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The Study Of Instinct
Behavioural ecologists and evolutionary biologists have long recognised Professor Tinbergen's great prescience in placing the study of animal behaviour firmly in an ecological and evolutionary context nearly fifty years ago. This is a reprint of the 1969 edition of The Study of Instinct (originally published in 1951). The first six chapters cover behaviour as a response to stimuli, the neurophysiological bases of innate behaviour as then understood, and the development of behavioural patterns in individuals. The final two chapters are devoted to the adaptativeness of behaviour and evolutionary aspects of behaviour. These last two chapters have particularly withstood the test of time. 'More than the other parts,' the author wrote in 1969, 'they show the potential of studying animals in their natural environment, i.e. in the environment that exerts the pressures which each animal species has to meet...I feel very strongly that an. . . intense effort ought to be made to understand the effects of behaviour; of the ways in which it influences the survival of the species; and that we should try much harder to understand the state of adaptedness and the process of evolutionary adaptation.' Tinbergen's insights undoubtedly paved the way for significant observational, experimental, and theoretical advances in behavioural ecology and evolution over the past two decades. This book is reissued to make it available to a new generation of researchers and students.
- GenresScienceBiologyNonfiction
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
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388 people want to read
About the author
Niko Tinbergen
28 books29 followersNikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen FRS[1] (/ˈtɪnbɜːrɡən/ TIN-bur-gən, Dutch: [ˈnikoː(laːs) ˈtɪmbɛrɣə(n)]; 15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz[7][8][9][10][11] for their discoveries concerning the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 3, 2018
If you want to understand how animals behave, read this book. A little long in the tooth but surprisingly relevant, Tinbergen laid out how we study animals and provided many, many examples of interesting behaviors that animals can do. Wasps can build complex underground and aboveground nests - how do they manage to do it with their tiny brains? How do gulls distinguish between real eggs and rocks? Why do fish sometimes look like they would blend into the background and sometimes look so vibrant? Tinbergen explores the foundations for the science of behavior (ethology) and has tons of fun little illustrations packed in as well.
December 23, 2025
Niko Tinbergen’s The Study of Instinct is an attempt to rescue animal behaviour from vagueness and turn it into a fully legitimate biological object. The book’s core conviction is that behaviour is neither a mysterious inner force nor a loose collection of reactions, but an organized, lawful phenomenon that can be studied with the same rigor as anatomy or physiology. Tinbergen’s guiding question throughout is deceptively simple: why does an animal behave the way it does? His answer, however, is deliberately multi-layered. Any behaviour, he argues, must be understood simultaneously in terms of its immediate causes, its development within the individual, its evolutionary history, and its biological function. Leaving out any one of these perspectives results in a distorted picture.
A major strength of the book is Tinbergen’s insistence on methodological discipline. He repeatedly warns against explaining behaviour by appealing to subjective states such as intentions or feelings. This is not because animals lack inner experiences, but because such explanations cannot be objectively tested. Instead, behaviour must be described in terms of observable movement patterns, studied in natural contexts, and only then experimentally analysed. His classic examples—stickleback fish attacking red-bellied rivals, honeybees’ colour discrimination, or the digging wasp that rigidly follows a daily behavioural sequence—demonstrate how easily results can be misinterpreted if context, timing, or internal state are ignored. Behaviour turns out to be far more structured, and far more conditional, than early stimulus–response models suggested.
Tinbergen’s account of causation is especially illuminating. Behaviour is shown to arise from the interaction of external stimuli and internal processes such as hormones, central nervous activity, and motivational states. Lorenz’s hydraulic model, with its ideas of action-specific energy and release mechanisms, serves not as a literal explanation but as a conceptual tool to show how behaviour can occur spontaneously, even in the absence of external triggers. Phenomena like vacuum activity, displacement behaviour, and redirected aggression reveal that behaviour is governed by internal organization as much as by the environment. What looks irrational or meaningless on the surface often turns out to be the visible trace of an internal conflict between competing drives.
One of the book’s most influential ideas is ritualization. Tinbergen shows how movements that originally arise from conflict, incomplete actions, or displacement can, over evolutionary time, become formalized communication signals. Through exaggeration and simplification, behaviour shifts function: an action once tied to a practical task becomes a social signal, especially in courtship or aggression. These ritualized displays can then be compared across species, allowing behaviour to be treated as an evolutionary character with its own history. In this sense, behaviour has a phylogeny just as real as that of bones or organs.
Crucially, Tinbergen does not treat behaviour as merely shaped by evolution. He argues that behaviour actively shapes evolution by altering the conditions under which selection operates. By changing how animals interact with their environment—through nesting, mate choice, territoriality, or migration—behaviour can precede and guide morphological change. Courtship behaviour, in particular, plays a central role in speciation by creating behavioural isolation between populations. Behaviour thus becomes both an outcome of evolution and one of its driving forces.
When Tinbergen turns to function, he reframes behaviour in terms of adaptive value rather than intention. A behaviour persists not because it is meaningful in a psychological sense, but because it contributes to survival or reproduction. Some behaviours benefit individuals directly, others stabilize social groups, and still others regulate population density at the species level. Importantly, Tinbergen emphasizes that a behaviour’s current function may differ from its original evolutionary role. Form can remain stable while function shifts, reminding the reader that adaptation is historical rather than teleological.
