The ‘Disadapted’ Animal: Niko Tinbergen on Human Nature and the Human Predicament

Journal of the History of Biology 51 (2):191-221 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper explores ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s path from animal to human studies in the 1960s and 1970s and his views about human nature. It argues, first, that the confluence of several factors explains why Tinbergen decided to cross the animal/human divide in the mid 1960s: his concern about what he called “the human predicament,” his relations with British child psychiatrist John Bowlby, the success of ethological explanations of human behavior, and his professional and personal situation. It also argues that Tinbergen transferred his general adaptationist view of animal behavior to the realm of human biology; here, his concern about disadaptation led him to a view of human behavior that was strongly determined by the species’ evolutionary past, a position that I call evolutionary determinism. These ideas can be seen in the work he carried out with his wife, Elisabeth Tinbergen, on autism. The paper concludes that Tinbergen’s vision of human nature constitutes another version of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called in 1966 the “stratigraphic” conception of the human: a view of human nature as a composite of levels in which a universal ancestral biological core is superimposed by psychological and cultural layers that represent accidental variation at best and pathological deviation at worst.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 97,197

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Beauty and the beast? : conceptualizing sex in evolutionary narratives.Erika Lorraine Milam - 2010 - In Denis R. Alexander & Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), Biology and Ideology From Descartes to Dawkins. London: University of Chicago Press.
Ethology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.Paul Edmund Griffiths - 2008 - In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Blackwell. pp. 393-414.
Nine Levels of Explanation.Melvin Konner - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (4):748-793.
On aims and methods of cognitive ethology.Dale Jamieson & Marc Bekoff - 1992 - Philosophy of Science Association 1992:110-124.
Perspectives on the animal mind.Robert A. Skipper - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (4):483-487.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-05-19

Downloads
45 (#385,070)

6 months
6 (#1,119,116)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Marga Vicedo
University of Toronto

References found in this work

The Study of Instinct.N. Tinbergen - 1954 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 5 (17):72-76.
On Aggression.Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris & Lionel Tiger - 1971 - Science and Society 35 (2):209-219.
Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism.Lorraine Daston & Gregg Mitman - 2005 - Journal of the History of Biology 38 (3):624-626.
King Solomon's Ring.Konrad Z. Lorenz - 1952 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (11):265-272.

View all 10 references / Add more references