was previously compensated by the presence of traditional beliefs,

In The Other Side of the Mirror, Konrad Lorenz presented evolution as the formation of new regulatory circuits. The linear sequence of processes influencing each other in a certain order closes, in his deep conviction, into a circuit, and this latter begins to act like the first, causing new feedback, which causes a leap in evolution, creating qualitatively new properties of the living system . Lorenz designated this phenomenon with the term “fulguration,” which is Latin for “lightning strike.” Lorenz's creative approach laid the foundation for a new science - theoretical biology.

Having received the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Lorenz decided that the first thing he would do was throw a punch at his American opponents, fellow psychologists. I regretted that my father was no longer alive. Surely he would say: “Incredible! This boy wins the Nobel Prize for fooling around with birds and fish!”

It came to mind that in the book “Kant’s concept of a priori in the light of modern biology”, published by him back in 1941, he argued that a priori forms of thinking and intuition should be understood as adaptation, since a priori it is based on the apparatus of the central nervous system, which has acquired a species-preserving expedient form due to the influence of reality in the course of genealogical evolution that lasted many eras. Further, he considered life as a process of cognition, combining a broad overview of animal and human behavior with the general picture of modern biology, approaching the problems of the formation and development of culture as a living system.

Once, at one of the international symposiums, a prominent Soviet scientist, hardly familiar with the biography of Konrad Lorenz, approached him and offered to come to the USSR with reports and stories about animals, assuring that his arrival would cause a sensation. Smiling softly at his colleague, Lorenz politely declined the invitation: “I’ve already been to you...”

Family dinner warmed the soul. Margaret Gebhart, a childhood friend whom he married back in 1927, who gave him two daughters and a son, handed her husband another telegram. She said that she almost forgot about her.

Having managed to sort through a heap of congratulations in the morning, Lorenz mechanically buried himself in the text. He jerked as if there was a tightness in his throat. Six words burned my memory: “CONGRATULATIONS CONRAD TCHK WE ARE PROUD OF YOU TCHK CAPTAIN KARAPETYAN.”

My ears filled with heartache. A stingy tear of gratitude plopped into the bowl of soup.

Ashot Sagratyan

Konrad Tsacharias Lorenz is an outstanding Austrian biologist, one of the founders of ethology - the science of animal and human behavior, and a Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine.

Konrad Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903 near Vienna, and was brought up in the best traditions of European culture. Lorenz graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Vienna, was a student of prominent physicians and biologists, but, having received a medical degree, did not practice medicine, but devoted himself to studying animal behavior. First, he completed an internship in England under the guidance of the famous biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, and then did independent research in Austria.

Lorenz began by observing the behavior of birds, determining that animals transfer knowledge to each other through learning. In the 1930s, Lorenz was already one of the leaders in biology. At this time, he collaborated with his friend, the Dutchman Tinbergen, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize in 1973 decades later.

In 1940 he became a professor at the University of Königsberg, working in a prestigious department. During the Second World War, he was mobilized by the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front. He worked as a doctor, performing operations in a military hospital in Belarus. In 1944, during the retreat of the German army, Lorenz was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Armenia.

Lorenz said that in his camp the authorities did not steal, and it was possible to survive. There was not enough protein food and the “professor,” as he was called in the camp, caught scorpions and, to the horror of the guards, ate them raw, throwing away the poisonous tail. The prisoners were taken to work and, while observing goats, he made a discovery: in natural conditions, the formation of conditioned reactions contributes to the preservation of the species when the conditioned stimulus is in a causal relationship with the unconditioned.

In 1948, Lorenz, having been forcibly mobilized into the German army, was released from captivity. At the camp, he began writing a book about animal and human behavior called “The Other Side of the Mirror.” He wrote with a nail on cement paper, using potassium permanganate instead of ink. The “Professor” was respected by the camp authorities. He asked to take his “manuscript” with him. The state security officer gave the opportunity to reprint the book and allowed me to take it with me under the assurance that there was nothing in the book about politics.

Lorenz returns to Austria to his family, soon he is invited to Germany and he heads the Institute of Physiology in Bavaria, where he gets the opportunity to conduct research.

