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Karl von Frisch and the Discipline of Ethology

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Abstract

In 1973, the discipline of ethology came into its own when three of its most prominent practitioners—Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch—jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Historians have shown how Lorenz and Tinbergen were central to the practical and theoretical innovations that came to define ethology as a distinct form of animal behavior research in the twentieth century. Frisch is rarely mentioned in such histories. In this paper, I ask, What is Frisch’s relationship to the discipline of ethology? To answer that question, I examine Tinbergen’s relationship to Frisch’s grey card experiments between Tinbergen’s time as a student at the University of Leiden in the mid 1920s and his 1951 publication of The Study of Instinct. In doing so, I highlight previously neglected affinities between Frisch’s early career research and the program of classical ethology, and I show how Frisch’s research meant different things at different times to Tinbergen and others working in the ethological tradition.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, the work of German scientist Wolfgang Köhler (1971) and American scientist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble (Noble 1939; Milam 2010, pp. 55–57).

  2. “Alle von uns bisher ermittelten Thatsachen würden gut in Ein klang stehen mit der Annahme, dass die untersuchten Fische total farbenblind seien, ja, nach einer solchen Annahme hätte man das thatsächlich gefundene Verhalten in allen Einzelheiten voraussagen können.”

  3. Minnows change body pigmentation by perceiving light through a translucent window in their cranium; honeybees can perceive ultraviolet and polarized light, and communicate the distance and direction of food sources to nest mates via a “dance language.”

  4. For an explicit discussion of Frisch’s justification for using the term dance language, see Frisch’s (1953) response to a critic who argued that honeybees’ communication behaviors do not fulfill the criteria of a true language.

  5. In an interview with Burkhardt, Tinbergen remembered that upon introducing Lorenz to his experimental work, Lorenz exclaimed, “This is just what I need!” (Burkhardt 2005, pp. 203, 526; emphasis in original).

  6. The original text of the passage in the letter from Lorenz to Stresemann, 4 October 1936, is cited in Brigandt (2005, p. 588, n. 46): “Ich kenne aber so viele Physiologische Chemiker, die alle ganz unfähig sind, im Tier eine organische Ganzheit zu sehen.”.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Richard Burkhardt for his incredibly in-depth comments that greatly improved the argument presented in this manuscript. Beckett Sterner, Alan Love, Jane Maienschein, Max Dresow, Yoshinari Yoshida, Anna Guerrero, Steve Elliot, Lauren Wilson, and Nathan Lackey also provided feedback on early versions of this manuscript.

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Research supported by the Ford Foundation, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and Arizona State University’s Center for Biology & Society.

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  1. University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Kelle Dhein

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Correspondence to Kelle Dhein.

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Dhein, K. Karl von Frisch and the Discipline of Ethology. J Hist Biol 54, 739–767 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09660-7

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