Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialists: On the Politics of Ethology

Abstract

The observation that science is influenced by politics has often been noted, but the details as to how, by whom, and to what ends, differ so muchfromcasetocasethatthethemeremainsinteresting. Duringthecold war it was, usually, physics and chemistry, occasionally mathematics, whose directions were thought to be influenced by political pressures (Snow, 1961). Biology came into prominence with the Vietnam War, and interest in an array of biological weapons, from defoliants to nerve gases likewise influenced a great deal of research. If one's memory goes back to earlier times, one also recalls the relations that developed between psychology and the politics of immigration and education, which had a lasting impact on developments in the study of intelligence (Gould, 1981). Nor have the politics of religion been irrelevant (Durant, 1985). I want here to provide details concerning the origins of modem ethology, or, as Lorenz termed it, the "objectivistic study of instinct" (1956). My study of the history of ethology has persuaded me that its principal tenets came equally from the observations of the animals Konrad Lorenz grew up with, as with Lorenz's enthusiasm for the doctrines of the National Socialists of Germany in the 1930s. Not that ethology was a Nazi plot; how could it be with Tinbergen, a Resistance fighter, and Von Frisch, a consistent if quiet opponent of the Nazis, as co-founders? But, it was Lorenz, in the 1940s, who principally defined the fundamentals of ethology, and it is the source of his ideas that we now have reason to believe were corrupt.