Working Papers on The Nature of Evidence:

How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?

No. 32/08

Dilemmas in the
Constitution of and Exportation
of Ethological Facts

Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.

© Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.

Department of History
University of Illinois

August 2008
“The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?” is funded by
The Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC at the Department of Economic
History, London School of Economics.

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Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts1

Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.

Abstract
Early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz faced
a problem: What constituted a fact about behaviour? How reliably
must a behaviour be exhibited (and in how many specimens) before
it could be said to be species-typical? And how similar do the
behaviours of two species need to be before it is reasonable to say
that the behaviour is true of both? They sought to convince others of
their claims for interspecific behavioural commonalities through a
number of means – writings, diagrams, films – and enjoyed some
notable successes. But establishing facts about behaviour that
would hold across multiple species was a dispute still largely
contained within the relatively esoteric discipline of ethology. It was
only a matter of time before the species boundaries being crossed
were more controversial. For if the problem of establishing that a fact
about goose-behaviour is also a fact about duck-behaviour was of
limited interest, it was of considerably more significance when one of
those species was human. With the publication of works such as
Lonrenz’s On Aggression and E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, what had
been a marginal issue for zoology was now of considerable political
significance, and the original claims for inter-specific behavioural
similarities fell under renewed and intense scrutiny – leading to the
reexamination of the original facts on which ethology was
predicated.

In 1949, the fledgling ethologist Robert Hinde observed a happy

interchange between Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the founders of
ethology, in their first days together after the Second World War. The
location was Cambridge, England. The occasion for the ethologists being
in Cambridge was a special symposium on “Physiological Mechanisms in

1
Sections of this paper are based on my book, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko
Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), the
research for which was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (SOC78-
05922 and SBE9122970), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1992-1993), and the
Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

1
Animal Behaviour,” hosted by the Society for Experimental Biology. The
interchange in question happened outside of the official proceedings. As
Hinde recalled:
We were walking down Jesus Lane in Cambridge, and Tinbergen
and Lorenz were discussing how often you had to see an animal
do something before you could say that the species did it. Konrad
said he had never made such a claim unless he had seen the
behaviour at least five times. Niko laughed and clapped him on
the back and said “Don’t be silly, Konrad, you know you have
often said it when you have only seen it once!” Konrad laughed
even louder, acknowledging the point and enjoying the joke at his
own expense.2
This story is instructive for what it tells about Lorenz and Tinbergen and
their relationship to one another. It is also helpful in introducing the subject
of the construction of ethological facts. Before addressing the topic of
ethological facts traveling, however, it is worth saying something about the
kinds of facts in which the ethologists were interested in the first place.
Central to the ethologists’ enterprise was their identification of what
they understood to be innate, species-specific behavior patterns. Innate
behavior patterns, as Lorenz explained at the Cambridge meeting, are
“something which animals of a species ‘have got,’ exactly in the same
manner as they ‘have got’ claws or teeth of a definite morphological
structure.”3 To Lorenz, the implications of this were far-reaching. The
founding insight of his field – its “Archimedean point,” as he liked to call it –
was the notion that innate behavior patterns -- just like claws, teeth, or
other body parts -- needed to be understood from “the comparative,
evolutionary viewpoint.” Instinctive behavior, in other words, could be used
just like physical structures not only in identifying species but also in
reconstructing phylogenies and assessing genetic affinities. For Lorenz,
2
R. A. Hinde, “Nikolaas Tinbergen,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 36
(1990): 547–565, quote on p. 553.
3
Lorenz, “The comparative method in studying innate behaviour patterns,” Symposia of the
Society for Experimental Biology, 4, (1950), p. 238.

2
this was the defining feature of his whole enterprise. Indeed, instead of the
word “ethology,” he preferred to call his field “comparative behavior study”
(Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung).
That said, we also need to consider how the ethologists positioned
themselves with respect to other disciplines. Prior to the war, the
ethologists were especially concerned with distinguishing themselves from
animal psychologists. They had insisted that they were addressing critical
biological questions that the animal psychologists were ignoring, most
notably the questions of evolutionary history and survival value. In addition,
they claimed that ethology represented a more objectivistic approach to
behavior than did the approaches of such major, subjectivistic animal
psychologists as the Dutch scientist J. A. Bierens de Haan. In 1942, in an
early, programmatic statement of what ethology was all about, Tinbergen
maintained that ethology’s aim was to understand innate behavior in
physiological terms.4 In Cambridge, England, seven years afterwards, the
ethologists were in effect hoping to demonstrate how far they had come in
this regard.5 The conference had been organized by Tinbergen and W. H.
Thorpe, the Cambridge entomologist-turned-ethologist. They wanted to set
up a venue where ethologists could present the results of their research to
physiologists. Later, in the 1950s, the ethologists’ primary target would be
the American behaviorists.
The historical point to be stressed here is that with respect to facts
described, questions asked, methods employed, and theories ventured,
ethologists looked toward a number of different disciplines, at different
times, with an eye to impressing or influencing practitioners in those areas.
Over time, they broadcast the nature of their work through interdisciplinary
seminars and conferences, public lectures, articles, books, films, and so
4
N. Tinbergen, “An objectivistic study of the innate behaviour of animals,” Bibliotheca
Biotheoretica, 1 (1942), 39-98.
5
The conference is discussed in Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, pp. 306-325.