In 1963, his book “So-Called Evil” was published, which brought Conrad worldwide fame. In this book, he talks about aggression and its role in the formation of behaviors.

In addition to scientific research, Lorenz is engaged in literary activities; his books are still popular today.

In his scientific views, Lorenz was a consistent evolutionist; he studied the behavior of gray geese for many years, discovering the phenomenon of imprinting in them, and also studied aspects of the aggressive behavior of animals and humans. Having analyzed the behavior of animals, Lorenz confirmed S. Freud's conclusion that aggression is not only a reaction to external stimuli, and if the stimuli are removed, then the aggressiveness will accumulate. When aggression is caused by an external stimulus, it can be redirected to someone else or to inanimate objects.

Lorenz concluded that heavily armed species had developed strong innate morality. Conversely, weakly armed species have weak innate morality. Man is by nature a weakly armed species, and although with the invention of artificial weapons man became the most armed species, his morality remained at the same level.

Aware of his responsibility, Lorenz gives lectures on the radio about the biological situation in the modern world and publishes the book “The Eight Deadly Sins of Civilized Humanity.” In it, he criticizes modern capitalist society, gives answers to the controversial questions of our time, identifying eight main trends leading to decline: overpopulation, emptying of living space, high pace of life caused by competition, increasing intolerance to discomfort, genetic degeneration, break with traditions, indoctrination and the threat of nuclear weapons.

A person, adapted to survive in a small group and in a metropolis, cannot restrain his natural aggressiveness. As an example of two extremes, Lorenz observed the hospitality of people living away from cities and the explosive nervousness in the camps. The concentration of people in a city where nature is disturbed leads to the aesthetic and ethical degradation of the resident. Every person is forced to work harder than is required to survive. This process is not limited by anything, but is accompanied by a number of chronic diseases in active people. Thus, achieving a goal is associated with discomfort. Modern medicine and living conditions deprive a person of the habit of patience.

The compassion that civilized man can express towards all men weakens natural selection and leads to genetic degeneration. It should be emphasized that the “diseases” of capitalist societies exist only in conjunction with other problems.

Konrad Lorenz is an outstanding popularizer of science; a whole generation of biologists was brought up on his popular science books.

Among the famous books, the following should be highlighted:

King Solomon's Ring; A man finds a friend;

Year of the Gray Goose, Evolution and Behavior Change;

Aggression is the so-called “evil”; Reverse side of the mirror;

Study of human and animal behavior, Basis of ethology;

8 deadly sins of civilized humanity;

The extinction of the human.

Since the 1970s, these Lorenz ideas have been developed in research on the evolution of cognition. He gives a detailed presentation of his views on the problems of cognition in the book “The Other Side of the Mirror”, where life itself is considered as a process of cognition, combining the behavior of animals and humans with the general picture of biology.

Speaking about the philosophical content of the book, Lorenz focuses on human cognitive abilities. As Lorenz explains, scientific knowledge is preceded by knowledge about the world around us, about human society and about ourselves. Human existence itself is a cognitive “cognitive” process based on “inquisitive” behavior. Behavior cannot be understood without studying the forms of human and animal behavior themselves. This is what ethology deals with - the science of animal and human behavior. Each act of cognition is an interaction between the external part of the organism and the organism itself.

Lorenz believed that a person by nature, from birth, possesses the basic forms of thinking and that acquired life experience is added. “A priori knowledge”, i.e. knowledge, which precedes all experience, consists of the basic ideas of logic and mathematics.

The magazine “Mirror” once called Kornad Lorenz “the Einstein of the animal soul,” which very accurately characterizes his colossal work in this direction. The philosophical significance of Lorenz's works is not limited to epistemology. An integral part of philosophy has always been reflections on the nature of man, his place in the world, and the fate of humanity.

These questions worried Lorenz, and he approached their study from a natural science perspective, using data from the theory of behavior and theory of cognition - essentially new biological disciplines. Lorenz opened new paths in the study of human nature and human culture - this is an objective analysis of the relationship between instinctive and programmed impulses in human behavior. His article, entitled: “Kant’s Theory of the Apriori in the Light of Modern Biology,” became the main directive of biology.

