Many of us have been surprised at the unconventional decision of the Nobel Foundation to award this year’s prize ‘for Physiology or Medicine’ to three men who had until recently been regarded as ‘mere animal watchers’. Since at least Konrad Lorenz and I could not really be described as physiologists, we must conclude that our scientia amabilis is now being acknowledged as an integral part of th...

This year is the 50th anniversary of Tinbergen's (1963) article 'On aims and methods of ethology', where he first outlined the four 'major problems of biology'. The classification of the four problems, or questions, is one of Tinbergen's most enduring legacies, and it remains as valuable today as 50 years ago in highlighting the value of a comprehensive, multifaceted understanding of a characte...

The evolutionary study of the mind in the twentieth century has been marked by three self-conscious movements: classical ethology, sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology (capitalized to indicate that it functions here as a proper name). Classical ethology was established in the years immediately before the Second World War, primarily by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen (Burckhardt, 1983). Int...