3
on. A number of scientists in other disciplines facilitated their efforts, while
still other scientists criticized or ignored them. Among the examples of
ethological facts traveling to be mentioned here, some were boosted in
their travels by the images associated with them, others were aided by the
activity of individuals friendly to the ethologists’ cause, and others failed to
reach their intended destination when the particular package in which they
had been embedded was rejected as unwanted.
To be sure, the ethologists were not interested in transmitting just
facts. The Cambridge conference of 1949 was where Lorenz presented his
famous psycho-hydraulic model of instinctive action. There too Tinbergen
presented a model of his own, that of the hierarchical organization of
behavior. All the while, however, the ethologists took pains to stress the
factual foundations of their models. Lorenz acknowledged the “extreme
crudeness and simplicity” of his psycho-hydraulic model but insisted that
the model symbolized, in his words, “a surprising wealth of facts really
encountered in the reactions of animals.”6 In addition, he emphasized the
strong, empirical inclinations of ethology’s forefathers. Identifying the
American biologist Charles Otis Whitman and the German ornithologist
Oscar Heinroth as the two great pioneers of comparative ethology, Lorenz
allowed that their achievements were due primarily to the fact that they
were animal lovers and empiricists. Whitman’s passion was pigeons;
Heinroth loved ducks and geese. As Lorenz cheerfully described their
work,
Happily ignorant of the great battle waged by vitalists and
mechanists on the field of animal behaviour, happily free from even
a working hypothesis, two “simple zoologists” were just observing
the pigeons and ducks they loved, and thus kept to the only way
which leads to the accumulation of a sound, unbiased basis of
induction, without which no natural science can arise.7

6
Lorenz, “The comparative method in studying innate behaviour patterns,” p. 255.
7
Lorenz, “The comparative method in studying innate behaviour patterns,” p. 222.

4
 Probably everyone in Lorenz’s audience recognized this as
hyperbole. If not, they should have. Whitman was indeed a lover of
pigeons, but he was also thoroughly engaged with the broadest questions
of biology. Issues of evolution, heredity, and development constituted the
raison d’être of Whitman’s pigeon studies. The portrait of a happy
empiricist does not suit him in the least. Heinroth, on the other hand, fits
the picture better. He and his wife Magdalena, in their classic study on the
birds of central Europe, operated on the assumption that what was innate
and what was learned in different bird species could only be determined by
means of experiments conducted on a species-by-species basis. Their
painstaking multi-year project involved rearing individuals of every different
central European bird species by hand, from the egg, and watching how
each bird behaved from the time it hatched all the way to its adulthood.8
Even Heinroth, though, was capable of looking up from his facts to see a
broader vision. In 1910 he expressed what might be called the “sooner or
later” motif of animal behavior studies, that is to say, the belief that such
studies would ultimately have something of value to offer for understanding
human behavior. At the international ornithological congress of 1910 he
closed his paper on the ethology of ducks and geese with the prediction:
“The study of the ethology of the higher animals—unfortunately a still very
untilled field—will bring us ever closer to the realization that in our conduct
with family and strangers, in courtship and the like, it is more a matter of
purely inborn, more primitive processes than we commonly believe.”9

8
Heinroth, Oskar and Magdalena Heinroth, Die Vögel Mitteleuropas in allen Lebens- und
Entwicklungsstufen photographisch aufgenommen und in ihrem Seelenleben bei der Aufzucht
vom Ei ab beobachtet, 4 vols. (Berlin: H. Bermühler, 1924-1934).
9
Oskar Heinroth, Beiträge zur Biologie: namentlich Ethologie und Psychologie der Anatiden,” in
Verhandlungen des 5. Internationalen Ornithologen-Kongresses in Berlin, 30 Mai bis 4. Juni
1910, ed. Herman Schalow, pp. 589-702 (Berlin: Deutsche Ornithologische Gesellschaft), p. 702.
All translations from the German are by the author.

5
 Lorenz would embrace this goal a generation later. In 1931, not long
after becoming acquainted with Heinroth and Heinroth’s work, Lorenz
wrote ecstatically to the older man saying: “Who knows what will become
of today’s human psychology if one can only know what is instinctive
behavior and what is rational behavior in humans? Who knows how human
morals with their drives and inhibitions would look if one could analyze
them like the social drives and inhibitions of a jackdaw.”10 From the 1930s
onward, Lorenz was keen to proclaim that the study of animal social
instincts would shed light on human social instincts. This appears indeed
to have been one of the reasons he welcomed the German takeover of
Austria in the spring of 1938. In the years immediately preceding that, he
had begun to believe that his career as a scientist in Austria was being
thwarted by the Catholic educational establishment, which wanted no part
of his ideas about the animal roots of human behavior. He imagined that
the Third Reich would provide a more receptive Weltanschauung for his
ideas.11
We will come back to the topic of extrapolating from animal behavior
to human behavior. For now, let us shift attention to the relations between
early ethology and American comparative psychology, with special
attention to facts crossing borders.
In 1899, Charles Otis Whitman threw a gauntlet down to modern
animal psychologists. In a paper entitled “Myths in animal psychology,” he
skewered a handful of writers who had misinterpreted various facts of
animal behavior. One of the authors was the Englishman George John
Romanes. Romanes had repeated an account provided to him by an
English lady, who had described the way a male pigeon performed
courtship displays to a ginger beer bottle whenever the bottle was put in
10
Heinroth, Oskar and Konrad Lorenz, Wozu aber hat das Vieh diesen Schnabel? Briefe aus der
frühen Verhaltensforschung, 1930-1940, edited by Otto Koenig (Munich: Piper, 1988), p. 42.
11
See Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, chapter 5.

