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Nikolaas Tinbergen: the Careful Scientist), Respectively, by Sindhu Radhakrishna in This Issue

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Editorial T N C Vidya, Associate Editor We are happy to bring to you, an issue that celebrates Niko- laas Tinbergen, who along with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, laid the foundations of the field of ethology, the study of animal behaviour. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, animal behaviour was largely approached either through vital- ism and purposive psychology (in England and then America), suggesting that behaviour was the outcome of mystical forces Email: within individuals that could, therefore, not be explained through [email protected] physico-chemical processes, or through comparative psychology (in America) that placed an almost exclusive emphasis on learn- ing as the process responsible for behaviour. Comparative psy- chologists at that time often anthropomorphised animal behaviour and relied on laboratory experiments to test animals. Ethologists Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch (in Europe), on the other hand, articulated how animal behaviour itself could be an evolved phe- nomenon. The behaviour showed by an animal could, therefore, be inherited, have survival value, and be acted upon by natu- ral selection. This was in contrast to the view of comparative psychologists who thought that mental faculties – and not be- haviours – evolved and allowed various species to learn appro- priate behaviours. Therefore, ethologists tended to focus on an- imal behaviour in the natural environment and study instinctive behaviours – behaviours that animals displayed in response to specific stimuli even in the absence of prior experience. How- ever, they realized that learning could also be important in some species at least. Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch carried out careful observations and experiments on insects, fishes, and birds. Their research paved the way for further work on obtaining an evolutionary understanding of behaviours in various animals, in- cluding humans, a proximate understanding of critical periods for normal development, and how adverse psychosocial environ- ments can lead to behavioural abnormalities and psychosomatic RESONANCE | August 2018 829 EDITORIAL illnesses. The triumvirate was awarded the Nobel Prize in Phys- iology or Medicine in 1973 “for their discoveries concerning or- ganization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour pat- terns”, a departure from the norm of awarding the prize to re- search more directly related to human physiology or disease. Tinbergen was interested in the specific stimuli eliciting certain behavioural responses of animals and in the adaptive value of behaviour. His life and his work are described in the Article- in-a-Box (Study Nature, Not Just Books) and the General Arti- cle (Nikolaas Tinbergen: The Careful Scientist), respectively, by Sindhu Radhakrishna in this issue. Regarding the former, Rad- hakrishna points out to us that Tinbergen, the man, was even more remarkable than Tinbergen, the ethologist; all of us in academia would do well to strive towards such personal qualities. Tinbergen is well-known for persistently fine-tuning and carry- ing out simple, but carefully designed, elegant experiments in the animal’s natural habitat to test hypotheses about a behaviour. It is a pleasure, therefore, to have the first of a series of articles on How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour by Raghaven- dra Gadagkar featuring Tinbergen’s experiments on digger wasps in this issue. This series encourages logical thinking and creativ- ity in setting up experiments to study animal behaviour and de- scribes experiments that can be performed (with some modifica- tion if required) by the readers of Resonance. I encourage you to write to the Resonance Facebook page (@Resonance.IASc.Bng) with your experiences of trying these experiments. Tinbergen discovered that exaggerated versions of certain stimuli evoked exaggerated responses from animals compared to what normal stimuli achieved. These supernormal stimuli seem to hi- jack the normal adaptive responses and are seen in a range of taxa – from birds to humans to butterflies. An article on Supernor- mal Stimuli and Responses appears in this issue. Some aspects of Tinbergen’s work are also illustrated in Science Smiles. It is far too easy to get lost in the details of one’s work, hardly pausing to step back and examine one’s field of work. However, 830 RESONANCE | August 2018 EDITORIAL Tinbergen did what few do, emphasising the lines of thought and methods used by ethologists rather than emphasising only factual information in his 1963 classic paper ‘On Aims and Methods of Ethology’ and in his 1965 book Animal Behaviour (LIFE Nature Library Series). The former was the Classics chosen for this issue and, in lieu of the original paper being reprinted here, we have its essence brilliantly captured in an essay (See Article-in-a-Box) by R Gadagkar that I hope will make you all read the original paper. Although Tinbergen primarily focussed on instinctive behaviour that was inherited, he attributed his success to his environment – his