Konrad Lorenz Facts
Konrad Lorenz Facts
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| Interesting Konrad Lorenz Facts: |
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| Konrad Lorenz was born in Vienna, Austria in a large house where he was allowed to keep a variety of animals. |
| Lorenz credits his parents' encouragement of his love of animals with having a decisive impact on his career choice. |
| He was a keen observer even as a child and studied the imprinting behavior in ducks and wild geese. |
| During high school, Lorenz was introduced to evolution and wanted to major in biology but his father pushed him into the study of medicine and in 1922 he entered Columbia Medical School. |
| In 1923 he transferred to the University of Vienna where he received his M.D. in 1928. |
| He finished his studies in zoology in 1933 and received his second PhD. |
| In 1936 Lorenz met his future friend and colleague, Nikolaas Tinbergen and together they studied the instinctual behavior of wild and domestic geese. |
| In 1940 he accepted a post as professor of psychology at the University of Konigsberg and in 1941 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. |
| He was assigned to a camp at Poznan as a psychologist to study racial mixing in humans and its impact on their psychology and biology. |
| The real world impact of his work was that those found unfit were sent to concentration camps. |
| His membership in the Nazi party, his pseudo-scientific support for their ideas of racial purity, and his work at Poznan led many to doubt the objectivity of his future work. |
| From 1958 to 1973 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology. |
| He is considered the father of ethology which is the study of animal behavior as a separate field of study from their morphology and biology. |
| His best known for the discovery of imprinting behavior in which some newborn animals form a special attachment to their caregivers. |
| Those others had noticed the behavior, Lorenz was the first to discover the mechanism that limited perception makes the animal attach to the first moving object it sees. |
| He developed the theory that animal behavior is largely instinctual but is triggered by environmental stimuli. |
| He believed that the laboratory setting changed animal behaviors and carried out much of his research in the field. |
| In 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tinbergen. |
| His other awards included the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1964), the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science (1969), the Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany I1984) |
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