Konrad Lorenz Did Not Discover Imprinting

An earlier post on “The Nazi Konrad Lorenz” sparked a few commentators to weigh in to say that Lorenz’s work was important, and to just ignore the Nazi stuff.

OK.  

But what was the work?

Imprinting?

Konrad Lorenz did not discover imprinting any more than Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity

A few key points and dates about imprinting: 

▪️The idea of imprinting has been well-known for millennia, through simple observation by farmers, and those who capture very young animals from the wild. Anyone who has ever bottle-fed a newborn goat or lamb knows about imprinting, same as every falconer who has lifted a three day-old chick from a nest.

▪️ Imprinting in domestic chickens was sufficiently understood and a topic of common knowledge in 1516 when Sir Thomas More wrote “Utopia”, which featured a description of chickens hatched in artificial incubators. Once hatched, the chicks then imprinted on their human feeders, considered them their mothers, and followed them around.  See >> https://shorturl.at/zaDBG  Note:  More was writing 170 years *before* Newton.

▪️The phenomenon of imprinting was “rediscovered” again by 19th-century amateur biologist Douglas Spalding (1841 – 1877). Spalding’s contribution to the idea of imprinting was highlighted by biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who reprinted Spalding's 1873 essay "On Instinct" in 1954 in order to clarify the history of the subject. Regular readers of this page might remember an earlier post on “Haldane’s Dilemma”.  See >> rb.gy/kb3yo9

▪️Imprinting was then “rediscovered” *again* by Oskar Heinroth, who worked at the Berlin Zoo and then the Berlin Aquarium. A lot of Heinroth’s work focused on imprinting behavior in ducks and geese, and Heinroth’s work was later copied and popularized by his student, Konrad Lorenz.

So the work of Lorenz, as far as imprinting goes, was not about discovery but about popularization.  

That’s not nothing, but it’s a bit shy of transformative.

It should probably be noted here that there are several kinds of imprinting.  

Filial imprinting is of the type described above with ducks, geese, and chickens following the first moving thing they see, but it also occurs across a great deal of the vertebrate world.

Filial imprinting  is a combination of instinct and learned behavior. The instinctive part is the genetic predisposition of the very young to follow the first thing they see that moves. The learned part occurs when that moving object provides food or warmth. 

When these two forces are combined — instinct and operant conditioning — the imprinting that occurs is likely permanent, and certainly difficult to change. 

Why is it so hard to change?  

That’s because an animal’s neonatal experience can wire, or rewire, the  brain’s limbic system (aka, the paleomammalian cortex) which is involved in emotional processing and motivation in vertebrate animals. 

Limbic imprinting is a physical thing, and it’s key to understanding why the “taming” of wild animals captured when only a few hours or days old, is so often successful. 

Limbic imprinting also explains why adult feral versions of “domesticated” animals are so difficult to work with despite descending from thousands of years of domestic stock.