6
the bird’s vicinity. Romanes offered the bird’s behavior as an instance of
avian insanity. Whitman, who knew pigeon behavior better than anyone
else, offered Romanes’s analysis instead as an example of how far one
could go astray if one had not first gained a thorough knowledge of the
normal behavior of the species in question. In Whitman’s words: “The
qualification absolutely indispensable to reliable diagnosis of an animal’s
conduct is an intimate acquaintance with the creature’s normal life, its
habits and instincts. Little can be expected in this most important field of
comparative psychology until investigators realize that such qualification is
not furnished by parlor psychology.” What was required, he continued, was
nothing less than years of close study….” Later in his paper Whitman
complained again of “students ambitious to reach the heights of
comparative psychology through a few hours of parlor diversion with caged
animals, or by a few experiments on domestic animals.”12
These themes would be repeated half a century later. Ethologists
would insist that the first thing a student of animal behavior needed to do
was to learn the full behavioral repertoires of the particular species in
which he or she was interested. Ethologists would furthermore complain
about the psychologists’ use of a limited number of highly domesticated
animal races, especially the white rat. By the 1940s and 1950s, however,
they could no longer claim that the psychologists had spent just a few
hours in their studies. American comparative psychology had by this time
put hundreds of researchers to work for their entire careers doing
experiments on learning in the white rat.
We will return to the comparative psychologists, but first let us
consider an interesting experiment conducted by Tinbergen and Lorenz in
the spring of 1937 when Tinbergen spent three months at Lorenz’s home
in Altenberg, Austria. The two zoologists never wrote up the experiment
12
C. O. Whitman, “Myths in animal psychology,” Monist 9 (1899), 524-537.

7
fully, but Lorenz described it briefly in a paper of 1939, and Tinbergen did
the same, with illustrations, in a paper of 1948 and then again in his book,
The Study of Instinct, in 1951.13 The experiment tested the reactions of
hand-reared fowl of various species to simulated flying predators, the latter
being dummies of a variety of shapes made from cardboard. The
experimenters strung up a rope between two tall trees and pulled the
dummies along the rope to mimic the motion of birds in flight.
Tinbergen and Lorenz tried their experiment on virtually all the
young fowl that Lorenz had at Altenberg in the spring of 1937. Young
greylag geese, turkeys, and numerous species of ducks were all tested.
The cardboard dummies were pulled along the rope, above the birds, at
different speeds and in both directions. The results, significantly enough,
differed per species. It was not the case for the geese and the ducks, but
for young turkeys the shape of the moving dummy seemed to make a
difference. Dummies with “short necks” elicited the turkeys’ alarm calls
much more readily than did dummies with “long necks.” Most remarkably,
the investigators found they could actually evoke these results with a
single, relatively crude dummy constructed with the “wings” located toward
one end of the body in such a way as to make one end of the body short
and the other long. Which end appeared as the “head” and which
appeared as the “tail” depended on the direction in which the dummy was
pulled. The young turkeys displayed the most alarm when the dummy was
moved slowly above them with its short end forward and its long end to the
rear. When the dummy was moved with its long end forward, the turkeys
were calmer.
13
See Konrad Lorenz, “Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung,” Verhandlungen der Deutschen
Zoologischen Gesellschaft, Zoologischer Anzeiger, supp. 12 (1939): 69–102, on pp. 92–94; N.
Tinbergen, “Social releasers and the experimental method required for their study,” Wilson
Bulletin 60 (1948): 6–51, on p. 7; N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1951), on pp. 77-78. Tinbergen’s field notes of the experiments, dated from 16 March to
11 June 1937, are among the Nikolaas Tinbergen papers preserved at Oxford University at the
Bodleian Library, Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts.

8
Figure 1: Tinbergen’s illustration of some of the different shapes he and
Lorenz used for dummies when testing the innate fear responses of
juvenile birds. From Tinbergen (1948).

Figure 2: Tinbergen’s illustration of “a card board dummy that elicits

escape reactions [in young turkeys] when sailed to the right (‘hawk’) but is
ineffective when sailed to the left (‘goose’). From Tinbergen (1948).

