Behavior: The Animal Watchers

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It is no accident that the problem of instinctive aggression has also preoccupied Oxford's Holland-born laureate, Nikolaas Tinbergen. He did postdoctoral research under Lorenz in Vienna in 1937. Known to a generation of awed students as a tireless stalker of gulls on windswept cliffs, Tinbergen is a master experimenter who has found ingenious ways to test his own and others' hypotheses. After many tedious years of studying the stickleback fish, he was able to delineate its patterns of fighting and courtship: the male builds an elaborate nest of water plants and lunges fiercely at any rival male that dares to enter its newly claimed territory. Tinbergen was able to prove that this behavior was rigidly instinctual. This knowledge was used by other researchers, including Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape, 1968), as a basis for investigating behavior in the higher mammals and in man, for, though human beings function less slavishly by instinct than sticklebacks, it is the contention of ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen that inherited behavior patterns, notably in aggression of rival males, are common to both fish and people.

On the other hand, ethologists are also leary of going too far with this kind of anthropomorphic thinking. Lorenz has said: "However much we may learn that is suggestive and instructive by studying animal behavior, we must be careful how we apply these lessons when we interpret human behavior. For man is certainly an animal, but man, although identifiably a primate, is also a primate of a unique—and uniquely dangerous&$151;species."