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The Life and Death of Ethology

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The Life and Death of Ethology Animal Biology, Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 491-493 (2003) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003. Also available online - www.brill.nl The Life and Death of Ethology Niko’s Nature. A life of Niko Tinbergen and his science of animal behaviour H. Kruuk. 391 pages, 67 drawings, 76 photographs, Oxford University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-19-851558-8 This is a wonderful book about the life of Nikolaas Tinbergen, a man whose unusual talent for naturalistic observation and experimentation contributed to the establishment of ‘ethology’, an approach to animal behaviour for which he was awarded, jointly with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Hans Kruuk, a Dutch compatriot, student and friend, has produced a detailed and enthralling biography of Niko Tinbergen. The ten chapters look at Tinbergen’s youth spent in a Holland that no longer exists, his studies, and his trip to Greenland. The book describes the birth of ethology in a pre-World War II Leiden. The invasion of Holland by the Nazis and the subsequent two years endured by Tinbergen in a Nazi hostage camp not only affected his life deeply but also changed the direction of the development of ethology. The future of ethology would also change with Tinbergen’s move to Oxford. The book covers the Oxford years and Tinbergen’s retirement, and gives a much appreciated evaluation of his scientific legacy and list of progeny. You will, I am sure, find it illuminating to trace the intellectual genealogies of many people who currently practise behavioural biology. I found the book captivating and emotional. Kruuk’s opening sentences describe how he remembers Tinbergen: “Along the beach a small, khaki-clad man ap- proached carrying a floppy rucksack, on his shoulder a tripod, binoculars around his neck. His grey hair bristled in the wind, his spectacled face followed the birds, and he searched the sand in front of his feet for animal tracks. A man in his ele- ment.” (p. 2). The tone is affectionate and full of admiration, but Kruuk’s love is not blind. When you pick up this book, so beautifully illustrated with Tinbergen’s own drawings and many of his own photographs, you may think you will read about the life of a scientist — and you will. You will learn a lot about his love of nature, his deep-rooted Dutch culture, his obvious charisma with students — and you will also learn about his modesty and self-doubt, his cyclic deep depressive spells, his hypochondria, his affectionate relationship with his younger brother Luuk and 492 Book Review his more distant interactions with his older and considerably more quantitatively- oriented brother Jan who won a Nobel Prize in Economics just a few years before Niko. This detailed uncompromising look at some of the most intimate and personal affairs of Niko Tinbergen may make you wonder why Kruuk felt it necessary to say it all so openly. My feeling is that Kruuk gambled on presenting Tinbergen honestly and openly, faults and all, so that we, like Kruuk, would love and admire him even more. Kruuk was right. I grew fond of the man’s charisma with students, his pleasingly simplistic lecture style and his ability as a field naturalist. I admired his endurance in spending hours crouched in a hide and envied his talent at photography and filming. I grew attached to this complex secret man as I read that during the two years in the Nazi camp he kept himself busy by producing hand-illustrated story books for his children back home (two have since been published). But there is more in this book than just the life of a man. The book also describes the life of ethology in the same uncompromising crude light used to describe its founder. It turns out that many of the now classic, field experiments conducted by undergraduate students under Tinbergen’s supervision while he taught at Leiden have failed to be replicated, even by some of Tinbergen’s own students. Design flaws, statistical weaknesses — all is revealed, and one is left to wonder how Tinbergen would have fared in the light of today’s inquisitions into sloppy data. However, the ideas, the approach and the concepts that Tinbergen developed would prove much more important than the experiments he conducted. Ethology came to Britain with Tinbergen when he uprooted his family and moved to Oxford soon after the war. The science spread and developed into more complicated theories of causation, and one gets the impression that even Tinbergen himself started having doubts about whether one could really get to causation purely through observation of animal behaviour. He responded to these doubts by moving away from causation to study the survival value of behaviour, an interest that gave rise to the famous eggshell removal experiment and the birth of behavioural ecology. He and his wife Lies decided to apply ethology to the study of autism in children. This work produced a book but no great scientific contribution. His work with human behaviour was highly criticised; he was seriously heckled in a 1969 lecture at the Simon Fraser University in Canada for extending ethology to humans, a forerunner of what would hit E.O. Wilson and his New Synthesis a few years later. The book may be repetitive in places, and some details are clearly wrong, i.e. the author states that McGill University is in Toronto, which to an Englishman would be like saying that Niko was professor at the University of Oxford in Cambridge! However, these are very minor details that are quickly forgiven since Kruuk has invested a great deal of effort in going through massive amounts of correspondence and publications, and interviewing numerous people, including the Tinbergen children to whom the book is dedicated. For this he has all my admiration..
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