The Foundations of Ethology

The Foundations of Ethology

Lorenz traces ethology back to Darwin and explains why behavior must be studied as an evolved biological function. Through courtship displays, instinctive movements and learning, he challenges both vitalist accounts of instinct and the limits of behaviorism. He closes with what distinguishes human beings: conceptual thought, language and a new way of accumulating and transmitting knowledge.

1. 0:00 — Opening
2. 0:46 — Ethology and Darwin
3. 2:07 — Why the study of behavior developed so late
4. 2:43 — Purposive psychology and behaviorism
5. 5:21 — Conditioned reflexes and the limits of behaviorism
6. 9:49 — Whitman, Heinroth and the comparative method
7. 12:28 — Behavior as evidence of evolutionary relationships
8. 15:09 — Motor patterns and intention movements
9. 16:18 — Key stimuli and innate responses
10. 17:43 — Spontaneity, thresholds and vacuum activity
11. 20:11 — Appetitive behavior and learning
12. 21:48 — The innate releasing mechanism
13. 25:08 — What distinguishes human beings
14. 26:48 — Perception, abstraction and conceptual thought
15. 29:13 — Exploration and the emergence of language
16. 30:19 — Culture as a new inheritance system

Konrad Lorenz — 1 recording in the archive.

Related reading: The Foundations of Ethology by Konrad Lorenz.

I first intended to give this speech in English. Then on second thought, I decided to speak German, which is easier to me and easier with the majority of my audience. But on third, I decided to speak English. After all, most of the younger German understand English anyhow. And I know that one as a German one understands English particularly well if it is badly spoken by another German. So this is an excuse for my undemocratic procedure. What I'm going to talk about is a very banal story. I wanted to talk about ethology. for ethology is extremely easy to define. The definition is simply the science in which the same approaches and the same methods are used with behavior as a subject as are used in all other kinds of biological sciences since the times of my old friend Charlie with Charlie Darwin. Charles Darwin knew all about ethology and you know you can always claim Darwin as the first of your science in biological sciences because he started hare off in so very many of them. And if you read Charles Darwin's book on the expression of emotions in man and animals you find practically between the lines, or even clearly outspoken all practically everything we are talking about and puzzling about nowadays. The story of ethology is interesting from the historical point of view because it is so obvious that animal and human behavior is a life function, a function of life. So it's it seems to be a matter of course that we expo approach it as any other life process. Why did not that happen until about 1910 very late after Darwin and the reason of this is purely historical. It is the outcome of a contention between two great schools of psychology. The purposive psychologists on one side McDougall, William McDougall, Edward Chace Tolman, Tolman being the most important representatives and by the behaviorists Watson and so on on the other side. This contention lasted was a grudge fight on both sides because they fought for their philosophies for Weltanschauungen. and the purposivists contended that instinct was a preternatural factor neither in need of nor accessible to a natural explanation. The instinct taught the animal what to do. It taught and also they equated the purpose. Hence the term purposive psychologist. They equated the purpose followed by the animal or by man…