41 Facts About Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist.

Konrad Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch.

Konrad Lorenz is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.

Konrad Lorenz developed an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth.

Konrad Lorenz's work was interrupted by the onset of World War II and in 1941 he was recruited into the German Army as a medic.

Konrad Lorenz wrote numerous books, some of which, such as King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog, became popular reading.

Konrad Lorenz was the son of Adolf Konrad Lorenz, a wealthy and distinguished surgeon, and his wife Emma, a physician who had been her husband's assistant.

Konrad Lorenz was educated at the Public Schottengymnasium of the Benedictine monks in Vienna.

At the request of his father, Adolf Konrad Lorenz, he began a premedical curriculum in 1922 at Columbia University, but he returned to Vienna in 1923 to continue his studies at the University of Vienna.

Konrad Lorenz graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1928 and became an assistant professor at the Institute of Anatomy until 1935.

Konrad Lorenz finished his zoological studies in 1933 and received his second doctorate.

In 1936, at an international scientific symposium on instinct, Konrad Lorenz met his great friend and colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen.

One result of these studies was that Konrad Lorenz "realized that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals".

Konrad Lorenz sought to be a motorcycle mechanic, but instead he was assigned as a military psychologist, conducting racial studies on humans in occupied Poznan under Rudolf Hippius.

The degree to which Konrad Lorenz participated in the project is unknown, but the project director Hippius referred a couple of times to Konrad Lorenz as an "examining psychologist".

Konrad Lorenz later described that he once saw transports of concentration camp inmates at Fort VII near Poznan, which made him "fully realize the complete inhumanity of the Nazis".

Konrad Lorenz was sent to the Russian front in 1944 where he quickly became a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1948.

Konrad Lorenz himself claimed that he was captured in 1942, where in reality he was only sent to the front and captured in 1944, leaving out entirely his involvement with the Poznan project.

In 1958, Konrad Lorenz transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen.

Konrad Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns" with two other important early ethologists, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch.

Konrad Lorenz was a friend and student of renowned biologist Sir Julian Huxley.

Konrad Lorenz retired from the Max Planck Institute in 1973 but continued to research and publish from Altenberg and Grunau im Almtal in Austria.

Konrad Lorenz married his childhood friend, Margarethe Gebhardt, a gynaecologist, daughter of a market gardener who lived near the Konrad Lorenz family; they had a son and two daughters.

Konrad Lorenz lived at the Lorenz family estate, which included a "fantastical neo-baroque mansion", previously owned by his father.

Konrad Lorenz is recognized as one of the founding fathers of the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior.

Konrad Lorenz is best known for his research of the principle of attachment, or imprinting, through which in some species a bond is formed between a newborn animal and its caregiver.

Konrad Lorenz showed that this behavior of imprinting is what allows the goose to learn to recognize members of its own species, enabling them to be the object of subsequent behavior patterns such as mating.

Konrad Lorenz argued that animals have an inner drive to carry out instinctive behaviors, and that if they do not encounter the right stimulus they will eventually engage in the behavior with an inappropriate stimulus.

Konrad Lorenz considered that in order to understand the mechanisms of animal behavior, it was necessary to observe their full range of behaviors in their natural context.

Konrad Lorenz did not carry out much traditional fieldwork but observed animals near his home.

Konrad Lorenz's method involved empathizing with animals, often using anthropomorphization to imagine their mental states.

Konrad Lorenz believed that animals were capable of experiencing many of the same emotions as humans.

Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz contributed to making Ethology a recognized sub-discipline within Biology and founded the first specialized journal of the field "Ethology".

Konrad Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime.

Konrad Lorenz's published writing during the Nazi period included support for Nazi ideas of "racial hygiene" couched in pseudoscientific metaphors.

Konrad Lorenz was shown to have made anti-Semitic jokes on 'Jewish characteristics' in letters to his mentor Heinroth.

Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz developed the idea of an innate releasing mechanism to explain instinctive behaviors.

Konrad Lorenz claimed that there was widespread contempt for the descriptive sciences.

Konrad Lorenz predicted the relationship between market economics and the threat of ecological catastrophe.

Konrad Lorenz adopts an ecological model to attempt to grasp the mechanisms behind this contradiction.

Konrad Lorenz was one of the early scientists who argue that human overpopulation could cause environmental degradation.