The two naturalists concluded that the difference corresponded to

the basic shapes of avian predators versus avian nonpredators. Predators
like hawks have short necks relative to the rest of their bodies.
Nonpredators like geese have long necks relative to the rest of their
bodies. Tinbergen and Lorenz concluded that the young turkeys’ response
to the gestalt of the slowly moving, short-end-forward shape was an innate

9
response, forged by natural selection, to an environmental cue signaling
“predator.”
Here, certainly, was an experiment involving specific facts. Here too
was an explanation to go with them. These traveled far enough beyond the
bounds of ethology to elicit a challenge in 1955 from three American
psychologists: Jerry Hirsch, R. H. Lindley, and E. C. Tolman. They
undertook to replicate the Tinbergen-Lorenz experiment using white
leghorn chickens. Failing to get similar results, they summarized their
findings as follows: “The Tinbergen hypothesis that certain specifically
shaped sign stimuli innately arouse a fear response was tested on the
white Leghorn chicken and found to be untenable under controlled
laboratory conditions.”14 This conclusion drew critical responses from both
Tinbergen and Lorenz. As Tinbergen put it “Whatever the shortcomings of
‘ethological’ studies may be, one thing they have demonstrated
convincingly: the fact that different species usually behave differently in the
same situation.” The obvious implications of this were that “Facts found in
one species, or hypotheses formed about one species, simply cannot be
disproved by testing another species, under however well ‘controlled
laboratory conditions.’” He additionally observed that the white leghorn
chicken was a poor choice as a test animal, stating: “it is known that the
behavior of domesticated forms often differs considerably from that of the
wild ancestral forms.” Lorenz echoed Tinbergen’s criticism of the American
psychologists’ paper. It was as if, Lorenz said, one scientist reported
finding melanins in the fur of wild hamsters and another scientist claimed

14
Jerry Hirsch, R. H. Lindley, and E. C. Tolman, “An experimental test of an alleged innate sign
stimulus,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 48 (1955), 278-280, quote on p.
280.

10
to refute this by saying that his own studies on white, laboratory rats
showed the hamster results to be untenable.15
The ethologists’ response was entirely valid. It does not negate it to
note that in 1961, Wolfgang Schleidt, one of Lorenz’s students, redid the
Tinbergen-Lorenz turkey experiment and found that young turkeys do not
respond to specific shapes but rather to the speed at which the shapes
moved. 16 Nor is the ethologists’ response negated by the fact that Lorenz
himself often leapt from one species to another in ways that left other
scientists uncomfortable.
But we are still not done with the hawk-goose story, which has yet
more to offer with respect to the theme of facts traveling. (The author
thanks Wolfgang Schleidt for the details that are to follow.) Despite the
doubts that Schleidt’s turkey experiments cast on the interpretation of the
original experiments of 1937, the images from Tinbergen’s 1948 paper and
from his 1951 book, The Study of Instinct, continued to be reproduced.
They appeared on the covers of two important animal behavior textbooks
of the 1960s, Peter Marler and William J. Hamilton III’s Mechanisms of
Animal Behavior (1966), and Aubrey Manning’s An Introduction to Animal
Behavior (1967).17 The cover of the Marler and Hamilton book featured the
various shapes of the dummies that Tinbergen had used in the
experiments. Manning’s book cover used the single, two-directional,
“hawk-dove” model.
Manning was familiar with Schleidt’s study, and he cited it.
Manning’s summary conclusion, nonetheless, was that “there is evidence

15
N. Tinbergen, “On anti-predator responses in certain birds – a reply,” Journal of comparative
and physiological psychology,” 50 (1957), 412-414, quotes from pp. 412-413. Konrad Lorenz,
Evolution and Modification of Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 100.
16
W. M. Schleidt, “Reaktionen von Truthühnern auf fliegende Raubvögel und Versuche zur
Analyse ihres AAM’s,” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 18 (1961): 534–560.
17
Peter Marler and William J. Hamilton, III, Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (New York: Wiley,
1966); Aubrey Manning, An Introduction to Animal Behavior (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley,1967).

11
that wild birds do possess an IRM [Innate Releasing Mechanism] which
enables them to respond to birds of prey on the first occasion that they see
them. This IRM probably has different properties in different species but
short neck and relative speed of movement are among them.”18 Less
nuanced was the response of the distinguished ornithologist and secretary
of the Smithsonian Institution, S. Dillon Ripley, an admirer of the work of
Lorenz & Tinbergen. Ripley became a major proponent of the idea that the
silhouette of a raptor could deter songbirds from flying into windows. Under
his direction the Smithsonian Museum shop began marketing raptor
stickers to put on windowpanes. Such stickers continue to be used today,
without any evidence that they actually work.19
Let us return now to the fact of significant interspecific differences in
behavior. It would be worth attempting to track how this fact made its way
into American comparative psychology. That this appreciation was needed
was signaled not only by the Continental ethologists but by a few American
comparative psychologists as well. Prominent among them was Frank
Beach. In his article of 1950 entitled “The Snark was a Boojum,” Beach
indicted American comparative psychology as not having been genuinely
comparative for years. He demonstrated this through an analysis of the
papers published in the field’s primary journals over the previous four
decades. In addition to displaying his findings graphically, he characterized
the predicament with a cartoon, inspired by the story of the Pied Piper of
Hamelin. In the cartoon, the familiar roles of humans and rodents were
reversed. A rat (a white one) played the tune, while the people, a crowd of
scientists, followed eagerly behind, unaware they were being led to their
doom.20

18
Manning, An Introduction to Animal Behavior, p. 53.
19
Schleidt, personal communication with the author.
20
Beach emphasized his point further by noting that his field’s major journal perhaps ought to be
called “The Journal of Rat Learning.” The trouble with doing that, he said, was that many

