Tinbergen, Niko(laas) (1907–1988)

Dutch-born British zoologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work in animal behaviour patterns. He specialized in the study of instinctive behaviour in animals, and was one of the founders of ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour in natural surroundings. He shared the prize with Konrad Lorenz (with whom he worked on several projects) and Karl von Frisch.

Tinbergen investigated other aspects of animal behaviour, such as learning, and also studied human behaviour, particularly aggression, which he believed to be an inherited instinct that developed when humans changed from being predominantly herbivorous to being hunting carnivores.

Tinbergen was born in The Hague and educated at Leiden, where he became professor in 1947. From 1949 he was in Oxford, and established a school of animal-behaviour studies there.

In The Study of Instinct (1951), Tinbergen showed that the aggressive behaviour of the male three-spined stickleback is stimulated by the red coloration on the underside of other males (which develops during the mating season). He also demonstrated that the courtship dance of the male is stimulated by the sight of the swollen belly of a female that is ready to lay her eggs.

In The Herring Gull's World (1953), he described the social behaviour of gulls, emphasizing the importance of stimulus–response processes in territorial behaviour.