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.
相關網站:
http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1973/tinbergen-autobio.html
http://www.almaz.com/nobel/medicine/1973c.html