12
 When Beach went on to discuss the potential benefits of a genuinely
comparative approach, the first two authors he cited, even though he was
talking about learning rather than instinct, were Tinbergen and Lorenz. He
cited Tinbergen for his studies on learning in the hunting wasp. He cited
Lorenz for his observations on imprinting in precocial birds.21
Beach’s case would be worth a more extended examination than
can be provided here. Lorenz, in a letter to W. H. Thorpe in 1955,
described how he had made a convert out of Beach by showing him films.
In Lorenz’s words: “The best means to convince people that there is such
a thing as instinctive movements is the film. I played duck films to Frank
Beach until he nearly fainted, he got seriouser and seriouser and in the
end he said in a small voice: ‘You know I did not believe a word of it and
now I believe everything.’”22 Judging from a paper Beach published the
very same year, however, it is hard to countenance the idea that he now
believed everything that Lorenz wanted him to believe about instinct. In his
1955 paper, entitled “The Descent of Instinct,” Beach suggested that when
the development of behavior in the individual came to be properly
analyzed, the concept of “instinct” would not be needed.23 Evidently while
Beach felt there were things that American comparative psychologists
could learn from continental ethology, he likewise thought there were

psychologists would not see the purpose of doing so, given that they already supposed that “in
studying the rat they [were] studying all or nearly all that is important in behavior.” Beach noted
how the leader of the discipline, B. F. Skinner, had entitled his book The Behavior of Organisms,
even though it was based, in Beach’s words, “exclusively upon the performance of rats in bar-
pressing situations.” Frank A. Beach, “The Snark was a Boojum,” American Psychologist, 5
(1950), 115-124, quote on p. 119.
21
Beach’s 1950 paper was preceded by a 1946 paper by his American comparative psychologist
colleague, T. C. Schneirla, who cited Tinbergen to the effect that American comparative
psychology was not really comparative. See Schneirla, “Contemporary American animal
psychology in perspective,” in Twentieth Century Psychology, ed. P. L. Harriman (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 306-316.
22
Beach was enlisted by Tinbergen as the first American on the editorial board of the new
ethological journal, Behaviour. Later, Beach was a regular participant in the International
Ethological Congresses and a member of the organizing board for these conferences. For
Lorenz’s letter to Thorpe, see Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior.
23
Frank A. Beach, “The Descent of Instinct,” Psychological Review, 62 (1955), 401-410.

13
insights that ethologists could gain from American comparative
psychology.
The present story would be simple enough if the ethologists’ fact of
significant interspecific differences in behavior made steady inroads into
American comparative psychology after 1950. It did make inroads, but only
haltingly, and with qualifications. There were several reasons for this. In
the first place, American comparative psychologists as a group were
simply not interested in details about animal behavior that occurred in
naturalistic rather than laboratory settings. In the second place, it was one
thing to acknowledge the existence of species-specific differences in
behavior but quite another to accept the ethologists’ assumption that the
behavior in question deserved to be called innate. In the third place, in
acknowledging the importance of interspecific behavioral differences, the
comparative psychologists could turn the tables on the ethologists and
criticize them for having too readily supposed that behavior displayed at
one level of organic complexity was comparable to behavior displayed at
another level of complexity. These last two points were among those
presented by the American psychologist Daniel Lehrman in his famous
critique of Lorenzian ethology in the Quarterly Review of Biology in 1953.
Lehrman’s paper also took note of the political dimensions of Lorenz’s
writings. Criticizing Lorenz for “[equating] the effects of civilization in
human beings with the effects of domestication in animals,” Lehrman
observed that Lorenz had promoted this idea in 1940 in support of German
race purity laws.24
Associations such as these are not incidental to how facts travel.
The question of Lorenz’s wartime affiliations would continue to lurk in the
background as Lorenz offered new pronouncements about the biological

24
Daniel S. “A Critique of Konrad Lorenz;s theory of instinctive behavior,” Quarterly Review of
Biology, 298 (1953). 354.

14
bases of human behavior and how these related to the human
predicament. Of these new pronouncements, two in particular were
especially eye-catching. Lorenz’s first claim was that the human species is
unique among higher animals in that it lacks innate inhibitions against
killing its own kind. The second claim was that aggression is an instinct,
and that, as such, it builds up internally, like a fluid in a reservoir,
eventually requiring release. Lorenz presented both of these claims
essentially as facts, though neither is credited with that status today, nor
were they universally regarded as such when Lorenz first pronounced
them.
Lorenz highlighted the first of these claims with a striking contrast
between wolves and doves. Wolves, he allowed, have been equipped by
evolution not only with fearsome weapons—their strong jaws and their
sharp teeth —but also powerful, instinctive inhibitions against using these
weapons against other wolves. When two wolves fight, and one gets the
better of the other, Lorenz explained, if the loser submissively exposes its
neck to its adversary, the victor cannot finish the loser off. Instinctive
inhibitions prevent it from doing so.
Doves, in comparison, have no powerful natural weapons. Because
of this, they have not had to develop inhibitions against hurting their own
kind. In nature, by Lorenz’s account, when two doves fight, the bird that
loses can simply fly away. If the birds are confined to a cage, however,
fleeing is impossible, and the weaker bird is in danger of being killed,
because the winner has no innate inhibitions against continuing the fight to
the end. Lorenz described how he placed a male turtledove and a female
African blond ringdove together in the same cage, hoping they would mate.
When he returned, he found that the ringdove had nearly pecked the
turtledove to death.

