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Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

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Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz

Profession: Scientist
Nationality: Austrian

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Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is what we perceive as a value.

Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.

Practically all animals which move fast in a homogeneous medium have found means of giving their body a streamlined shape, thereby reducing friction to a minimum.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.

The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.

Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.

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