Nikolaas Tinbergen

Niko Tinbergen
Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (1907-1988)
Born	April 15, 1907 The Hague, Netherlands
Died	December 21, 1988 Oxford, England
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 behavior 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 irresistible 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 and 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 because he supported Jeshish faculty colleagues. It was the period when Niko Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz; and it took several years before the two reconciled.

Tinbergen 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 systematized such understanding with respect to four sets of questions that provide the framework of ethology: immediate cassation, development, adaptive function, and evolution. Tinbergen originated the four questions he believed should be asked of any animal behavior, 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 behavior 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 behavior change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behavior too 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 behavior impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?
• 4. Evolution (Phylogeny): how does the behavior compare with similar behavior in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny? Why did structural associations (behavior 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.

The egg-rolling behavior of the greylag goose is a widely cited example of a fixed-action pattern, one of the key concepts used by ethologists to explain animal behavior.

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. For example, at the sight of a displaced egg near the nest, the greylag goose will roll the egg back to the others with its beak. If the egg is removed, the animal continues to engage in egg-rolling behavior, pulling its head back as if an imaginary egg is still being maneuvered by the underside of its beak. It will also attempt to move other egg-shaped objects, such as a golf ball, doorknob, or even an egg too large to have been laid by the goose itself (Tinbergen 1991). Thus began the emergence of a new branch of biology and psychology: animal ethology.

Gull chicks peck at a red spot on their mother's beak to stimulate the regurgitating reflex, another example of a fixed action pattern.

Where Lorenz was a bold theorist, Tinbergen was a careful observer and experimenter with a genius for devising simple, yet insightful, experiments in the natural habitat. Typically, he would construct a blind and make observations 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 trivial behavior lay in keeping the young hidden from predators. He also studied the tendency of young gulls to peck at the red spot on the parent gull's beak, which induces the parents to regurgitate food for them. He offered naive young chicks a range of cardboard dummy gull heads varying in bill and spot color, and shape. For each color and shape combination Tinbergen measured the preferences of the baby chicks by counting their pecks in a standard time. Through this he discovered that naive gull chicks are born with a built-in preference for long yellow things with red spots, in other words, genes equip the young birds with detailed prior knowledge of the world in which they are about to hatch – a world in which food comes out of adult herring gull beaks. 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 stickleback fish. He observed that the male turns a bright red color during the breeding season. This color change is the fixed action pattern in response to an increasing day length. During this time they are also naturally aggressive towards other red-bellied sticklebacks, causing them to separate into distinct territories for breeding. From his studies, Tinbergen found that anything that is red will bring about this instinctive response. Among his last research projects was a study of early childhood autism in humans. His major study on early infantile autism was conducted in collaboration with his wife.

Despite his distrust of behaviorism, Tinbergen was a pivotal player in helping to bring European ethologists and comparative psychologists together. More accommodating that 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. Among his major accomplishments was the establishment of the study of adaptive significance. Tinbergen showed that the function could be studied quantitatively under field conditions. In general, 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.

An ethological analysis describes consummator acts (such as nest building and copulating) without reference to an animal's working toward a goal of having a nest and producing young. A response is elicited when an appropriate releaser is present. Tinbergen (1951) described instinctive or genetically preprogrammed behavior patterns as a sequence of events: sign stimulus (releaser) — innate releasing mechanism (IRM) — fixed action pattern (FAP). The IRM, a neural process, is triggered by the sign stimulus and mediates the FAP — innate stereotyped responses. For example, the red belly of a male stickleback fish (sign stimulus) activates the neural circuitry (IRM) which releases a stereotyped aggressive threat display (FAP) in all male sticklebacks. To Tinbergen, instincts are not disembodied responses that occur in a vacuum. They are tied to stimuli. Only very rarely are internal stimuli powerful enough to evoke an instinct without external stimulus support. In fact, instinctive behavior can be the raw material for learning, i.e., the innate behavior which is modified whenever learning process occurs. Today, most psychologists agree with the ethological definition that instinct is a complex pattern of behavior elicited by a specific pattern of internal or external stimuli.

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 formation 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 Academy of 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.

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.
• Tinbergen, N. 1985. "Watching and Wondering." In Donald A. Dewsbury (Editor) Leaders in the Study of Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives (p. 430-463). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. ISBN 0838750524

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barnett, S.A. 1998. Instinct. In: G. Greenberg and M.M. Haraway (Eds) Comparative psychology: A handbook (pp. 138-149). New York: Garland.
• Birney, R.C. and Teevan, R.C. (Eds). 1961. Instinct. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
• 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
• Dewsbury, D. A. 1990. Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988). American Psychologist, 45, P. 67-68.
• Galton, F. 1889. Natural inheritance. London; Macmillan.
• 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.
• 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 Retrieved July 12, 2007.
• The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973: von Frisch, Lorenz and Tinbergen Retrieved July 12, 2007.
• Diagram on The Four Areas of Biology Retrieved July 12, 2007.

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