15
 Were there implications here for the human species? Lorenz
believed there were. The human species, he argued, is more like the dove
than the wolf when it comes to dealing with its own kind. Humans do not
have powerful natural weapons, like wolves do, and thus until relatively
recently, evolutionarily speaking, humans have had no need to develop
strong instinctive inhibitions against killing one another. Unfortunately, in
the latest stages of our history, we humans have had our science and
technology far outpace our biological evolution. That is to say, we have
developed artificial weapons of tremendous destructive power without
developing instinctive inhibitions against using them.
There are multiple problems with the story that Lorenz constructed.
One is that in citing the example of a ringdove nearly pecking to death a
bird of another species, a turtledove, he was arguing past the question of
whether animals of the same species kill each other. A second is that he
was completely ignoring the testimony of the leading expert on dove
behavior in the first half of the century, Wallace Craig (whose work Lorenz
in fact knew). Craig had already insisted that doves of the same species do
not go on fighting each other in the way that Lorenz went on to claim that
they did.25 A third problem, stemming from evidence on animal behavior
collected in the years since Lorenz made his claim, is that among non-
human higher animals the killing of members of one’s own species occurs
in some species not simply as an occasional accident, as Lorenz
maintained, but more systematically, as in the case of male lions killing off
the cubs of other sires, or male chimpanzees killing the infant chimps or
other members of another chimp tribe. This last point is a finding that
would have made no sense to Lorenz, given his predilection for “good of
the species” type arguments. It becomes more understandable in the
context of the kind “selfish gene” thinking that developed in the 1970s.
25
I discuss this more extensively in Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, pp. 451-453.

16
 The present writer has not attempted to track how far this first claim
by Lorenz traveled.26 It seems, in any case, that Lorenz’s ideas on
aggression traveled farther, at least in the sense that they were more
widely and recurrently debated. What Lorenz claimed to offer in his best-
selling book of the 1960s, On Aggression, was an analysis of the natural
history of aggression. His basic message was that the human race had to
come to understand its instinctive aggressive drives in order to learn how
to deal with them, and that essential to this understanding was a
recognition of the positive as well as the negative aspects of aggression.
Although man was faced with a predicament of the most urgent sort —“in
his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the
aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors”—Lorenz was
prepared to offer an “avowal of optimism.” He believed the biologist could
rescue humankind from its precarious state by teaching humans to change
for the better.27
Lorenz’s portrayal of aggression attracted a great amount of
attention. The critics included ethologists as well as representatives of
other disciplines. They rejected in particular his claim that aggression is an
instinct that builds up internally and requires release.28 Even as an idea
that has been rejected, this one still has a certain staying power.
Introductory psychology textbooks still cite Lorenz with some frequency.
He is the only one of the early ethologists, it seems, for which this is true.

26
Lorenz’s claim was repeated elsewhere. Anthony Storr, in his 1968 book, Human Aggression,
asserted that aside from rodents, man is the only vertebrate who “habitually destroys member of
its own species.” For an ethologist’s assessment of animal aggression as of 1976, see Peter
Marler, “On animal aggression: the roles of strangeness and familiarity,” American Psychologist,
31 (1976), 239-246.
27
Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 49, 275.
28
One of the more gentle critics was Niko Tinbergen. Tinbergen’s position was that what ethology
had to offer in the way of understanding of human behavior was not facts about other species so
much as ethology’s whole approach of looking carefully at a species and considering the
causation, development, evolution, and survival value of the species’ behavior. What Lorenz had
offered and what Tinbergen’s student Desmond Morris had offered in his book, The Naked Ape,
were in Tinbergen’s view “no more than likely guesses.”

17
He is remembered in two contexts: One as the author of an interesting but
generally discredited theory of aggression; the other as the scientist who
called attention to the phenomenon of imprinting.
Most of the “traveling facts” offered thus far in this paper have
straddled the line between facts and theories. Let us consider yet another
case, in this instance one where where some of Tinbergen’s facts passed
beyond ethology to the realm of American social science education. This
occurred in the federally-funded social science curriculum entitled “Man: A
Course of Study” – or MACOS. The prime mover of the curriculum was
Jerome Bruner, the cognitive psychologist who was co-founder and
Director as of 1960 of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard.
Bruner’s desire was to “form the intellectual powers” of the students the
curriculum was supposed to serve, namely elementary school students in
the fifth and sixth grades. He wanted students to become self-conscious
about their strategies of thought. The content of MACOS was identified in
1965 as “man: his nature as a species [and] the forces that shaped and
continue to shape his humanity.” The three recurring questions of the
course were to be: (1) “What is human about human beings?” (2) “How did
they get that way?” (3) “How can they be made more so?”29
Early on, the developers of MACOS planned to use only one animal
species, the savannah baboon, as a contrast with humans. The trouble
with this approach, as it turned out, was that the elementary school pupils
saw baboons as being so similar to humans they had trouble identifying
strong differences between the two.30 To underscore certain differences
more carefully, the educators introduced two more species: the Pacific
29
J. S. Bruner, Man: A Course of Study. Occasional Paper No. 3, The Social Studies Curriculum
Program, Educational Services Inc. (Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. 4. Cited in Peter B. Dow, “Man: A
Course of Study: A continuing exploration of man’s humanness,” in Man: A Course of Study.
Talks to Teachers. 1983 Edition (Curriculum Development Associates: Washington D.C., 1983),
p. 4.
30
Curriculum Development Associates, Man: A Course of Study. A Guide to the Course 1976
Edition (Curriculum Development Associates: Washington D.C., 1976), p. 26.

