Lorenz Discusses Bases of Learning

A capacity audience of 800 packed Lowell Lecture Hall last night to hear Konard Lorenz, author of On Aggression, discuss the innate bases of learning.

Scientists were enthralled, and non-scientists bewildered, as Lorenz eschewed descriptions of aggression in favor of a technical discussion of the learning process.

He compared this process to the action of a battery: "When the two systems of condenser and coil come together, they produce a totally new, oscillating system."

In a similar manner, he said, genetic knowledge tells an organism whether its environmental adaptation has succeeded or failed. "Finding the exact source of this knowledge is one of the nicest bits of detective work we have to do," Lorenz commented.

His beard glowing in the spotlight, the white-haired director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Physiology of Behavior punctuated his speech with comments on nest-building jackdaws, the creeping amoeba, and the business world.

He compared the human organism to a corporation which "gains information to gain capital (energy) which in turn improves its chances of gaining more information."

Like a Car

Lorenz attacked narrow approaches to learning. "Any system has parts which are as different from the whole as a carburetor is from a car," he said.

He advocated a "systems analysis" of human behavior -- an approach including behavior -- an approach including both analysis of organic behavior and an attempt to trace the origins of genetic knowledge.