Konrad Lorenz: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Konrad Z Lorenz being followed by his imprinted geese

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (November 7, 1903 - February 27, 1989) was an Austrian zoologist and ornithologist; and founder of modern ethology. He studied instinctive behaviour in animals, especially in grey geese. He discovered the principle of imprinting in psychology.

Professor at the University of Vienna from 1928-1935, professor in Psychology at the University of Königsberg 1940, joined the German army in 1941, POW in Russia 1944-48. The Max Planck Society establishes the Lorenz institute for behavioural physiology in Buldern, northern Germany in 1950. In 1958 he transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in Seewiesen. He published his best known book in 1963 Das sogenannte Böse which espouses his "Triebstauhypothese" (the "Psychohydraulic Model of Motivation"). He retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg and Grünau in Austria. He died on February 27, 1989, in Altenberg.

For discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns, Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch.

Lorenz was also a friend and student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (grandson of "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley).

Other famous texts by him include King Solomons Ring and On Aggression.

There are three Konrad Lorenz Institutes in Austria.

During the final years of his life Lorenz supported the fledgling Austrian Green Party, becoming the figurehead, in 1984, of the Konrad Lorenz Volksbegehren, a grassroots movement that was formed to prevent the building of a power plant at the Danube near Hainburg and thus the destruction of the yet untouched woodland surrounding the planned site.

Bibliography

• "King Soloman's Ring" (1952)
• "Man Meets Dog" (1954)
• "Evolution and Modification of Behavior" (1965)
• "Behind the Mirror" (1966)
• "On Aggression" (1966)
• "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins" (1974)
• "Studies in Animal and Human Behavior Vol I" (1970)
• "Studies in Animal and Human Behavior Vol II" (1971)
• "The Foundations of Ethology" (1982)