Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology

  • Richard W. Burkhardt
University of Chicago Press: 2005. 636 pp. $80, £56 (hbk); $29, £20.50 (pbk) 0226080897 | ISBN: 0-226-08089-7

The Austrian Konrad Lorenz and Dutchman Niko Tinbergen founded ethology, the study of animal behaviour, at the start of the twentieth century. The history of the ‘study of instinct’, as it was once known, attracts interest from a range of disciplines, and this naturally affects the viewpoint of books on the subject. Niko's Nature (Oxford University Press, 2003), for example, a recent biography of Tinbergen, was written by his one-time friend and pupil Hans Kruuk (for a review see Nature 427, 293–294; 2004). In contrast, Richard Burkhardt is a historian, not an ethologist, so his book Patterns of Behavior is quite different. Nevertheless, it is not a dry factual biography of a scientific discipline, but a fascinating and often entertaining account of the life and work of some of ethology's key figures. Burkhardt has done a tremendous job, meticulously analysing and describing the rise of ethology. He consulted a multitude of written sources and interviewed many of the important players.

Up close and personal: Konrad Lorenz liked to observe birds in their natural habitats. Credit: TIME LIFE/GETTY IMAGES

Modern history of science is not only about scientific concepts, Burkhardt explains, but is just as much about the social context of the individual scientists — what he likes to call “ethology's ecologies”. The term ‘ethology’ was introduced by the American William Wheeler, and US biologists active around the end of the nineteenth century might have contributed much more to the development of ethology if they'd had the resources and the intellectual freedom to pursue their empirical studies and develop new ideas. A particularly poignant example of this is the pioneering biologist Wallace Craig, who greatly influenced Lorenz but struggled to make ends meet for most of his life. When the great British ethologist William Thorpe lectured at Harvard in 1951, he paid tribute to his American colleagues Charles Otis Whitman, Wheeler and Craig. Thorpe was surprised that only one or two members of his large audience seemed to know who Craig was. According to Burkhardt: “Thorpe, supposing Craig was dead, was astonished to learn that Craig was not only alive but in the audience.”

The development of ethology has been greatly influenced by the different personalities involved. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the relationship between the two key figures in the field, Lorenz and Tinbergen. The characters of these two men could hardly have been more different. Whereas Lorenz was vain, self-centred, an extrovert and a self-styled philosopher, Tinbergen was modest, an introvert and an empiricist. Lorenz characterized himself as a ‘farmer’, who mainly observed the domesticated birds that he kept around his own house, in contrast to the ‘hunter’, Tinbergen, who conducted controlled experiments both in the field and in the laboratory. The contrast between the two men became painfully obvious during the Second World War, when Lorenz was a doctor in the German army and Tinbergen was interred in a detention camp for Dutch intellectuals. Burkhardt devotes an entire chapter to Lorenz's conduct during the Nazi regime, and shows that, blinded by ambition, Lorenz did not distance himself from Nazi doctrine. After the war it took some time for the wounds to heal so that the two friends could resume their scientific partnership.

One of Tinbergen's lasting contributions is the identification of the four main problems in animal behaviour: evolution, function, development and causation. Tinbergen has credited British biologist Julian Huxley with identifying three of these as the main problems in biology, to which he merely added development. On reading Burkhardt's account, however, it seems that Tinbergen was being rather generous towards Huxley. “It is from a failure to distinguish between ultimate cause, immediate cause, and mere necessary machinery, that so much of the barren disputes of biology are due,” wrote Huxley. It would seem that, with such a sloppy and essentially misguided interpretation, these disputes would not be solved in a hurry. Unfortunately, even Tinbergen's careful analysis of cause and function could not prevent a confusion of concepts that continues to this day.

Some will say that ethology is no longer a scientific discipline in its own right, but that depends on who you ask: a behavioural ecologist and a cognitive ethologist might give you different answers. Nevertheless, Burkhardt notes that the core ideas of classical ethology dissipated astonishingly rapidly; few contemporary ethologists would use such concepts as ‘action-specific energy’, for example. This discarding of outmoded ideas would seem natural for any vibrant scientific discipline.

Burkhardt rightly maintains that it was the empirical and theoretical approach introduced by Lorenz, Tinbergen and their colleagues that made the study of animal behaviour what it is today. In order to study the genomic or neural mechanisms of behaviour, we need to know how behaviour works, and for that an ethological analysis is crucial. This wonderful book shows very clearly how early ethologists made such analysis possible.