Niko's Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and His Science of Animal Behaviour

By Hans Kruuk

Here is the first biography of Niko Tinbergen, the brilliant but reticent naturalist (once described as "pathologically modest") who turned a passion for observing nature into a revolutionary new branch of science that illuminated the study of animal behavior.
Tracing the closely intertwined threads of Niko's personal and professional life, Hans Kruuk reveals the man behind the scientist. He shows how Niko's Calvinist upbringing in a highly intellectual Dutch family--his father was a much-published scholar, his elder brother a Nobel Laureate in Economics--the two-years he spent in a hostage camp during the Nazi occupation of Holland, and most importantly the magical year in Greenland, where he lived amongst the Inuit and observed animals in their natural habitat--an experience that would shape his scientific disposition. The period in Greenland set the stage for the groundbreaking experiments with free-living birds in the 1930s and 1940s that brought the study of animal behavior out of the laboratory and into the wild. Kruuk also offers an illuminating exploration of Niko's work with Konrad Lorenz, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1973; his great success as a teacher at Oxford, where he was known by enthusiastic students--Desmond Morris, Richard Dawkins, and John Krebs, among them--as "The Maestro"; his frequent bouts of depression; the triumph of his book The Study of Instinct, which established ethology as a science; his controversial work on autism in children, and much more.
Written by Hans Kruuk, a former student of Niko Tinbergen and himself a distinguished scientist, Niko's Nature offers a fascinating and affectionate account of the man who forever changed the way we think about animal behavior.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198515588
• ISBN13: 9780198515586
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 2.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

One of the Greatest Founders of Ethology

Niko Tinbergen was one of three ethologists to win the Nobel Prize and of the three he was perhaps the most interesting. A born animal observer, there was little doubt about where his interests tended from very early age. The other two Nobel winners, Karl Von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz were Austrian and German, respectively, while Tinbergen was Dutch. As such he was interned by the Nazi's, while Von Frisch was harassed for not following Hitler and Lorenz became a collaborator with the Nazi government and a member of the Nazi Party. The latter acts caused a deep rift between Lorenz and Tinbergen, who had been to a large degree a disciple of Lorenz. This carried on in later contact which, while cordial, was strained. On one occasion Lorenz took issue with Tinbergen's partial agreement with Danny Lehrman, who had criticized both Lorenz's and Tinbergen's collaborative work. Tinbergen had merely acknowledged some of the criticism by Lehrman (and also Schneirla) had some basis and that "instinct" and "learning" were not at all easy to separate. These and many other aspects of the life of Niko Tinbergen are well covered in "Niko's Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and his Science of Animal Behaviour" by Hans Kruuk, one of Tinbergen's students. This is a very well done biography of a complex man, who on one hand designed brilliant studies of gulls, wasps, and other organisms, and on the other fell into major errors of judgement. He was in fact quite human, very conservative about bringing up his and his wife's children, yet very liberal politically to the point of socialism. His Nobel Prize speech was a total disaster because he used it to inadvisedly praise a questionable idea on autism. On the other hand he often refused to defend himself when attacked. In other words he was a fallible human being and in this regard quite likable Still he was a pioneer in a new field that has born fruit in modern evolutionary behavioral studies. It is certainly to his credit that he saw some of the flaws in his and Lorenz's work, despite their close early colaborations. I only wish that Lorenz had been as open to criticism! I recommend this book highly as a great introduction to the thought of Tinbergen and other ethologists and of the times during which it developed.