Nikolaas Tinbergen

Facts

Nikolaas Tinbergen

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Nikolaas Tinbergen
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1973

Born: 15 April 1907, the Hague, the Netherlands

Died: 21 December 1988, Oxford, United Kingdom

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Prize motivation: “for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns”

Prize share: 1/3

Work

Some animal and human patterns of behavior are innate. Examples of such behavioral patterns in animals can be seen in how they convey information to one another, how they behave when mating and how they care for their young. Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen made pioneering contributions within ethology by studying animal behavior. Nikolaas Tinbergen used dummies in his experiments. One of his discoveries at the end of the 1930s was that birds preferred to brood eggs with exaggerated markings in the form of size, spots and color.

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