It is interesting to note that in old age, Konrad Lorenz spoke out as an environmental critic and became a leader of the green movement in Austria.

Nowadays, the conclusions of K. Lorenz are becoming more and more relevant and are a kind of foundation for their further development.

Konrad Lorenz died on February 27, 1989 in Vienna, having lived a long and vibrant creative life.

Konrad Tsacharias Lorenz(German: Konrad Zacharias Lorenz; November 7, 1903, Vienna - February 27, 1989, ibid.) - an outstanding Austrian zoologist and zoopsychologist, one of the founders of ethology - the science of animal behavior, Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine (1973, together with Karl von Frisch and Nicholas Tinbergen). In 2015, he was posthumously stripped of an honorary doctorate from the University of Salzburg due to his “adherence to Nazi ideology.”

Biographical milestones

Konrad Lorenz was born on November 7, 1903 in Austria. He was a late child in the family. His father, orthopedist Adolf Lorenz, was almost fifty, and his mother was already 41 years old.

Konrad Lorenz grew up in Altenberg near Vienna in his parents' home. In 1909 he entered primary school and in 1915 the Vienna Scottish Gymnasium, where he graduated with honors in 1921. He was a childhood friend of Karl Popper.

After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna, he received a medical degree, but did not practice medicine, but devoted himself to studying animal behavior. In the 1920s, he completed an internship in England under the guidance of the famous biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley. Then he began independent research in Austria.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany, and the subsequent annexation of Austria to Germany, in 1938 he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In his application to join this party, he wrote: “As a German thinker and natural scientist, I have, of course, always been a National Socialist” (“Ich war als Deutschdenkender und Naturwissenschaftler selbstverstndlich immer Nationalsozialist”).

In 1940 he became a professor at the University of Königsberg. During World War II he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served for two years in a rear hospital in Poznan. On October 10, 1941, he was called up for mobilization and sent to the Eastern Front as part of the 2nd ambulance company of the 206th infantry division. After fighting for several years, on June 20, 1944, during the retreat of the German army, he was captured by the Soviets near Vitebsk. He spent more than a year in a prisoner of war camp in the city of Kirov, then on March 2, 1946 he was transferred to a work camp in Armenia. In 1947 he was transferred to Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, and in December 1947 he was repatriated to his homeland. While in captivity, he began work on the book “The Other Side of the Mirror” and renounced his Nazi beliefs. In 1948 he returned to Germany and brought home his manuscript. In 1950 he founded the Institute of Physiology in Bavaria. In 1963 he published a book on aggression.

In addition to scientific research, Konrad Lorenz was engaged in literary activities. His books are still very popular today.

Main scientific results and scientific views

Having devoted many years to studying the behavior of gray geese, Lorenz discovered the phenomenon of imprinting in them. Using the example of this and other species, Lorenz also studied many aspects of the aggressive and sexual behavior of animals, including human behavior in the comparative ethological analysis of these forms of behavior.

In his scientific views, Lorenz was a consistent evolutionist, a supporter of the theory of natural selection.

Below are some of Lorenz's conclusions.

Spontaneity of aggression

Having analyzed the behavior of many animal species, Lorenz confirmed Freud's conclusion that aggression is not just a reaction to external stimuli. If these stimuli are removed, then aggressiveness will accumulate, and the threshold value of the triggering stimulus may decrease down to zero. An example of such a situation in humans is expeditionary rabies, which occurs in isolated small groups of people in which it comes to killing their best friend for an insignificant reason.

Redirecting aggression

If aggression is nevertheless caused by an external stimulus, then it does not splash out on the stimulus (say, an individual higher in the hierarchy), but is redirected to individuals lower in the hierarchy or to inanimate objects.

Konrad Lorenz photography

Konrad Lorenz received his primary education at a private school.

Then Conrad entered the prestigious Schottengymnasium school. Lorenz then became a student at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna.

