Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Obituary

2018; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.22330/heb/333/035-044

2224-4476

Wulf Schiefenhövel,

Two weighty text books, compiled from a vast number of publications in books, scientific journals and from the results of his own research, several best sellers on topics of natural history and human ethology, also translated in many other languages than the original German, including Polish and Korean, approximately 600 publications in journals, scientific films, TV documentaries, interviews plus the world's largest film archive of non-staged social interactions among members of several traditional societies are the impressive legacy of this great scientist.Son of a botanist father and an artist mother, he was born on June 15th 1928 in Döbling, a suburb of Vienna.His parents gave him the also then unusual name Irenäeus, perhaps hoping that he would become, following his namesake, the Greek goddess Eirene, a peaceful inhabitant of our planet.Instead, Renki became somewhat of a scientific rebel, who fought for his often-provocative ideas, never swam with the current nor hung his flag according to the wind.His father introduced him, from very early on, to the wonders of living organisms.The little boy was fascinated.When he was 11 years old, his father died.The death of a parent is a deep trauma for children; from an evolutionary point of view this is easy to understand: human offspring are dependent on their parents for an extended period of their lives.For Irenäeus, the death of his beloved father was especially traumatic: his performance in school suffered dramatically, he often stayed away from classes and, instead, spend his time at ponds, rivers and in the forest, watching animals and their behavior.His sharp eyes and vivid interest in all swimming, crawling, flying, walking, jumping creatures made him the perfect ethologist he remained throughout his life, a scientist, who was not only interested in the overt phenomena of life but wanted to understand the underlying laws and structures governing all these wonders.This titanic power of synthesis has made him the famous, internationally recognized scholar who developed, after his career as animal ethologist, an evolutionarily inspired view of the human condition.His teachers at school must have realized that this boy was