Nikolaas Tinbergen
15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988
Nikolaas Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who helped found the discipline of ethology, the study of animal behaviour under natural conditions. He is known for his field experiments on instinctive behaviour and for the four questions that structure explanations of behaviour. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Nikolaas Tinbergen.
- Alan Paton (1903–1988) Overlapped 81 years →
- Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) Overlapped 81 years →
- Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) Overlapped 81 years →
- Frank Whittle (1907–1996) Overlapped 81 years →
- Félix Houphouët-Boigny (1905–1993) Overlapped 81 years →
- Graham Greene (1904–1991) Overlapped 81 years →
Life events
He was the third of five children of Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen and Jeannette van Eek.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTinbergen completed a short doctoral thesis on the homing behaviour of the bee-wolf wasp.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe couple spent more than a year in East Greenland studying Inuit communities and Arctic birds and mammals.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTinbergen visited Lorenz in Austria, beginning a partnership that shaped the framework of ethology.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe was detained after protesting the dismissal of Jewish faculty members at Leiden University.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTinbergen relocated to England and built the animal behaviour research group in Oxford's Department of Zoology.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe book set out his synthesis of instinctive behaviour and became a foundational ethology text.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe paper set out the four complementary questions, on causation, development, function and evolution, now known as Tinbergen's four questions.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHe shared the prize with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for discoveries about individual and social behaviour patterns in animals.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTinbergen died at the age of 81 following a stroke.
Source: en.wikipedia.org