Science Quote by Konrad Lorenz

Sin, in Lorenz's hands, stops being a thunderbolt from heaven and starts looking like a fossil record. The line smuggles a bracing implication: moral outrage often targets behaviors that once helped our species survive, reproduce, and coordinate in small bands. Greed reads as hoarding in winter. Lust as a species with a narrow margin for replacement. Pride as status-maintenance in a hierarchy where rank meant access to food and protection. Even aggression, the pet vice of modern ethics panels, is recast as a tool with ancient use-cases: defending kin, drawing boundaries, deterring predators.

The intent is less to excuse bad behavior than to relocate the debate. Lorenz, an ethologist, is nudging the reader toward an evolutionary diagnosis of morality: if you want to curb a "vice", start by understanding the machinery that produces it. Condemnation without comprehension is politically satisfying and biologically naive. That move lands because it punctures a common modern fantasy - that we are simply rational individuals who occasionally choose to be terrible, rather than animals running inherited programs in mismatched environments.

The subtext, sharpened by the phrase "condemned today", is that contemporary moral categories can be historically parochial. What was "harmless in primitive man" becomes destructive under capitalism, mass anonymity, and technological leverage: small-band rivalries turn into nationalism; adaptive suspicion curdles into prejudice at scale. Lorenz is asking for humility and better design. If vice is partly adaptation, the task isn't purification - it's channeling, restraint, and institutions smart enough to handle what evolution built.