From Aubrey Manning, University of Edinburgh
While I accept the accuracy of most of Adriaan Kortlandt’s points in his
comments on my review of Konrad Lorenz’s early work, I defend myself because my
aims were not to write a history of ideas, but to reflect upon the flavour of
British ethology in the 1950s and 1960s (Review, 10 February, p 40, and Letters,
9 March, p 52).
I acknowledge that Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen had their antecedents. Lorenz
frequently spoke and wrote about the Heinroths and also about Fabre, Whitman and
Craig. However, it remains the case that there are, in most fields, people who
become catalysts, as it were, and who come to the fore in this role as much or
more than for their other contributions.
Lorenz’s 1950 paper in the Symposium of the Society for Experimental
Biology for that year had an enormous influence in the monoglot
English-speaking world. It was the right stuff at the right time for the British
and Americans; Lorenz’s formidable powers as a communicator did the rest.
I must defer to a Dutch person’s knowledge of Lorenz’s social and political
views and I was saddened by what I learnt. I did not mean to gloss over his
faults, but they were those of a young man. He went on to greater things, he did
open our eyes and I agree with Kortlandt: he became a great man.
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