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Nikolaas Tinbergen – Autobiography
I was born in The Hague, Netherlands, on 15th
April 1907, the third of five children of Dirk C. Tinbergen and
Jeannette van Eek. We were a happy and harmonious family. My mother
was a warm, impulsive person; my father - a grammar school master in
Dutch language and history - was devoted to his family, a very hard
worker, and an intellectually stimulating man, full of fine, quiet
humour and joie de vivre.
I was not much interested
in school, and both at secondary school and at University, I only
just scraped through, with as little effort as I judged possible
without failing. Wise teachers, including my University Professors
in Leiden, H.
Boschma and the late C. J. van der Klaauw, allowed me plenty of
freedom to engage in my hobbies of camping, bird watching, skating
and games, of which playing left-wing in grass hockey teams gave me
free rein for my almost boundless youthful energies.
Throughout my life, Fortune has smiled on me. Holland's then
unparalleled natural riches - its vast sandy shores, its magnificent
coastal dunes, the abundant wildlife in its ubiquitous inland
waters, all within an hour's walk of our urban home - delighted me,
and I was greatly privileged in having access to the numerous
stimulating writings of the two quite exceptional Dutch naturalists,
E. Heimans and Jac P. Thijsse - still household names in the
Netherlands.
As a boy, I had two small aquaria in our
backyard, in which I watched, each spring, the nest building and
other fascinating behaviours of Sticklebacks. My natural history
master at our High School, Dr. A. Schierbeek, put some of us in
charge of the three seawater aquaria in the classroom, rightly
arguing to the Head Master that I got plenty of fresh air, so that
no one needed to worry about my spending the morning break indoors.
Having been frightened off by what I had been told of
academic Biology as it was then taught in Leiden, I was at first
disinclined to go to University. But a friend of the family,
Professor Paul Ehrenfest, and Dr. Schierbeek urged my father to send
me, in 1925, to Professor J. Thienemann, the founder of the famous
'Vogelwarte Rossitten', and the initiator of bird ringing. While
Thienemann did not quite know what to do with this awkward youth,
the photographer Rudy Steinert and his wife Lucy took me along on
their walks along the uniquely rich shores and dunes of the
Kurische Nehrung, where I saw the massive autumn migration of
birds, the wild Moose, and the famous Wanderdünen. Upon my
return to Holland, Christmas 1925, I had decided to read Biology at
Leiden University after all. Here I had the good fortune to be
befriended by Holland's most gifted naturalist Dr. Jan Verwey, who
instilled in me, by his example, a professional interest in animal
behaviour (he also beat me, much to my humiliation, in an
impromptu running match along the deserted Noordwijk
seashore - two exuberant Naked Apes!). I owe my interest in seagulls
to early imprinting on a small protected Herring Gull colony not far
from the Hague, and to the example of two fatherly friends, the late
G. J. Tijmstra and Dr. h. c. A. F. J. Portielje.
Having
scraped through my finals without much honour, I became engaged to
Elisabeth Rutten, whose family I had often joined on skating trips
on the Zuiderzee; this made me realise that some day I would have to
earn a living. Influenced by the work of Karl
von Frisch, and by J.-H. Fabre's writings on insects, I decided
to use the chance discovery of a colony of Beewolves
(Philanthus - a digger wasp) for a study of their remarkable
homing abilities. This led to an admittedly skimpy but still quite
interesting little thesis, which (as I was told later) the Leiden
Faculty passed only after grave doubts; 32 pages of print were not
impressive enough. But I was itching to get this milestone behind
me, for, through the generosity of Sidney Van den Bergh, I had been
offered the opportunity of joining the Netherlands' small contingent
for the International Polar Year 1932-33, which was to have its base
in Angmagssalik, the homeland of a small, isolated Eskimo tribe. My
wife and I lived with these fascinating people for two summers and a
winter just before they were westernised. Our first-hand experience
of life among this primitive community of hunter-gatherers stood us
in good stead forty years laters when I tried to reconstruct the
most likely way of life of ancestral Man.
Upon our return to
Holland, I was given a minor instructor's job at Leiden University,
where in 1935 Professor C. J. van der Klaauw, who knew how to
stretch his young staff members, told me to teach comparative
anatomy and to organise a teaching course in animal behaviour for
undergraduates. I was also allowed to take my first research
graduates into the field and so could extend my official 12-day
annual holiday to an annual two months' period of field work. This
we used for further studies of the homing of Beewolves and behaviour
studies of other insects and birds.
In 1936 Van der Klaauw
invited Konrad
Lorenz to Leiden for a small symposium on 'Instinct', and it was
then that Konrad and I first met. We 'clicked' at once. The Lorenzes
invited us, with our small son, for a fourmonths' stay in their
parental home in Altenberg near Vienna, where I became Lorenz'
second pupil (the first being Dr. Alfred Seitz, of the Seitz's
Reizsummenregel). But from the start 'pupil' and 'master'
influenced each other. Konrad's extraordinary vision and enthusiasm
were supplemented and fertilised by my critical sense, my
inclination to think his ideas through, and my irrepressible urge to
check our 'hunches' by experimentation - a gift for which he had an
almost childish admiration. Throughout this we often burst into
bouts of hilarious fun - in Konrad's words, in Lausbuberei.
