Science Quote by Konrad Lorenz

Lorenz’s line tries to smuggle a hard, clinical authority into one of the messiest arenas humans have: culture. By invoking “historians” he’s not merely commenting on anthropology; he’s issuing a jurisdictional challenge. The subtext is disciplinary conquest: stop treating ideas, institutions, and norms as primarily the products of contingency, politics, or meaning-making, and start treating them as adaptations shaped by selection pressures. It’s a bid to reframe cultural history as something closer to population biology.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Will have to face the fact” is a pressure tactic, casting dissent as denial rather than debate. “In the same manner” is the most loaded clause: it collapses analogy into identity, suggesting that the explanatory machinery that works for finches and wolves can be ported to religions, laws, and art without losing fidelity. That’s rhetorically potent because it promises a single, unifying theory; it’s also where the trouble starts, because cultural transmission isn’t genetic inheritance, and “fitness” in social life can mean coercion, luck, infrastructure, or spectacle as much as survival.

Context matters here. Lorenz, a founder of ethology, wrote in a century intoxicated by evolutionary explanation and scarred by its political misuse. Read with that backdrop, the quote carries an anxious double edge: an attempt to naturalize culture to make it legible, and a latent risk of turning historical outcomes into biological inevitabilities. It works because it flatters the reader with a bracing “fact” while quietly shifting the moral and political conversation into the colder language of nature.