The Animal Watchers

In a surprise move last week, Sweden's Karolinska Institutet awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine--which usually goes to researchers in disease or laboratory science--to three behavioral scientists: Karl von Frisch, 86, Konrad Lorenz, 69, and Nikolaas Tinbergen, 66. They will share $120,000 in prize money and the satisfaction of seeing ethology, the scientific field which they virtually created, recognized by the highest of academic accolades.

Ethology, the study of animal behavior and its relationships to man, may not be a household word, but its flashier discoveries, like male bonding and territoriality, have become common currency. Ethology did not begin with best-selling grandiose comparisons between the habits of men and apes. It started with years of painstaking observation of bees, fish and birds by the three prizewinners. It stems from the once unthinkable idea that men and beasts are species in the same animal kingdom and have comparable patterns of behavior.

An Austrian who did most of his research at the University of Munich, Karl von Frisch established after decades of observation that bees communicate with each other through a complicated, highly articulate language of dance. He found, for instance, that a bee returning from a source of honey near the hive will perform a "round" dance, but if the source is more than about 160 ft. away, he will "waggle" instead. When the scout bee steps forward during the waggling dance, it points the way to the source. Having written the classic book on the subject, The Dancing Bees, Von Frisch went on to publish Man and the Living World (1936), an ethological survey of the life sciences. It ranges from behaviorist speculations on the cause of man's relatively weak sense of smell (since man stands upright, his nose is too far from the ground to follow spoors any more) to the fact that calluses on the feet are inherited.

With less experimental finesse, perhaps, but with greater intellectual capacity, another Viennese, Konrad Lorenz, began his studies of ducks and a gaggle of other animals in early childhood. Since then, in Austria and, after 1951, at the Max Planck Institute of Behavioral Physiology near Munich, he confirmed that his animal subjects inherited certain instincts, but that other kinds of behavior are learned or "imprinted." The newborn duckling will be imprinted to follow the first moving object it sees, whether it is its mother, a cardboard box or a balloon.

War and Violence. Later, Lorenz applied his insights into animal instinct and imprinting to man in a series of popular books, including King Solomon's Ring (1949) and On Aggression (1963). Perhaps his most controversial theory views animal and human aggression as an instinctive drive with a number of useful features. Aggression's ugly side--war and violence--will be selected out of human behavior by the evolutionary "power of human reason."

It is no accident that the problem of instinctive aggression has also preoccupied Oxford's Holland-born laureate, Nikolaas Tinbergen. He did postdoctoral research under Lorenz in Vienna in 1937. Known to a generation of awed students as a tireless stalker of gulls on windswept cliffs, Tinbergen is a master experimenter who has found ingenious ways to test his own and others' hypotheses. After many tedious years of studying the stickleback fish, he was able to delineate its patterns of fighting and courtship: the male builds an elaborate nest of water plants and lunges fiercely at any rival male that dares to enter its newly claimed territory. Tinbergen was able to prove that this behavior was rigidly instinctual. This knowledge was used by other researchers, including Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, 1968), as a basis for investigating behavior in the higher mammals and in man, for, though human beings function less slavishly by instinct than sticklebacks, it is the contention of ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen that inherited behavior patterns, notably in aggression of rival males, are common to both fish and people.

On the other hand, ethologists are also leary of going too far with this kind of anthropomorphic thinking. Lorenz has said: "However much we may learn that is suggestive and instructive by studying animal behavior, we must be careful how we apply these lessons when we interpret human behavior. For man is certainly an animal, but man, although identifiably a primate, is also a primate of a unique--and uniquely dangerous&$151;species."

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