Nikolaas Tinbergen
|
Niko Tinbergen | |
|---|---|
 Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (1907-1988) | |
| Born |
April 15, 1907 |
| Died | December 21, 1988 |
| Residence |  UK
|
| Nationality |  Dutch
|
| Field | Zoologist, ethologist |
| Institutions | Oxford University |
| Alma mater | Leiden University |
| Notable students | Richard Dawkins |
| Known for | Hawk/goose effect |
| Notable prizes |  Nobel Prize (1973)
|
Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (April 15, 1907 – December 21, 1988) was a Dutch ethologist, zoologist, and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals. Together with Lorenz, Tinbergen established European ethology as the study of the natural behavioral patterns of animals in the context of the natural environments.
Life
Nikolaas Tinbergen was born in The Hague, Netherlands, the third of five children in a happy family. Nikolaas — "Niko" — Tinbergen is also noted as the brother of Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, (i.e., Nobel Prize in Economics), four years before Nikolaas Tinbergen. Jan and Niko had a third eminent brother, Luuk Tinbergen.
Though Niko Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young, camping and bird watching and playing hockey kept him from being a serious student. He found the lure of the beautiful Dutch coast irresistable and was aided in its appreciation by some of the leading Dutch naturalists. Tinbergen studied biology at Leiden University and received his PhD degree in 1932 with a 32-page dissertation, the shortest on record there.
Niko Tinbergen married Elisabeth Rutten, and the couple spent a 14-month interval in Greenland studying a variety of organisms including phalaropes, Eskimo dogs, and Eskimo hunters. Nikolaas Tinbergen then taught at the University of Leiden and began some of his classic research on gulls, stickleback fish. The Tinbergen spouses spent the spring of 1937 with Konrad Lorenz in Austria, and their names have been linked ever since.
Nikolaas Tinbergen was a prisoner of war during World War II. He spent two years imprisoned in a Nazi German hostage camp bacause he supported Jeshish faculty collegues. He returned to Leiden after war, becoming a full professor in 1947. Wanting to bring his ethological perspective to English-speaking audiences, Tinbergen resigned his position and moved to England, to the University of Oxford, in 1949, and stayed there for the rest of his life, until 1988.
Work
Tinbergen was a dedicated naturalist, skilled scientist, and concerned envoronmentalist. As a curious naturalist he was always seeking to understand the world around him. He systemarized such understanding with respect to four sets of questions that provide the framework of ethology: immedate casation, development, adaptive function, and evolution. Tinbergen originated the four questions he believed should be asked of any animal behaviour, which were:
Proximate mechanisms:
- 1. Causation: what are the stimuli that elicit the response, and how has it been modified by recent learning? How do behaviour and psyche "function" on the molecular, physiological, neuro-ethological, cognitive and social level, and what do the relations between the levels look like? (compare: Nicolai Hartmann: "The laws about the levels of complexity")
- 2. Development (Ontogeny): how does the behaviour change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behaviour to be shown? Which developmental steps (the ontogenesis follows an "inner plan") and which environmental factors play when / which role? (compare: Recapitulation theory)
Ultimate mechanisms:
- 3. Function (Adaptation): how does the behaviour impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?
- 4. Evolution (Phylogeny): how does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny? Why did structural associations (behaviour can be seen as a "time space structure") evolve in this manner and not otherwise?
In ethology and sociobiology causation and ontogeny are summarized as the "proximate mechanisms" and adaptation and phylogeny as the "ultimate mechanisms". They are still considered as the cornerstone of modern ethology, sociobiology and transdisciplinarity in Human Sciences.
This schema, adopted by animal behaviorists around the world, serves to help keep different questions about nature separate and ensure that the information provided in answers is indeed appropriate to the question under consideration.
Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz together studied the behavior of ducks following cardboard dummies. Their only joint published work was on the rolling behavior of greylag geese. Thus began the emergence of a new branch of biology and psychology: animal ethology. Where Lorenz was a bold theorist, Tinbergen was a careful observer and experimentater with a genius for devising simple, yet insightful , experiments in the natural habitat. Typically, he would construct a blind and make obsevations of the animals under study. These observations would lead to experiments that could clarify what he had observed. Tinbergen's research on the behavior of gulls is classic, especially the role of various stimuli acting at key points. For example, he observed that shortly after their young hatch, the parents remove the egg shells from the vicinity of the nest. He then conducted a series of experiments demonstrating that the function of this seemingly trival behavior lay in keeping the young hidden from predators. His work with orientation in insects and numerous other species in nature was in the same spirit. Beyond this, Tinbergen conducted important laboratory research on the courtship and mating of stickbak fish. Among his last research projects was a study of early childhood autism in humans.
