Lorenz then makes his critical transition from bones to behavior: “s it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group-just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today” (p. The zoologist concludes that whale, bat and man evolved from a common ancestor” (p. But the bones of these structures reveal an essential similarity of design. Writing in Scientific American in 1958 2, Lorenz begins with a familiar discussion of the evolution of forelimbs: “A whale's flipper, a bat's wing and a man's arm are as different from one another in outward appearance as they are in the functions they serve. Lorenz aimed to do for behavior what Charles Darwin's evolutionary insights did for bones. In 1973, the young science of ethology received a significant vote of approval when three of its founders-Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch-received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. One of the founders of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, popularized this new discipline for the general public with his many famous images of “imprinted” ducklings walking behind the bearded Austrian as if he were their mother.
Ethology is a subdiscipline of zoology devoted to understanding behavior in its natural context. The modern study of instinct began in the 1930s with the emergence of ethology.
As Patrick Bateson 1 has pointed out, this conceptual confusion about instinct is reflected in the many meanings that are routinely ascribed to it, including: The more we dive into these matters, the harder it is to settle on any clear notion of what an instinct actually is. Scratch the surface of any complex, adaptive behavior and one is confronted with a seemingly endless array of hard questions spanning evolutionary and developmental time, the intricacies of ecological and social experience, and the machinations of the nervous system with its billions of neurons.
Such labels may seem gratifying, but it is an illusory gratification. How do birds know to migrate south for the winter? How do border collies know to herd sheep? How do sea turtles find their way back home to the beach on which they hatched? As a shorthand-as an aid to communication-we might talk about a migratory instinct, a herding instinct, or a homing instinct. Every complex behavior challenges us to identify its origins.
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