18
coast salmon and the herring gull. Baby salmon must do without parental
protection in their struggle to survive. Their story was used to highlight the
significance in humans of the length and the quality of the human infant’s
dependence on its parents. Herring gull chicks, unlike baby salmon, are
taken care of by their parents. The gull story, based on the work of
Tinbergen, was used to examine more closely the causes of animal
behavior. Observations of how the gull chicks must peck at the red spot on
their parent’s beak if they are to be fed provided an entry to the discussion
of innate versus learned behavior. The herring gull section also helped
introduce the idea that behavior patterns, like physical structures, should
be understood in terms of their adaptiveness or survival value.31 Beyond
this, the herring gull study was intended to give children the opportunity to
study territoriality, fighting, and communication. The authors of MACOS
suggested that children are intrigued by the idea of an aggressive instinct,
and the gull study would allow them to “consider the ways a human
handles his aggressive feelings without really fighting.” They
recommended that children be given a chance to act out scenes of adult
male fighting in herring gulls, where the use of particular bodily gestures
enables the antagonists to escape serious harm. They also suggested that
the teachers go to Lorenz’s book, On Aggression, for helpful background
reading.32
The teachers were introduced to the concept of natural selection by
a short piece written by the evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers. Trivers’
concluding observation was that one could not legitimately talk about
higher versus lower animals, or more evolved versus less evolved animals.
31
Teachers were encouraged to read Tinbergen’s The Herring Gull’s World and chapter six of his
Animal Behavior.
32
In Teacher’s Guide Number 4, Herring Gulls, pp. 21-22. The curriculum developers also
recommended as an “optional reading assignment”: “You or one of the better readers in your
class might read to the children parts of the last chapter of Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring. This
chapter describes many instances of animals fighting each other, and Lorenz discusses the
gestures they use to keep from inflicting serious harm upon each other.” P. 24.

19
As he put it, “in different environments, different characteristic are
adaptive.” Expressing a theme that would recur at different levels through
the course, Trivers wrote: “There are no traits in this scheme that have an
absolute value, an absolute value irrespective of the environment.”33
The notion of no traits having an absolute value irrespective of the
environment was what ultimately caused trouble for the MACOS
curriculum. Perhaps no one would have objected if the story had stopped
with herring gulls or even baboons, but when it was applied to human
behavior, as exemplified by the lives of Netsilik Eskimos, this was too
much for people who believed that human values are God-given.
In her book, Science Textbook Controversies and the Politics of
Equal Time, Dorothy Nelkin describes what transpired. United States
Congressman John Conlan of Arizona in 1974 described MACOS as “a
Godawful course,” “almost always at variance with the beliefs and values
of parents and local communities.” He urged that National Science
Foundation appropriations for MACOS be terminated because of its
“abhorrent, repugnant, vulgar and morally sick content.” Federal funds
were withdrawn, and textbook sales dropped sharply between 1974 and
1975.34
While MACOS stirred up one angry group, E. O. Wilson’s book,
Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, published in 1975, stirred up another.
The most vocal protesters in the second case were not conservative,
fundamentalist Christians but instead the radical scientists who constituted
themselves as the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People. In

33
Robert Trivers, “Natural Selection,” in Man: A Course of Study. Talks to Teachers (Curriculum
Development Associates: Washington D.C., 1970 [1983 edition]), pp. 35-41, quotation on p. 41.
This volume, Talks to Teachers, also included a section by Tinbergen entitled “The Study of
Animals,” extracted from his book Animal Behavior (New York: Time-Life Books, 1965), and a
section by Irven Devore, with the assistance of R. Trivers and I. Rothman, entitled “Innate and
Learned Behavior.”
34
Dorothy Nelkin, Science Textbook Controversies and the Politics of Equal Time (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), p. 112.