family, peers, teachers, and the widespread interest in natu- ral history that was part of the social milieu in the Netherlands at the time. Unfortunately, we do not have a widespread interest in natural history, behaviour, organismal or evolutionary biology in India, despite the abundance of biodiversity that can be very rewarding to study. Although ethology and other disciplines in organismal/supra-organismal biology became a ‘testable science’ many decades to about a century ago, most of our school and college syllabi in organismal biology are hopelessly outdated and rarely extend beyond ‘stamp collecting’. An understanding of the theory in various subjects, especially evolutionary biology, is cru- cial to progressing beyond descriptions and addressing meaning- ful questions in organismal biology. There is, unfortunately, not a single masters programme on evolutionary biology in the coun- try while there should logically be multiple institutes dedicated to the subject, given its scope of research and ramifications for understanding human society and health (evolutionary medicine, for example) amongst other issues. In this context, it is exciting that the formation of the first society of evolutionary biology in India, the Indian Society of Evolutionary Biologists (ISEB), (https://www.facebook.com/Indian-Society-of-Evolutionary-Bio logists-510429992749285/) has just been announced. The soci- ety has amongst its aims, promoting evolutionary biology in India through outreach in schools and colleges, which might be of in- terest to readers of Resonance. Of course, this is just a beginning and a lot more needs to be done to improve the state of organismal RESONANCE | August 2018 831 EDITORIAL biology in the country. This issue also carries the review of a very interesting book, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog). The book describes a long- term experiment, conceived of and initiated by the Russian ge- neticist, Dmitri Belyaev, in the early 1950s (and continuing to present times) to understand the evolution of animal domestica- tion. Selecting and breeding the tamest silver foxes on fox farms in remote Siberia, Lyudmila Trut, one of the authors of the book, and Belyaev unravelled possible processes that might have en- abled the transformation of wolves into domestic dogs. I hope the inviting review by Sujata Deshpande will encourage you to read the book. Apart from articles relating to ethology and evolution, we have in this issue, another General Article – The Easiest Proof of Fer- mat’s Principle by H Ray (Late) and S Roy, and a Classroom Article intriguingly titled Card Games and Chemistry by A G Samuelson. This issue also carries the second of a three-part lu- cid and informative series on Breakthroughs in Information and Communication Technologies by V Rajaraman and the last in a long Classroom Series of beautifully demonstrated Experiments in Fluid Dynamics by Chirag Kalelkar. I hope you enjoy the col- lection of articles. 832 RESONANCE | August 2018 Science Smiles Ayan Guha Email for Correspondence: [email protected] RESONANCE | August 2018 833 Resonance journal of science education August 2018 Volume 23 Number 8 GENERAL ARTICLES 925 845 Nikolaas Tinbergen The Careful Scientist Sindhu Radhakrishna 853 Supernormal Stimuli and Responses T N C Vidya 861 The Easiest Proof of Fermat’s Principle Hasi Ray and Sudipto Roy SERIES ARTICLES 853 871 How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour 1. How Wasps Find Their Nests Raghavendra Gadagkar 885 Breakthroughs in Information and Communication Technologies – II V Rajaraman 905 Follow us on Facebook Resonance, Journal of Science Education @Resonance.IASc.Bng 834 RESONANCE August 2018 Classroom DEPARTMENTSDEPARTMENTS The Inveterate Tinkerer 905 Flow Visualisation Chirag Kalelkar Editorial 829 T N C Vidya Card Games and Chemistry 915 Teaching Organometallic Reactions Through Card Games A G Samuelson Science Smiles 833 Information & Announcements Ayan Guha India Flourishes at International 929 Article-in-a-Box Olympiads Study Nature, Not Science Academies’ Refresher Course 934 837 in Experimental Physics Just Books: Nikolaas Tinbergen Science Academies’ Refresher Course 935 and His Naturalistic Life in Statistical Physics Sindhu Radhakrishna What Do 841 Ethologists Front Cover Wish to Know? Beewolf (Philanthus triangulum) carrying a bee to its tunnel Raghavendra Gadagkar nest. Nikolaas Tinbergen studied how these wasps found Book Review the way back to their own unfinished nest (read How to Design Experiments in Animal Behaviour in this issue). Magic of 925 Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beewolf#/media/ Transforming a Fox File:Bee_wolf.jpg licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Into a Dog! Back Cover Sujata Deshpande Inside Back Cover Night Life Nikolass Tinbergen (1907–1988) Malabar Gliding Frog Credit: Sindhu Radhakrishna Illustration: Subhankar Biswas RESONANCE August 2018 835 ARTICLE-IN-A-BOX Study Nature, Not Just Books Nikolaas Tinbergen and His Naturalistic Life Nikolaas Tinbergen, co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology and one of the founding fathers of ethology, is a poster child for the best that can happen when nature and nurture work in harmony.
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