Many of you may find the name Nikolaas Tinbergen unfamiliar. That is why today at ARISTOPET we have set out to change that. Nikolaas Tinbergen, Niko to his friends, was a Dutch zoologist, known for being one of the fathers of ethology.
Niko was born in The Hague in 1907 and earned his doctorate in Science at the University of Leiden, where he was a professor of Experimental Zoology. He later worked at the University of Oxford as a professor and head of the Department of Animal Behaviour Research.
His passion for animals began in adolescence. In 1925, he discovered the mass autumn migration of birds and moose on the Curonian Spit. As a result, he decided that he wanted to study Biology at the University of Leiden, where he began in 1935. There, he taught comparative anatomy and organized a course on animal behaviour for students.
A year later, Niko met Konrad Lorenz, the other father of ethology, whom we have already discussed in this post. Lorenz was invited to the University of Leiden to take part in a symposium on instincts. Their affinity was so strong that Lorenz invited him to spend four months at his home in Altenberg, Austria. Those months were decisive in consolidating their lifelong friendship and laying the foundations for their collaborations and research, as we can see in this photo.
From 1938 onward, his work pace became extremely intense. Throughout this period, he naturally corresponded with Lorenz, until war broke out. They lost contact until 1947. Tinbergen was held in a German camp, while Lorenz was recruited as an army doctor.
For all his work, he received the recognition and acceptance of the scientific community. He was appointed a member of the Royal Society in 1962; a foreign member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen in 1964; he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Edinburgh; and in 1973 he received the Swammerdam Medal from the Genootschap voor Natuur-, Genees- en Heelkunde of Amsterdam.
In his comparative studies of animal psychology, he established the value of the stimulus as a sign, in the sense that signals transmitted by animals include behavioural sequences. He related this phenomenon to the existence of a coordinating unit in the nervous system.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, shared with Konrad Lorenz and Karl R. von Frisch. This was the second award in this category to honor his family, as in 1969 his brother Jan Tinbergen had received the Nobel Prize in Economics. This gives us an idea of how academically remarkable his family was.
Among his notable works are The Study of Instinct (1951), his most influential book, and The Animal in Its World. Field Studies.
In this video, you can see the experiment carried out with the three-spined stickleback, which enabled him to contribute a new understanding of the term “instinct,” understood as a nervous mechanism.
If you would like to learn about other important figures in the field of animal knowledge whom we have already discussed at ARISTOPET, click here. And if you think this post might interest your friends, share it!