20
their attack on Wilson, they lumped him together with Lorenz as a
biological determinist and noted that Lorenz had been associated with the
Nazis. But there were other critics as well. One of these was the American
psychologist Frank Beach. Prominent among Beach’s complaints was “[the
sociobiologists’] apparent omission or disregard of facts concerning
interspecific similarities and especially interspecific differences.” Explaining
the flaws in Wilson’s discussions of what Wilson blithely termed
“homosexuality” in a wide range of animals, Beach wrote: “There is a
fundamental rule that applies to all such cases whether whether the
comparison is between animals and humans or between different species
of animals. The validity of interspecific comparison is limited by the
reliability of intraspecific analysis.
Meaningful comparisons between Species A and Species B simply
are not possible until the behavior in question has been analyzed with
equal care, objectivity, and precision in both species.”35
Earlier in this paper, when discussing Heinroth’s comments on
animal and human social instincts, we spoke of the “sooner or later” motif
of animal behavior study. A second key motif of animal behavior studies
seems to have been the one we have just seen Beach expressing, namely,
that in seeking implications for humans through the study of animal
behavior, close scrutiny is critical in constituting the facts in the first place,
for all the species concerned, before concluding how far these facts might
appropriately travel. These motifs are mirror images of each other. The
ongoing tension between them, closely tied to the question of which facts
should or should not be allowed or encouraged to “travel,” has much to do
with the perennial fascination of studying animal behavior.

35
Frank A. Beach, “Sociobiology and interspecific comparisons of behavior,” in Michael S
Gregory, Anita Silvers, and Diane Sutch, eds., Sociobiology and Human Nature: An
Interdisciplinary Critique and Defense (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), pp. 116-135, quote
on p. 131.

21
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

WORKING PAPERS IN: THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE: HOW WELL

DO “FACTS” TRAVEL?

For further copies of this, and to see other titles in the department’s
group of working paper series, visit our website at:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economichistory/

2005

01/05: Transferring Technical Knowledge and innovating in

Europe, c.1200-c.1800
Stephan R. Epstein

02/05: A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at

Eyam, 1666-2000
Patrick Wallis

03/05: Experimental Farming and Ricardo’s Political Arithmetic of

Distribution
Mary S. Morgan

04/05: Moral Facts and Scientific Fiction: 19th Century Theological

Reactions to Darwinism in Germany
Bernhard Kleeberg

05/05: Interdisciplinarity “In the Making”: Modelling Infectious

Diseases
Erika Mattila

06/05: Market Disciplines in Victorian Britain

Paul Johnson

2006

07/06: Wormy Logic: Model Organisms as Case-based Reasoning

Rachel A. Ankeny
08/06: How The Mind Worked: Some Obstacles And
Developments In The Popularisation of Psychology
Jon Adams

09/06: Mapping Poverty in Agar Town: Economic Conditions Prior

to the Development of St. Pancras Station in 1866
Steven P. Swenson

10/06: “A Thing Ridiculous”? Chemical Medicines and the

Prolongation of Human Life in Seventeenth-Century
England
David Boyd Haycock

11/06: Institutional Facts and Standardisation: The Case of

Measurements in the London Coal Trade.
Aashish Velkar

12/06: Confronting the Stigma of Perfection: Genetic Demography,

Diversity and the Quest for a Democratic Eugenics in the
Post-war United States
Edmund Ramsden

13/06: Measuring Instruments in Economics and the Velocity of

Money
Mary S. Morgan

14/06: The Roofs of Wren and Jones: A Seventeenth-Century

Migration of Technical Knowledge from Italy to England
Simona Valeriani

15/06: Rodney Hilton, Marxism, and the Transition from Feudalism

to Capitalism
Stephan R. Epstein

2007

16/07: Battle in the Planning Office: Biased Experts versus

Normative Statisticians
Marcel Boumans

17/07: Trading Facts: Arrow’s Fundamental Paradix and the

Emergence of Global News Networks, 1750-1900
Gerben Bakker
18/07: Accurate Measurements and Design Standards:
Consistency of Design and the Travel of ‘Facts’ Between
Heterogenous Groups
Aashish Velkar

19/07: When Rabbits became Human (and Humans, Rabbits):

Stability, Order, and History in the Study of Populations
Paul Erickson and Gregg Mitman

20/07: Contesting Democracy: Science Popularisation and Public

Choice
Jon Adams

21/07: Carlyle and the French Enlightenment: Transitional

Readings of Voltaire and Diderot
T. J. Hochstrasser

22/07: Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England

Patrick Wallis

2008

23/08: Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of

John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence
Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams

24/08: Travelling in the Social Science Community: Assessing the

Impact of the Indian Green Revolution Across Disciplines
Peter Howlett

25/08: Circulating Evidence Across Research Contexts: The

Locality of Data and Claims in Model Organism Research
Sabina Leonelli

26/08: The Lives of ‘Facts’: Understanding Disease Transmission

Through the Case of Haemophilus influenzae type b
Bacteria
Erika Mattila

27/08: Regulating Data Travel in the Life Sciences: The Impact of

Commodification
Sabina Leonelli
28/08: A Journey Through Times and Cultures? Ancient Greek
Forms in American Nineteenth-Century Architecture:
An Archaeological View
Lambert Schneider

29/08: Behind the Façade: Elias Holl and the Italian Influence on
Building Techniques in Augsburg
Simona Valeriani

30/08: What happens to facts after their construction?

Characteristics and functional roles of facts in the
dissemination of knowledge across modelling communities
Erika Mansnerus (formerly Mattila)

31/08: ‘Voice’ and the Facts and Observations of Experience

Mary S. Morgan

32/08: Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of

Ethological Facts
Richard Burkhardt

33/08: Travelling With the GDP Through Early Development

Economics’ History
Daniel Speich

34/08: ‘On a Mission' with Mutable Mobiles

Mary S. Morgan