00:01:14.920And then, arguably, one of his most famous books on aggression,
00:01:19.080also an antiquarian edition that i have uh so who is conrad lawrence let's spend a few minutes this
00:01:26.540by the way i picked up uh during my recent trip uh to dc at a amazing uh used an antiquarian bookshop
00:01:36.160and i've bought a whole bunch of other books that i'll discuss at various future sad truth clips
00:01:41.420so conrad lawrence is a ethologist a pioneer of the field of ethology and for those of you who
00:01:50.580don't know what ethology is it's the study of the evolutionary roots of instinctive patterns right
00:01:59.000so animals engage in certain instincts these instincts are not learned they're not socialized
00:02:07.160they are part of the evolutionary repertoire of an animal and so what conrad lawrence did was
00:02:15.480develop the field of study whereby you study these instinctual patterns so for example
00:02:21.800imprinting the idea that when a duckling hatches there is a mechanism ontogenetic mechanism that
00:02:31.480basically says the first thing that i see i'm going to be imprinted on it because that must
00:02:35.880be my mother my my duckling my duck mother well he showed that if you remove the mother and the
00:02:45.000duckling hatches and he is the one that the duckling first sees it will follow it it'll
00:02:51.880become imprinted on it now he could remove himself and put a golden retriever it'll be imprinted on
00:02:56.920it and so these books the king solomon ring the on aggression and many of his other works
00:03:04.040are about studying these what I call fixed action patterns, meaning that once the mechanism is
00:03:11.060released, it has to see its way to the end. It is released because it's a built-in instinct.
00:03:17.920And so human ethology is one of the fields within the evolutionary behavioral sciences.
00:03:23.960Some of you might remember that I held a university-wide chaired professorship in
00:03:28.520evolutionary behavioral sciences. Well, the evolutionary behavioral sciences are,
00:03:32.500Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, human ethology, evolutionary psychology. These are all
00:03:40.400part of the umbrella of behavioral disciplines that study their own interesting phenomena
00:03:50.940using some evolutionary lens. Now, in reading the biography on Conrad Lawrence, several things
00:04:00.000roles that were interesting that are still sort of being discussed today 50 plus years later and
00:04:05.540that is that you know he was considered by many of his colleagues to not be a real scientist because
00:04:12.400he really relied on describing behavior observational behavior where he didn't care
00:04:19.540so much about you know quantifying things using specific you know measurement techniques and that
00:04:26.380his argument was that, you know, you really need to sit there and study by observing assiduously
00:04:33.660patterns of behavior amongst animals. And when you apply it to humans, it becomes human ethology.
00:04:41.160And, you know, E.O. Wilson, who was arguably one of the biggest scientists of the 20th century,
00:04:47.840also was accused of similar things. He's not a hardcore, he's not a microbiologist,
00:04:53.160he's not a biochemist he's not studying the most reductive mechanisms he's only looking at the
00:05:00.000behavior of the animals by observing them surely that's not scientific and that's completely untrue
00:05:05.960right i mean same principles happen when we study consumer behavior and and marketing where let's
00:05:10.800say you have somebody who observes consumers as as an anthropologist would in engaging with
00:05:17.040particular modern day environments like how do they shop at a mall well but that's not real science
00:05:22.100Well, of course it is, right? Jane Goodall, who became world famous, did not do fancy, you know, measurements using fMRI or hormonal assays. She just sat there quietly and patiently for years so that she became accepted within the chimp societies so that she could, you know, code their behavior, study their power dynamics, study their sexual behavior.
00:05:50.040And so all of these different methodological approaches are perfectly valid epistemologically, as long as you are adhering to the scientific method.0.89
00:05:59.160So anyways, and by the way, in 1973, he won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Nico Timbergen, who's another great ethologist, and the third name escapes me, German name.
00:06:17.080uh they won the nobel prize for their work in ethology so that understanding the fundamental
00:06:25.720features of what it what makes us human uh via an ethological approach so anyway so check this
00:06:33.400guy out let me just summarize them again for you this is i mean look at how gorgeous that
00:06:37.240the cover is i'm not quite finished i've got about maybe 30 pages left so conrad lawrence
00:06:43.280this biography and then you've got this biography this one i haven't read uh another biography by
00:06:50.500on coroner lawrence and then you've got king solomon's ring and then you've got on human
00:06:56.480aggression he's got several others but these are probably some of his most famous ones so check
00:07:00.340them out many people no longer uh you know spend much time uh looking at the work of ethologists
00:07:08.040but it is part of the full repertoire of trying to understand the human condition.