Dissertation Research: Of Birds and Bees: Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and the Science of Animals

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant treats the history of animal behavior studies. In particular, the project examines how scientists viewed animals in German-speaking Europe from the 1920s to 1970s by focusing on two of the period's most important voices on the subject. Nobel Laureates Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz. Von Frisch attained international acclaim for his discovery of the honeybee dances as a means to communicate the direction and distance of food sources to hive mates, while Lorenz was one of the founders of ethology . the European approach that sought evolutionary explanations of instinctive behavior. The student has completed most of her archival work on von Frisch and is currently researching Lorenz holdings in Berlin. With funds from this grant, she will travel to Gottingen to conduct research on the production and distribution of their many films. She will also return to Europe in the fall (2004) to complete the remainder of her research on von Frisch and Lorenz in Munich and Vienna, respectively. The project will examine how these two researchers navigated the animal-human boundary and how they handled problems of anthropomorphism in their science as well as their popular works. Much was at stake, for questions about animals cut to the core of what it meant to be human . an issue that became especially pressing in the period surrounding World War Two. Thus, the project seeks to answer the following two questions: How were animals viewed scientifically? And how did scientists teach the public to view animals? Because the dissertation's arc is largely chronological, the project will also address how these views changed over the roughly fifty-year period in question. While the disciplinary history of ethology has been well documented, no in-depth examination of von Frisch's work or of Lorenz's popular writings and its relation to his scientific work exists. The study will also contribute to the history of twentieth-century biology, which has tended to emphasize the development of genetics and molecular biology at the expensive of other approaches, such as animal behavior studies. By addressing both scientific and popular works, her project pays particular attention to the relationship between science and society as seen through the lens of animal behavior studies. In addition to published popular and scientific writings, the project draws on von Frisch's and Lorenz's correspondence, diaries, laboratory notebooks, lecture notes, and film.