Otto Koehler (behavioral scientist)

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Otto Koehler (born December 20, 1889 in Insterburg / East Prussia , † January 7, 1974 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was an important zoologist and one of the first German ethologists . In January 1936 he was a co-founder of the German Society for Animal Psychology and was one of the first editors of the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (today: Ethology ) together with the considerably younger Konrad Lorenz, who was significantly supported by him .

childhood

Otto Koehler was the fifth and only surviving child of Eduard Koehler and his second wife Karoline, geb. Heinrici, widowed Schiller, a sister of Georg Heinrici . His father was a pastor at the Luther Church in Insterburg . His mother died shortly after he was born, and so did his father four years later. Thereupon he was taken into his family by Paul Heinrici, another brother of his mother, so that he spent the following years in the rectory of Gumbinnen at the side of the only child of his foster family, the three years older general Gotthard Heinrici . Because his extremely strong thirst for knowledge could not be endured at home, he was sent to a private preschool at the age of 5 and occupied with tasks at an extra table.

From 1902 Otto Koehler was educated in the Königliche Landesschule Pforta , a princely school , on a so-called free place (that is: without school fees ), as was customary at the time with a focus on the ancient languages . There he passed his school leaving examination in 1907 and began studying at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau at the age of 17 .

Education

Otto Koehler initially took the subjects mathematics and history, but also attended lectures in other subjects, including a. by August Weismann on zoology and theory of evolution . This influenced him so much that he eventually became a zoologist. Already at Easter 1908 he moved to the University of Munich , where he a. a. Studied botany and - with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and his successor Franz Himstedt - heard lectures in physics. By Richard Hertwig , he was on July 7 in 1911 according to developmental studies of Strongylocentrotus lividus (a sea urchin ) summa cum laude doctorate . This was his second doctoral thesis within four years of study, as his first had become obsolete due to the publication of similar studies by a specialist colleague. The doctorate was soon followed by a position as a private assistant at Franz Doflein and - after a year-long stay abroad , partly together with Karl von Frisch in Naples , as well as Doflein's change to a professorship for zoology in Freiburg im Breisgau - he returned to the university there in 1913 During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students in Munich.

Service in the First World War

During the First World War , Otto Koehler took sole responsibility for bacteriological examinations in an 800-bed hospital near Metz in 1915 after only three days of training . In 1916 he helped set up an epidemic laboratory for Anatolia , which took him to Turkey and Palestine as a soldier, and finally to the British prisoner of war in Nazareth for a year . In November 1919 he was again assistant to Franz Doflein, who had meanwhile gone to Breslau . On March 15, 1920 he completed his habilitation in zoology, comparative anatomy and comparative physiology. In the same year he married Dr. phil. Annemarie Deditius, daughter of the Lübeck building council and fire director Eugen Deditius . They had a daughter, Barbara, who was also born in Breslau.

Assistant time

This was followed by studies on the geotaxis (today: Gravitaxis) of Paramecium , in which he demonstrated that these unicellular organisms can perceive the magnetic field, and on the color vision of Daphnia magna , a water flea. Koehler demonstrated that he was able to perceive UV light . In October 1921 Koehler moved again to Munich , where he gave lectures in sensory physiology and heredity and, for the first time, in animal psychology . He had a lifelong friendship with Karl von Frisch , who was also active in Munich and, like Koehler, had started to study in Munich in 1908. His behavioral studies on the color sense of bees , in whose training Koehler had temporarily helped, prompted him to conduct his own investigations into color vision. a. Trained Koehler dragonfly larvae ( Aeschna larvae ) successfully on yellow chunks of food.