The discussion of development further undermines the instinct-versus-learning dichotomy. Tinbergen shows that behaviour emerges through a continuous interaction between inherited structure and experience. Some patterns mature without prior experience, others depend on hormones or critical periods, and learning itself is biologically constrained. Animals are not blank slates; they are prepared to learn certain things and not others. Instinct, in this view, is not a hidden force but a level of biological organization integrating neural, hormonal, and sensory systems.
By the end of the book, it becomes clear that Tinbergen’s real achievement is not any single concept, but the framework he constructs. Behaviour is no longer reduced to reflexes, nor inflated into vague mentalism. It is treated as a dynamic, self-regulating system that links physiology, development, ecology, and evolution. The Study of Instinct reads today less like a dated monograph and more like the foundation of modern behavioural biology—a reminder that to understand life, one must take behaviour seriously as both mechanism and meaning.
A major strength of the book is Tinbergen’s insistence on methodological discipline. He repeatedly warns against explaining behaviour by appealing to subjective states such as intentions or feelings. This is not because animals lack inner experiences, but because such explanations cannot be objectively tested. Instead, behaviour must be described in terms of observable movement patterns, studied in natural contexts, and only then experimentally analysed. His classic examples—stickleback fish attacking red-bellied rivals, honeybees’ colour discrimination, or the digging wasp that rigidly follows a daily behavioural sequence—demonstrate how easily results can be misinterpreted if context, timing, or internal state are ignored. Behaviour turns out to be far more structured, and far more conditional, than early stimulus–response models suggested.
Tinbergen’s account of causation is especially illuminating. Behaviour is shown to arise from the interaction of external stimuli and internal processes such as hormones, central nervous activity, and motivational states. Lorenz’s hydraulic model, with its ideas of action-specific energy and release mechanisms, serves not as a literal explanation but as a conceptual tool to show how behaviour can occur spontaneously, even in the absence of external triggers. Phenomena like vacuum activity, displacement behaviour, and redirected aggression reveal that behaviour is governed by internal organization as much as by the environment. What looks irrational or meaningless on the surface often turns out to be the visible trace of an internal conflict between competing drives.
One of the book’s most influential ideas is ritualization. Tinbergen shows how movements that originally arise from conflict, incomplete actions, or displacement can, over evolutionary time, become formalized communication signals. Through exaggeration and simplification, behaviour shifts function: an action once tied to a practical task becomes a social signal, especially in courtship or aggression. These ritualized displays can then be compared across species, allowing behaviour to be treated as an evolutionary character with its own history. In this sense, behaviour has a phylogeny just as real as that of bones or organs.
Crucially, Tinbergen does not treat behaviour as merely shaped by evolution. He argues that behaviour actively shapes evolution by altering the conditions under which selection operates. By changing how animals interact with their environment—through nesting, mate choice, territoriality, or migration—behaviour can precede and guide morphological change. Courtship behaviour, in particular, plays a central role in speciation by creating behavioural isolation between populations. Behaviour thus becomes both an outcome of evolution and one of its driving forces.
When Tinbergen turns to function, he reframes behaviour in terms of adaptive value rather than intention. A behaviour persists not because it is meaningful in a psychological sense, but because it contributes to survival or reproduction. Some behaviours benefit individuals directly, others stabilize social groups, and still others regulate population density at the species level. Importantly, Tinbergen emphasizes that a behaviour’s current function may differ from its original evolutionary role. Form can remain stable while function shifts, reminding the reader that adaptation is historical rather than teleological.
The discussion of development further undermines the instinct-versus-learning dichotomy. Tinbergen shows that behaviour emerges through a continuous interaction between inherited structure and experience. Some patterns mature without prior experience, others depend on hormones or critical periods, and learning itself is biologically constrained. Animals are not blank slates; they are prepared to learn certain things and not others. Instinct, in this view, is not a hidden force but a level of biological organization integrating neural, hormonal, and sensory systems.
By the end of the book, it becomes clear that Tinbergen’s real achievement is not any single concept, but the framework he constructs. Behaviour is no longer reduced to reflexes, nor inflated into vague mentalism. It is treated as a dynamic, self-regulating system that links physiology, development, ecology, and evolution. The Study of Instinct reads today less like a dated monograph and more like the foundation of modern behavioural biology—a reminder that to understand life, one must take behaviour seriously as both mechanism and meaning.
September 24, 2017
Momentami straszna piła, ale fascynujący wgląd we wrodzone mechanizmy u bardzo wielu zwierząt - od ciernika, przez mewy srebrzyste i ostrygojady, aż po ludzi.
September 16, 2024
I like behavior of fishies
July 10, 2020
Tal como su nombre lo dice el libro narra los principios que rigen el instinto. Fue escrito por uno de los padres de la etología, Niko Tinbergen. A través del libro vamos conociendo las directrices de las conductas, desde las más sencillas hasta las más complejas. El libro explica cada hecho de una forma muy concisa, seguido de cómo se llegó al descubrimiento de tal hecho y enumera algunos experimentos por los cuales se comprobó y se puede comprobar dicho hecho. Cualquier biólogo que esté interesado en la conducta animal disfrutará mucho este libro.
April 16, 2010
A classic.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews