The Tinbergen Legacy edited by Marian S. Dawkins, Timothy R. Halliday
and Richard Dawkins, Chapman & Hall, pp 146, £25
Curiosity and the urge to observe are fundamental to the practice of
both science and journalism. Without curiosity there is little motivation
to search for answers. And without the knowledge that observation supplies
it is difficult, if not impossible, to ask the right questions.
The doyen of curiosity and observation was, arguably, the Dutch naturalist
and one of the founding fathers of ethology, Niko Tinbergen who, with Konrad
Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, received the Nobel Prize for Biology and Medicine
in 1973. ‘It seems to me that no man need be ashamed of being curious about
nature,’ he wrote in Curious Naturalists in 1958. ‘It could even be argued
that this is what he got his brains for and that no greater insult to
nature and oneself is possible than to be indifferent to nature.’
Indifference was not one of Tinbergen’s characteristics. His lively
mind and unstinting efforts led to the coming of age of ethology. Following
in the giant footsteps of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution resulted
from studies of the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Tinbergen’s
ground-breaking thesis was founded on the premise that behaviours culminate
from a series of evolutionary compromises.
For example, his well-known work on breeding male sticklebacks demonstrated
that their actions performed during a fight depend on the level of two independent
drives, aggression and fear. When both drives are strongly activated, a
behavioural compromise is reached that takes the form of displacement activity,
such as sand digging – equivalent to nest building in birds – which seem
daft performed out of context.
To study these and other phenomena related to what is generally called
instinct, Tinbergen adopted what he and fellow ethologists considered were
‘objective scientific methods’. Not everyone would agree. The more rigorous
of behaviourists, for example, dispute that the ethological method is either
wholly objective or scientific. This, in part, may have explained Tinbergen’s
aversion to behaviourism, with its confinement of experimentation to the
laboratory where variables may be tightly controlled and manipulated.
The main weakness of this book is that it omits the behavourists’ opposition
to the ethologists’ belief that the field may serve as a laboratory for
observations and experiments to unlock the myriad causes and effects of
behaviour. This weakness results from the book being basically a record
of a conference held in 1990 when some 120 of his former Oxbridge colleagues
and students – the ‘maestro’s mob’ – converged at Oxford to pay tribute
to the Tinbergen legacy. As such, it comprises a series of what sometimes
amount to eulogies.
The book’s main strength lies in its anecdotal and personal accounts
of Tinbergen in action combined with academic accounts of his ideas, methods
of researching and questioning, and their application to current research
issues. His methods entailed making detailed observations of animal behaviour
that he analysed by asking four fundamentally different categories of questions
concerning causation, function, development and evolution.
The more controversial question of comparing observations of animals
to humans he left to his more ambitious successors, some of whom got into
hot water by encroaching upon the closely guarded terrain of other disciplines.
The issue of comparative ethology is addressed in one of the book’s most
fascinating chapters by the Cambridge zoologist Robert Hinde who writes:
‘Stated baldly, humans are not fish, and descriptive methods that were outstandingly
successful in studies of sticklebacks in the 1930s-1950s cannot be applied
directly in the human case.’
This is not to say that Tinbergen’s work was irrelevant to later generations
of social scientists, particularly psychologists, some of whom relished
his analyses of group behaviour in the animal kingdom. In Social Behaviour
in Animals, published in 1965, he noted that ‘the result of cooperation
of individuals is continually tested and checked and thus the group determines
ultimately, through its efficiency, the properties of the individual’.
His idea that cooperation develops within a group because of the advantages
this affords its individuals also appeals to radical sociologists and Marxists.
Such multidisciplinary appeal is fitting for a remarkable man whose
wide-ranging interests spanned almost every aspect of nature in the wild
and, unlike many dedicated researchers, did not exclude those of his pupils
and colleagues. His heuristic method, combined with a modesty of manner,
is applauded by Oxford zoologist John Krebs: ‘I never felt, in talking to
him, anything other than a colleague and an equal, one whose views were
to be judged and appreciated in the same way as those of more senior colleagues.’
Equally commendable was his conviction that as important as conducting
research is the need to communicate its findings to the public. ‘Science
is a social effort, and scientists must adjust to the public,’ Tinbergen
said. ‘If people don’t want to read your work, your whole effort, and all
the money that went into it has been lost.’ The same might be said of this
Peter Spinks is a science writer and former research psychologist based
in the Netherlands.