Professor in Munich and Königsberg

In 1923 Otto Koehler became associate professor and curator in Munich and in 1925 finally director of the Zoological Institute and the museum at the University of Königsberg . There he examined u. a. the reactions of flatworms to tactile stimuli as well as to thermal, visual and chemical stimuli. In addition to switch-off attempts, with the help of which, for example, the greater sensitivity of the front end of flatworms to chemical stimuli compared to the rear end was demonstrated, Koehler also analyzed their behavior in an undisturbed environment. He pointed out that there were many special, species-specific adaptations in different types of flatworms, depending on whether they came from the upper reaches of mountain streams or from calm flowing waters. This was followed by studies on shape vision and visual acuity in different insects as well as on the differentiation of quantities in animals .

The switch to ethology

The epistemological background of his experiments consisted of a. in the fact that Koehler wanted to gain clues for what was called the preliminary stages of human thought at the time: How do animals recognize: "This is my territory", "these are 3 grains", "this path is right, that wrong". In contrast to Konrad Lorenz , his investigations focused primarily on those behaviors that are not caused by internal automatisms, but (especially in connection with learning to count) that he classified as "unnamed thinking".

The final change from the field of sensory physiology to ethology resulted nonetheless stumbled after Otto Koehler the behavior of a randomly discovered by him to his nest sand plover was observed. He analyzed their flight and courtship behavior, sexual behavior, defense of the territory and the joint care of the nestlings by both parent birds as well as their dealings with the teenage boys. He is considered to be the first researcher to use egg dummies to gain clues as to what characteristics a bird uses to recognize its eggs.

Otto Koehler was probably also the first behavioral scientist who systematically used film recordings as a scientific aid and for logging and was able to not only describe movement sequences - thanks to individual image analysis - particularly precisely, but also make them vivid and verifiable for other observers. The wild animals in the zoological garden were also used for this purpose.

Research in World War II

During the first meeting of the short-lived German Society for Animal Psychology , Otto Koehler, Konrad Lorenz and Carl Kronacher jointly founded the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie , which appeared from 1937 to 1985 and has been continued as Ethology since 1986 . Koehler remained its editor-in-chief until 1967. In 1940, Eduard Baumgarten and Otto Koehler ensured that Lorenz in Königsberg was appointed to the chair of human psychology as the successor to Arnold Gehlen . His relationship to National Socialism is made clear by an anecdote passed down by Bernhard Hassenstein : In the discussion after a public lecture on the coordination of the nervous system, he was asked whether nothing in the human nervous system was comparable to the Führer principle . Koehler answered no at first , but then corrected himself: Yes, the epileptic fit . In 1945 Otto Koehler, whose wife had died after a serious illness, left the meanwhile completely destroyed city of Königsberg alone, finally got to relatives in Denmark after wandering for weeks and was initially considered missing in Germany.

New start in Freiburg im Breisgau

At the end of 1946, however, Otto Koehler was reappointed university professor and institute director, at the place where he began his studies in Freiburg, whose biological institutes were almost completely destroyed. He turned down appointments at the universities of Munich and Würzburg and instead organized the reconstruction of biology as a subject in Freiburg, where a new two-story building was moved in 1951, which was raised by another floor in 1955. In the same year Koehler married his former student Amélie Hauchecorne, great-granddaughter of Wilhelm Hauchecorne . As the first Freiburg doctoral student , Paul Leyhausen completed the study he had already begun in Königsberg on lion-tiger hybrids . Various other research work was again devoted to the question of how well animals can differentiate between different amounts. Test animals included magpies , squirrels and various parrots. Due to the possibilities of comparison given in this way, Koehler came to the conclusion that the ability to record numbers in these animals and also in humans comes from a common phylogenetic root.

Otto Koehler was also the first researcher to prove that the smile must also be innate in humans and not, as many psychologists believed at the time, be imitated in adults. It often occurs only on one side in infants, that is, before the coordination of the muscles in the face is fully developed, and children born blind smile like the sighted. Since then, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has tried to research the innate foundations of human behavior by comparing different cultures.

