Konrad Lorenz (1903 — 1989) was an outstanding Austrian scientist, Nobel laureate, one of the founders of ethology and the science of animal behavior.
The scientist draws very interesting analogies between the behavior of various vertebrate species and the behavior of Homo sapiens, which is why the book was published in the “Library of Foreign Psychology” series. Arguing that aggressiveness is an innate, instinctively determined property of all higher animals and proving this using a variety of convincing examples, the author comes to the conclusion: “There are good reasons to consider intraspecific aggression to be the most serious danger that threatens humanity in the current conditions of cultural, historical and technical development.”
“The conservation function of the species is much clearer in any interspecific collisions than in the case of intraspecific warfare. The mutual influence of predator and prey provides remarkable examples of how selection makes one of them adapt to the development of the other. The speed of the chased ungulates cultivates the powerful jumping ability and the terribly armed legs of large cats, which, in turn, develop the victim's senses and run faster.
An impressive example of such an evolutionary competition between offensive and defensive weapons is the paleontologically well-documented specialization of herbivorous mammals' teeth — teeth were getting stronger — and the parallel development of food plants that, if possible, were protected from being eaten by silicic acid deposits and other measures. But this kind of “struggle” between what is eaten and what is eaten never leads to the complete destruction of the prey by the predator; a certain balance is always established between them, which, if we talk about the species as a whole, is beneficial to both. The last lions would starve to death much before they killed the last pair of antelopes or zebras that were capable of procreation. Just as translated into human commercial language, the whaling fleet would go bankrupt long before the last whales disappeared. Whoever directly threatens the existence of the species is not an “eater” but a competitor; it is he and only he.”
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