Nikolaas Tinbergen

Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals.

He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.

In 1951, he published The Study of Instinct, an influential book on animal behaviour.

In 1951 Tinbergen's The Study of Instinct was published.

Behavioural ecologists and evolutionary biologists still recognise the contribution this book offered the field of behavioural science studies.

The Study of Instinct summarises Tinbergen's ideas on innate behavioural reactions in animals and the adaptiveness and evolutionary aspects of these behaviours.

By behaviour, he means the total movements made by the intact animal; innate behaviour is that which is not changed by the learning process.

The major question of the book is the role of internal and external stimuli in controlling the expression of behaviour.

In particular, he was interested in explaining 'spontaneous' behaviours: those that occurred in their complete form the first time they were performed and that seemed resistant to the effects of learning.

He explains how behaviour can be considered a combination of these spontaneous behaviour patterns and as set series of reactions to particular stimuli.

Behaviour is a reaction in that to a certain extent it is reliant on external stimuli, however it is also spontaneous since it is also dependent upon internal causal factors.

His model for how certain behavioural reactions are provoked was based on work by Konrad Lorenz.

Lorenz postulated that for each instinctive act there is a specific energy which builds up in a reservoir in the brain.

In this model, Lorenz envisioned a reservoir with a spring valve at its base that an appropriate stimulus could act on, much like a weight on a scale pan pulling against a spring and releasing the reservoir of energy, an action which would lead an animal to express the desired behaviour.

Tinbergen added complexity to this model, a model now known as Tinbergen's hierarchical model.

He suggested that motivational impulses build up in nervous centres in the brain which are held in check by blocks.

The blocks are removed by an innate releasing mechanism that allows the energy to flow to the next centre (each centre containing a block that needs to be removed) in a cascade until the behaviour is expressed.

Tinbergen's model shows multiple levels of complexity and that related behaviours are grouped.

An example is in his experiments with foraging honey bees.

He showed that honey bees show curiosity for yellow and blue paper models of flowers, and suggested that these were visual stimuli causing the buildup of energy in one specific centre.

However, the bees rarely landed on the model flowers unless the proper odour was also applied.

In this case, the chemical stimuli of the odour allowed the next link in the chain to be released, encouraging the bee to land.

The final step was for the bee to insert its mouthparts into the flower and initiate suckling.

Tinbergen envisioned this as concluding the reaction set for honey bee feeding behaviour.

In the 1960s, he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including The Riddle of the Rook (1972) and Signals for Survival (1969), which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971.

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he was one of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and his wife Jeannette van Eek.

His brother, Jan Tinbergen, won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1969.

They are the only siblings to each win a Nobel Prize.

Another brother, Luuk Tinbergen, was also a noted biologist.

Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young.

He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II.

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.

After the war, Tinbergen moved to England, where he taught at the University of Oxford and was a fellow first at Merton College, Oxford, and later at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Several of his graduate students went on to become prominent biologists including Richard Dawkins, Marian Dawkins, Desmond Morris, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Tony Sinclair.

In 1973 Tinbergen, along with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns".

The award recognised their studies on genetically programmed behaviour patterns, their origins, maturation and their elicitation by key stimuli.

In his Nobel Lecture, Tinbergen addressed the somewhat unconventional decision of the Nobel Foundation to award the prize for Physiology or Medicine to three men who had until recently been regarded as "mere animal watchers".

Tinbergen stated that their revival of the "watching and wondering" approach to studying behaviour could indeed contribute to the relief of human suffering.

The studies performed by the trio on fish, insects and birds laid the foundation for further studies on the importance of specific experiences during critical periods of normal development, as well as the effects of abnormal psychosocial situations in mammals.

At the time, these discoveries were stated to have caused "a breakthrough in the understanding of the mechanisms behind various symptoms of psychiatric disease, such as anguish, compulsive obsession, stereotypic behaviour and catatonic posture".