His last major study, in collaboration with his wife, was on early infantile autism.
Despite his distrust of behaviorism, Tinbergen was a pivotal player in helping to bring European ethologists and comparative psychologists together. More accomodating that Lorenz, Tinbergen and his students developed a variety of ethology more sensitive to the concerns of North American workers regarding such issues as the complexity inherent in the development of behavior.
Contributions
Among his major accomplishments was the establishment of the study of adaptive significance. He showed that the function could be studied quantitatively under field conditions.
Tinbergen believed that the study of ethology should be applied to human behavior as well as animals. This did not mean that animal behavior should be extrapolated to humans but that the same methodology could be applied.
Legacy
Many of Tinbergen's works have become classics in both psychology and biology, including his work on courting behavior of sticklebacks, orienting behavior in wasps, and the behavior grayling butterflies.
The peak of recognition was reached when he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine, sharing it with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch]]. Tinbergen's Nobel Prize address was "Ethology and Stress diseases." The prize money was used to help younger students study infantile autism. In his research, he always emphasized careful observation and clear formartion of questions. Other recognitions included the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychological Association]] in the United States and his election as a fellow of the Royal Society in England.
As befits a Nobel Prize winner, Tinbergen received many other honors. These include the Swammerdam medal and honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Leicester. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign member of the US National Academyof Sciences, and the recipient of a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.
As much as he enjoyed his zoological work, Tinbergen was deeply concerned with the state of the world around him and struggled with his career as a researcher, wanting to do more to help humanity and and the surrounding environment. His modesty was linked, in part, to his feelings that he had not done enough in this sphere.
Critics
Niko Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled.
Works by Nikolaas Tinbergen
- Tinbergen, N. 1951. The study of instinct. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Tinbergen, N. 1953. The herring gull's world. London: Collins.
- Tinbergen, N. 1953. Social behavior of animals. London: Methuen.
- Tinbergen, N. 1958. Curious naturalists. London: Country Life.
- Tinbergen, N. 1963. On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 20, P. 410-433.
- Tinbergen N. and Tinbergen, E. A. 1972. Early Childhood Autism - an Ethological Approach. Berlin, Parey.
- Tinbergen, N. 1972. The animal in its world. (vol.1). London: Allen and Unwin.
- Tinbergen, N. 1973. The animal in its world. (vol.2). London: Allen and Unwin.
Works about Nikolaas Tinbergen
- Dewsbury, D. A. 1990. Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988). American Psychologist, 45, P. 67-68.
- Hinde, R. A. 1990. Nikolass Tinbergen, 15 April 1907 — 21 December 1988. In Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Vol. 36, p. 549-565), London: Royal Society.
- Tinbergen, N. 1985. Watching and wondering. In Leaders in the study of animal behavior (p. 430-463). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Boring, E.G. 1950. A history of experimental psychology, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0133900398
- Brennan, J.F. 1986. History and systems of psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 0133922189
- Galton, F. 1889. Natural inheritance. London; Macmillan.
- Leahey, Th. H. 1991. A History of Modern Psychology. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall. 3rd edition. 2000. ISBN 0130175730
- Lorenz, K. 1937. Biologische Fragestellungen in der Tierpsychologie (Biological Questions in Animal Psychology). Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 1, P. 24-32.
- Pruette, L. 1926. G. Stanley Hall: Biography of a mind. Ayer Co Pub. ISBN 0836954742
- Hans Kruuk (2003) Niko's Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and His Science of Animal Behaviour ISBN 0-19-851558-8
- Marian Stamp Dawkins (1991) The Tinbergen Legacy ISBN 0-412-39120-1
- Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. (2005) Patterns of Behavior : Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology ISBN 0-226-08090-0
External links
- Autobiography
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973: von Frisch, Lorenz and Tinbergen
- Diagram on The Four Areas of Biology
- Further Diagrams on The Four Areas of Biology (Documents No. 9, 10 and 11 in English)
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