Nature Approaches to Development: Konrad Lorenz and the Concept of “Instinct”

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989) was the foremost proponent of a branch of biology termed ethology, which involves the study of the evolutionary, and it is thus argued, the hereditary bases of animal behavior. Lorenz’s ethological work was built around his conceptualization of the notion of “instinct,” a conceptualization that was a key intellectual basis of the hereditarian theory of behavior and development termed sociobiology (Wilson, 1975). Historian Robert Richards (1987, p. 528) explained that Lorenz “gave conceptual and empirical shape to the modern science of ethology, the science which has been further elaborated into (and . . . Wilson believes absorbed by) sociobiology.”