These months were decisive for our future collaboration and
our lifelong friendship. On the way back to Holland, I shyly wrote
to the great Von Frisch asking whether I could call at his already
famous Rockefeller-built laboratory in Munich. My recollection of
that visit is a mixture of delight with the man Von Frisch, and an
anxiety on his behalf when I saw that he refused to reply to a
student's aggressive Heil Hitler by anything but a quiet
Grüss Gott.
In 1938 the Netherlands-America
Foundation gave me free passage to and from New York, which I used
for a four months' stay, eked out by fees for lectures given in
halting English, by living for one dollar a day in YMCAs (40 c for a
room, 50 c for a day's food, and 2 nickels for the subway), and
travelling by Greyhound. During that visit I met Ernst Mayr, Frank
A. Beach, Ted Schneirla, Robert M. Yerkes (who offered me
hospitality both in Yale and Orange Park, Florida) and many others. I
was frankly bewildered by what I saw of American Psychology. I
sailed for home shortly after the Munich crisis, bracing myself for
the dark years that we knew were lying ahead.
There followed
a year of intense work, and of lively correspondence with Lorenz,
which was broken off by the outbreak of war. Both of us saw this as
a catastrophe. Wir hätten soviel Gutes vor, wrote Lorenz
before the evil forces of nazism descended on Holland.
In
the war I spent two years in a German hostage camp while my wife saw
our family through the difficult times; Lorenz was conscripted as an
Army doctor and disappeared during the battle of Witebsk; he did not
emerge from Russian prison camps until 1947. Our reunion, in 1949,
in the hospitable home of W. H. Thorpe in Cambridge, was to both of
us a deeply moving occasion.
Soon after the war I was once
again invited to the United States, and to Britain, to lecture on
our work on animal behaviour. Lasting friendships with Ernst Mayr
and David Lack proved decisive for my later interest in evolution
and ecology. The lectures in the U.S. were worked out to a book 'The
Study of Instinct' (1951); and my visit to Oxford, where David Lack
had just taken over the newly founded Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology,
ultimately led to our accepting the invitation of Sir Alister Hardy
to settle in Oxford.
Apart from establishing, as Hardy had
asked me, a centre of research and teaching in animal behaviour, I
spent my Oxford years in seeing our newly founded journal Behaviour
through its early years, in helping to develop contact with American
psychology (of which we were perhaps excessively critical), and in
fostering international cooperation. This work would not have been
possible without the active help, behind the scenes, of Sir
Peter Medawar (who urged the Nuffield Foundation to finance our
little research group through its first ten years) and of E. M.
Nicholson, who allocated generous funds from the Nature Conservancy
which, with hardly any strings, was to last until my retirement.
When Professor J. W. S. Pringle succeeded Alister Hardy as Head of
the Department of
Zoology in Oxford, he not only supported and encouraged our
group, but also interested us in bridging the gap (so much wider
than we had realised) between ethology and neuro-physiology. By
founding the new inter-disciplinary Oxford School of Human Sciences
he stimulated my still dormant desire to make ethology apply its
methods to human behaviour.
Our research group was offered
unique opportunities for ecologically oriented field work when Dr.
h. c. J. S. Owen, the then Director of Tanzania's National Parks,
asked me to help him in founding the Serengeti Research Institute. A
number of my pupils have since helped to establish this Institute's
world fame; and the scientific ties with it have remained strong
ever since.
Our work received recognition by various proofs
of acceptance by the scientific community, among which I value most
my election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1962; as a Foreign Member of the
Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen in 1964; the
conferment, in 1973, of the honorary degree of D. Sc. by Edinburgh University;
and the awarding of the Jan Swammerdam medal of the Genootschap
voor Natuur-, Genees-, en Heelkunde of Amsterdam in 1973.
In recent years I have, with my wife, concentrated my own
research on the socially important question of Early Childhood
Autism. This and other work on the development of children has
recently brought us in contact with Professor Jerome S. Bruner,
whose invigorating influence is already being felt throughout
Britain. My only regret is that I am not ten years younger, so that
I could more actively join him in developing his centre of child
ethology in Oxford.
Among my publications the following are
representative of my contributions to the growth of ethology:
1951 |
The Study of Instinct - Oxford, Clarendon
Press |
1953 |
The Herring Gull's World - London,
Collins |
1958 |
Curious Naturalists - London, Country
Life |
1972 |
The Animal in its World Vol. 1. - London,
Allen & Unwin; Harvard University Press |
1973 |
The Animal in its World Vol. 2. - London,
Allen & Unwin; Harvard University Press |
1972 |
(together with E. A. Tinbergen) Early
Childhood Autism - an Ethological Approach - Berlin,
Parey |
From Les
Prix Nobel 1973.
Dr Tinbergen died in 1988.
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