Having received a medical degree, Lorenz did not engage in medical practice, but devoted himself to ethology - the science of the behavior of animals and humans as a biological being; more precisely, he became the founder of this discipline.

While writing his dissertation, Konrad Lorenz systematized the features of instinctive behavior of animals.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century in biology there were two points of view on instinct: vitalism and behaviorism. Vitalists explained the expedient behavior of animals by the wisdom of nature and believed that the instincts of animals are based on the same factors as human behavior. Behaviorists sought to explain everything by reflexes - conditioned and unconditioned. Often their conclusions contradicted the very concept of instinct as a complex set of innate, but not acquired reactions.

In the twenties, Konrad Lorenz completed an internship in England under the guidance of the famous biologist Julian Huxley.

After returning to Austria, Lorenz carried out joint work with the famous ornithologist Oskar Heinroth.

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Even in his youth, Lorenz discovered that animals are capable of transmitting knowledge acquired through learning to each other. This phenomenon was called imprinting.

In the thirties, Lorenz became a leader in the science of instincts. At first, leaning toward behaviorism, he tried to explain instinct as a chain of reflexes. But, having collected evidence, Lorenz came to the conclusion that instincts have internal motivation. In particular, Lorenz showed that in so-called territorial animals the social instinct is opposed by another, to which he gives the name “instinct of intraspecific aggression.” The behavior of animals occupying a certain hunting area is determined by the dynamic balance between the instinct of intraspecific aggression and one of the attractive instincts: sexual or social. Lorenz showed that from the combination and interaction of these instincts, the highest emotions of animals and humans were formed: recognition of each other, limitation of aggression, friendship and love.

After the absorption of Austria by Nazi Germany, Lorenz was left without a job, but then received an invitation to the Department of Psychology at the University of Königsberg.

Two years later, Lorenz was mobilized into the army as a military doctor, where, despite the lack of medical practice, he even performed surgical operations - in the field and in a military hospital in Belarus.

In 1944, during the retreat of the German army, Konrad Lorenz was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Armenia. Lorenz made up for the lack of protein food by eating scorpions - only their tail is poisonous, so the abdomen can be eaten even without special treatment.

Watching the semi-wild goats of the Armenian highlands, Lorenz noticed how, at the very first distant rumbles of thunder, they look for suitable caves in the rocks, preparing for possible rain. They do the same when there is blasting going on nearby. Konrad Lorenz came to the conclusion that “under natural conditions, the formation of conditioned reactions only contributes to the preservation of the species when the conditioned stimulus is in a causal relationship with the unconditioned.”

In 1948, Konrad Lorenz, among the Austrians forcibly mobilized into Hitler's army, was released from captivity. In the camp, he began writing the book “The Other Side of the Mirror: An Experience in the Natural History of Human Cognition.” The final version of this book was published in 1973.

In 1950, Konrad Lorenz, together with Eric von Holst, created the Institute of Physiology in Bavaria, where he continued his observations, focusing mainly on the study of the behavior of waterfowl.

In 1963, the book “So-Called Evil: On the Nature of Aggression” was published, which brought Lorenz world fame. In this book, the scientist talked about intraspecific aggression and its role in the formation of higher forms of behavior.

At the end of the sixties, Lorenz returned to Austria at the invitation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which organized for him the Institute for the Comparative Study of Behavior.

Somewhat later, Konrad Lorenz’s book “The Eight Sins of Modern Humanity” was published, which he considered overpopulation, devastation of living space, racing against oneself, the heat death of feelings, genetic degeneration, a break with tradition, indoctrination and nuclear weapons.

In The Other Side of the Mirror, Konrad Lorenz presented evolution as the formation of new regulatory circuits. The linear sequence of processes acting on each other in a certain order closes into a circuit, and the last process begins to act on the first - a new feedback arises. It is this that causes a leap in evolution, creating qualitatively new properties of a living system. Lorentz called this shock a fulguration (from the Latin term meaning lightning strike). The application of this approach led to the formation of a new science: theoretical biology.

In 1973, Konrad Lorenz, together with Nicholas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries related to the creation and establishment of models of individual and group behavior in animals.”