Humans do not have a monopoly on social behaviour; animals engage in it too. And yet, as late as the early twentieth century, this was not an area of study that biologists focused on. The promising researcher Niko Tinbergen, on the other hand, found animal behaviour fascinating, an interest drove him to revolutionise the entire field of biology.
As a child, Niko Tinbergen was already very interested in birds and fish. Although he was not in the first instance motivated to study biology – he would have preferred to become a professional hockey player – ultimately he did change his mind. And with great results. In 1932, Tinbergen defended his PhD dissertation in Leiden on the mating behaviour of birds, and in subsequent years he further extended his research on animal behaviour.
Four questions
In his research Tinbergen always asked four questions regarding animal behaviour, the answers to which he sought primarily in the animal’s natural environment, rather than in a laboratory. Tinbergen’s by now famous questions were:
What stimuli lead to specific behaviour?
How does behaviour change as an animal reaches adulthood?
How does behaviour impact an animal’s chances of survival and reproduction?
How does behaviour as function change in the animal’s evolutionary history?
With these questions, Tinbergen gave biology a new impetus and he shifted the focus of research from the classification and identification of animal species and forms to animal behaviour. As a result, his work led to a new area of study, ethology, which thanks to his research questions has since become closely linked to evolutionary biology.
Oxford
Although Tinbergen developed the foundation for his Nobel Prize-winning research in Leiden, where he was appointed Professor in Experimental Zoology in 1947, two years later he left unexpectedly for the University of Oxford.
In 1955 Tinbergen acquired British nationality and in 1973, together with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his ‘discoveries regarding the organisation and cause of individual and social behavioural patterns’.
Fame
In Oxford Tinbergen became famous as a researcher and a lecturer. His students included such well-known names as biologist Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who later gained fame as the author of popular science books on evolutionary biology (The Selfish Gene) and for his bitter struggle against religious evolution deniers, in particular in the US.
During his Oxford period Tinbergen also made films that won international prizes, such as the television film Signals for Survival on how seagulls use their behaviour to survive.
To celebrate the unique scientific impact of this Leiden scholar, Leiden University holds an annual Niko Tinbergen lecture, in which an eminent expert from the field gives a public lecture on the subject of evolution.
