Science Quote by Konrad Lorenz

Lorenz’s punchline lands because it flips the smug Victorian ladder of progress into a mirror. The “missing link” was supposed to be some conveniently extinct creature that reassures modern humans of their clean break from animal messiness. Instead, he points the arrow back at the audience: we are the bridge, the awkward intermediate stage, the animal that learned to wear a tie while keeping its teeth.

As a behavioral scientist writing in the shadow of two world wars, Lorenz isn’t just teasing human vanity; he’s diagnosing it. The line smuggles in an argument about continuity: aggression, dominance rituals, and in-group loyalty aren’t aberrations that civilization has conquered; they’re inherited equipment that civilization decorates and amplifies. The subtext is a warning against moral outsourcing. If “barbarism” isn’t a foreign species but a native impulse, then no amount of education, art, or bureaucracy automatically inoculates a society against cruelty.

The pronoun “we” does the real work. It’s communal, indicting, and oddly democratic: no scapegoats, no “those people,” no comforting distance. Lorenz also uses the old anthropological trope (the missing link) with a scientist’s deadpan irony, turning an evolutionary question into a cultural one. Civilization, in this frame, isn’t a finish line; it’s a fragile behavioral truce, permanently negotiated by a primate that never stopped being one.