Instinct

The history of ethology must be almost unique. Its founders were awarded a Nobel Prize, which they richly deserved, and yet the theoretical core of the discipline as they founded it survived only a few decades. Most of the overhauling occurred in the 1950s and took the form not so much of revising that original theoretical core, the theory of instinct, as of simply demolishing it, leaving nothing of comparable generality in its place. By 1968 the theory of instinct put forward by Lorenz (1937, 1950) and Tinbergen (1950, 1951) and commended by Thorpe (1948, 1954), could be alluded to by Bateson, then a seasoned editor of Animal Behaviour, in the following terms:

This was not an unfair judgement. It has been echoed by R. Dawkins (1976a) and Barlow (1989) and repeated recently by Bateson & Klopfer (1989). Ridley (1982) even described a book in which Lorenz (1981) defended his original ideas, as “awkwardly antediluvian”.