Nikolaas Tinbergen

Konrad Lorenz (left) and Niko Tinbergen (right) in 1978.

Nikolaas Tinbergen or Niko Tinbergen (April 15, 1907, The Hague, Netherlands - December 21, 1988) was a Dutch zoologist. He is one of the fathers of ethology. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973 —together with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch— "for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns". universities of Leiden and Oxford; in the latter he was a professor and head of the Animal Behavior Research Department.

Biography

He was the third of five children born to Dirk C. Tinbergen and Jeannette van Eek. Since he was little, he showed interest in observing animals and nature. A family friend prompted the father to send it in 1925, with Professor J. Thienemann, who worked at a bird observatory. There he met the photographer Rudy Steinert and his wife Lucy, who invited him on their walks through the Kurische Nehrung dunes, where he watched the massive autumn migration of birds and moose. Close to his return to the Netherlands, at Christmas 1925, he had already decided to study Biology at the University of Leiden.

Influenced by the work of Karl R. von Frisch and Jean Henri Fabre's writings on insects, he decided to use the discovery of a wasp colony for a study of their prey homing abilities. This short study (32 pages) served as his thesis to obtain his PhD in Science at the University of Leiden, where he was Professor of Experimental Zoology.

In 1936, Van der Klaauw invites Konrad Lorenz to Leiden for a short symposium on instincts. Lorenz invited Timbergen for a four-month stay at his parents' home in Altenberg, near Vienna, where he became Lorenz's second pupil (the first was Dr. Alfred Seitz). These months were decisive for future collaboration and for achieving a lifelong friendship. In the Netherlands, he wrote to Karl R. von Frisch to go to his laboratory.

In 1938, the American Foundation in the Netherlands gave him the opportunity to go to New York for a four-month stay, with fees to give lectures in English. There he became interested in American psychology.

He continued to work intensely, and maintained a lively correspondence with Lorenz, which was interrupted by World War II. During the war he spent two years in a German hostage camp, while his wife lived through hard times with her family. Lorenz was recruited as a Nazi army doctor and disappeared during the Battle of Witebsk, reappearing in 1947 in a Russian prison camp. Their reunion, in 1949, in the hospitable home of W. H. Thorpe in Cambridge, was a special occasion for the two of them.

After the war he was invited again to the United States, to give a series of lectures —published in a book under the title The Study of Instinct (1951)—, and to Great Britain, to give a lecture on animal behavior. His long-standing friendships with Ernst Mayr and David Lack sparked his interest in evolution and ecology.

His visit to Oxford, where David Lack had just taken over the Edward Gray Institute of Field Ornithology, led him to accept Sir Alister Hardy's invitation to Oxford. There he joined a research group to build bridges between ethology and neurophysiology, founding the New Oxford Interdisciplinary School of Human Sciences, which sought to apply the methods of ethology to human behaviour.

Dr. J. S. Owen, Director of Tanzania's national park, asked the Serengeti Research Institute Foundation for his help.

In recognition of his work he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1962; foreign member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen in 1964; he was conferred the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Edinburgh; and he received the Swammerdam medal from voor Natuur (Amsterdam) in 1973.

He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973, shared with Konrad Lorenz and Karl R. von Frisch. This was the second award in this category that his family had received, since in 1969 his brother Jan Tinbergen had received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

He was the doctoral supervisor of Richard Dawkins.

Contributions

In his comparative studies of animal psychology, he came to establish the value of the stimulus as a sign, in the sense that the signals transmitted by animals include sequences of behavior, a phenomenon that he related to the existence of a coordinating unit in the system highly strung. (Theory of Human Sciences)

In addition to his contributions to zoology, he researched autism in early childhood, eventually publishing a book on this subject with Elisabeth Amélie. He proposed to develop a Center for Child Ethology in Oxford.

The four questions

According to Tinbergen, the four questions we must ask ourselves to understand a certain behavior are:

1. What is the cause? It refers to the stimuli that elicit behavior.

2. What is its survival value? It refers to the way in which the behavior contributes to the survival and reproductive success of the animal.

3. Ontogeny: This is a genuine contribution from Tinbergen, and refers to how behavior develops during the life of the animal.

4. How did this behavior arise in the species? This question introduces us to the study of phylogeny: what factors throughout evolution have influenced behavior to adopt a certain form. In this sense, Tinbergen carried out various experiments with birds using soundproof boxes to determine which part of the song was phylogenetically inherited and which part was learned.

Work

He published, among other works, The Study of Instinct (1951), his most influential book, and The Animal in Its World. Field Studies (The animal in its world. Field studies, 1932-72).

• Tinbergen, Niko (1951): The study of instinct. Clarendon Press. 228 p. Oxford (ISBN 019857343X ed. 1969)
• - (1953): The herring gulls; world; a study of the social behaviour of birds. Collins. 255 p. London
• - (1953): Social behaviour in animals, with special reference to vertebrates. Methuen. 150 pp. London
• - (1954): An objectivistic study of the innate behavior of animals. E.J. Brill. 98 pp. Leiden
• - (1954): Kleew. The story of a gull. Oxford University Press. 41 pp. New York (trad. Kleew. History of a seagull. Plural of Editions, S.A. Traces. 42 pp. Barcelona, 1992 ISBN 84-8045-029-0).
• - (1954): Bird life. Oxford University Press. 62 pp. Oxford R.U.
• - (1958): Curious naturalists. Basic Books. 280 pp. New York (trad. Naturalists curious. Salvat Editores. Salvat Basic Library, 19. 260 p. Barcelona, 1988 ISBN 84-345-8395-X).
• — (1963): “On Aims and Methods in Ethology”. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20: 410-433
• - (1965): Animal behavior. Time Inc. 200 pp. New York
• - (1972): The animal in its world; explorations of an ethologist, 1932-1972. Vol. I. Field Studies. George Allen and Unwin. London ISBN 0-04-591014-6 (trad. Ethology studies. T.1. Field experiments 1932-1972. Editorial Alliance, S.A. University Alliance. 376 p. Madrid, 1990 (3rd ed.) ISBN 84-206-2105-6).
• - (1973): The animal in its world; explorations of an ethologist, 1932-1972. Vol. II. Laboratory experiments and general papers. George Allen and Unwin. London (trad. Ethology studies. T.2. Laboratory and written experiments. Editorial Alliance, S.A. University Alliance. 248 pp. Madrid, 1983 ISBN 84-206-2990-1).
• - and Elisabeth Amélie (1983): "Autistic" children: new hope for a cure. Georg Allen & Unwin London ISBN 0-04-157011-1 (trad. Autistic children. New hopes of healing. Editorial Alliance, S.A. Psychological alliance, 13448 pp. Madrid, 1987 ISBN 84-206-6513-4).