Description
This book is an English translation of six of Konrad Lorenz’s early ethological papers. Of these, two are fairly straightforward descriptive accounts of bird behaviour; the third is a long and detailed investigation of social behaviour in birds, in which Lorenz introduces the concept of the Kumpan—the companion as seen from the bird’s peculiar point of view; the fourth paper elaborates Lorenz’s conception of instinctive behaviour, showing how it differs from other conceptions such as McDougall’s; the fifth applies Lorenz’s general conceptual scheme in the analysis of one particular behaviour pattern (the egg-rolling of the greylag goose); and the last paper is an attack on the kind of teleological explanations of behaviour given by early vitalist-inclined ethologists such as Bierens de Haan.
In addition to the papers themselves Lorenz has written a new introduction in which he has some justifiable criticisms to make of Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape, and Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative. ‘There is also a collection of notes at the end which correct and clarify certain points in the original papers. One remarkable fact here is that so few corrections should be required after a period of thirty years in which ethology has developed very rapidly.
This book, it should be clear, is primarily a book for ethologists and others interested in animal behaviour, but it is also the sort of book in which more philosophical issues lurk just beneath the surface, occasionally breaking through as when Lorenz confesses that his theory of instinct has an affinity with Cartesian interactionism (p. 312). Elsewhere he has claimed that his position on the mind- body question is that of a “well-disciplined psycho-physiological parallelist” who recognises that (the higher) animals have desires, beliefs, and so on, but who denies that such “subjective” phenomena can be taken into account by “objective” ethological investigations. This position is shared by other ethologists (e.g. Tinbergen) but whereas the others especially recent writers such as Hinde-make a fairly serious attempt to put their principles into practice, and try to limit their descriptions of behaviour to descriptions of bodily movements (and their effects and functions), Lorenz will at times cheerfully talk about what his animals feel. In the early paper on the behaviour of jackdaws he uses language not very different from that found in his popular work King Solomon’s Ring, remarking for example that his oldest jackdaw “was, as a general rule, absolutely devoted and affectionate towards me and passionately hated the young jackdaws” (p. 10).