It is also thanks to Koehler's openness to the use of technical media in behavioral research that tape recordings have been used to document species-specific bird songs since the early 1950s. "Only then will it finally be possible to determine the natural variability of the species song in terms of pitch, rhythm and timbre as well as the melody," he wrote in 1950 in a programmatic text entitled Der Vogelgesang as a preliminary stage for music and language . In this way Koehler also pioneered the bioacoustics that Günter Tembrock founded in the late 1950s . The connection between biology and music was no accident: Koehler was an enthusiastic violinist all his life.

In 1957 Otto Koehler retired , but worked at the Freiburg Institute until his successor Bernhard Hassenstein was appointed . Many behavioral educational films by Otto Koehler from the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) are still available today from both his time in Königsberg and Freiburg. a. for learning to count with birds and squirrels and for orientation skills with mice in the high maze.

Koehler and the big picture

Otto Koehler influenced the development of behavioral biology in German-speaking countries like no other, but it was only his younger successors who were granted significant prizes. In an obituary, Konrad Lorenz called him his mentor "until I was 70 years old" and counted him as one of his formative role models alongside Oskar Heinroth . Above all, Koehler is responsible for the fact that many younger zoologists took a holistic view of animals instead of - also in the sense of the behaviorist method - always analyzing isolated individual phenomena. Lorenz wrote literally:

“Through Otto Koehler's 'wholeness', we ethologists suddenly realized that what we did all day, namely observing healthy animals in as natural a habitat as possible, was scientifically just as legitimate as any exact experiment. (...) The overview of the totality of life was not only incompatible with the investigation of individual chains of causes, it was the indispensable prerequisite for even learning to ask questions that could be answered through experimentation. "

In 1940 Koehler was appointed a member of the Leopoldina . 1955/1956 he was President of the German Zoological Society .

Fonts (selection)

  • The holistic problem in biology. In: Writings of the Königsberg learned society, natural science class. 9th year, No. 4, 1933, pp. 139–204.
  • with O. Müller and R. Wachholtz: Can the pigeon record numbers? In: Negotiations of the German Zoological Society. 1935, pp. 39-54.
  • Can pigeons "count"? In: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. Volume 1, No. 1, 1937, pp. 39-48, doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1937.tb01404.x .
  • From learning unnamed numbers in birds. In: The natural sciences. Volume 29, No. 14/15, 1941, pp. 201-218, doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-642-51845-4_21 .
  • “Counting” experiments on a common raven and comparison experiments on humans. In: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. Volume 5, No. 3, 1943, pp. 575-712, doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1943.tb00665.x .
  • The birdsong as a preliminary stage of music and language. In: Journal of Ornithology. Volume 93, 1951, pp. 3-20, doi: 10.1007 / BF02007606 .
  • From unnamed thinking. In: Negotiations of the German Zoological Society. 1952, pp. 202-211.
  • The smile as an innate movement of expression. In: Journal for Human Heredity and Constitutional Science. Volume 32, 1954, pp. 390-398.
  • Karl von Frisch . The discoverer of the bee “language”. In: Hans Schwerte and Wilhelm Spengler (eds.): Researchers and scientists in Europe today. 2. Physicians, biologists, anthropologists. Series: Gestalter Our Time , Volume 4. Stalling, Oldenburg 1955, pp. 263–271.
  • The unnamed thinking. In: Grzimek's animal life. Special volume behavioral research. Kindler Verlag, Zurich 1974, pp. 320–336.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 116.
  2. ^ Konrad Lorenz: Otto Koehler 70 years. In: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. Volume 16, No. 6, 1959, pp. 641–646, full text (PDF)
  3. ^ Konrad Lorenz: Otto Koehler, teacher, friend and role model. In: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie , Volume 35, No. 5, 1972, pp. 468-472

Remarks

  1. ↑ A complete list of his writings is printed in: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie . Volume 35, No. 5, 1974, pp. 473-480, doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1974.tb00461.x .
personal data
SURNAME Koehler, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German zoologist and ethologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Insterburg , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH 7th January 1974
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau