Abstract

Konrad Lorenz does not view behaviors as innate; he does not even regard differences among behaviors (of different species) as innate. Rather, he construes information (about the environment to which the behavior is adapted) as the innate component of (some) behavior. His noted deprivation experiments are intended to withhold environmental sources of that information from the organism: should the organism nevertheless exhibit behavior evidencing possession of such information, then that information must be innate. Lorenz interprets this conclusion to mean that the information is transmitted to the organism genetically, by way of a sort of blueprint in the genome.D.S. Lehrman quarrels with the figure of a blueprint:A blueprint is isomorphic with the structure that it represents…. It is not true that each structure and character in the phenotype is “represented” in a single gene or well defined groups of genes; it is not the case that each gene refers solely or even primarily, to a single structure or character; and it is not the case that the topographical or topological relationships among the genes are isomorphic with the structural or topographical relationships among phenotypic structures to which the genes refer. (Lehrman 1970, p. 34).