Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases: Niko and Elisabeth Tinbergen On Autism

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Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases: Niko and Elisabeth Tinbergen on

Autism
Article in Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine = Canadian bulletin of medical history · April 2018
DOI: 10.3138/cbmh.191-122016
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Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases: Niko and Elisabeth
Tinbergen on Autism
Marga Vicedo
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Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases:
Niko and Elisabeth Tinbergen on Autism
Marga Vicedo
Abstract. The idea that some diseases result from a poor fit between modern
life and our biological make-up is part of the long history of what historian
of medicine Charles Rosenberg has called the ‘‘progress-and-pathology
narrative.’’ This article examines a key episode in that history: 1973 Nobel
laureate Niko Tinbergen’s use of an evolutionary framework to identify
autism as a pathogenic effect of progress. Influenced by British psychiatrist
John Bowlby’s work, Tinbergen and his wife Elisabeth saw autistic children
as victims of environmental stress caused mainly by mothers’ failure to
bond with their children and to protect them from conflicting situations.
However, the author argues that their position was not ‘‘environmental.’’
For them, autism was due to a failure of socialization but the mechanisms
that explain that failure were established by biological evolution. Situating
their views within the context of Niko’s concern about the derailment of
biological evolution by cultural evolution, this article shows that their ideas
are of special significance for understanding the persistence of the view
that civilization poses a risk to human health.
Keywords. autism, stress diseases, civilization diseases, Niko Tinbergen,

Elisabeth Tinbergen, John Bowlby, attachment, maternal care,
evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychiatry
Résumé. L’idée voulant que certaines maladies soient causées par un mauvais
ajustement entre la vie moderne et notre constitution biologique s’inscrit dans
la longue histoire de ce que l’historien de la médecine Charles Rosenberg
appelait le « progress-and-pathology narrative ». Cet article examine un
épisode clé de cette histoire : l’utilisation d’un cadre évolutionniste pour
identifier l’autisme comme un effet pathogène du progrès par le lauréat
du prix Nobel de médecine 1973 Niko Tinbergen. Influencés par le travail
du psychiatre britannique John Bowlby, Tinbergen et son épouse Elisabeth
Marga Vicedo – Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
University of Toronto
Originally submitted 11 December 2016; accepted 28 September 2017.
CBMH/ BCHM 2018; ahead of print article doi: 10.3138/cbmh.191-122016

2 Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases
voyaient les enfants autistes comme des victimes du stress environnemental

principalement causé par l’échec des mères à tisser des liens avec leurs
enfants et à les protéger des situations conflictuelles. Nous soutenons toute-
fois que leur position n’était pas « environnementale ». Pour eux, l’autisme
était causé par l’échec de la socialisation, mais les mécanismes qui expliquent
cet échec relevaient de l’évolution biologique. En situant leur point de vue
dans le contexte de la préoccupation de Niko concernant le déraillement de
l’évolution biologique par l’évolution culturelle, cet article montre que leurs
idées sont particulièrement importantes pour comprendre la persistance de
l’idée que la civilisation représente un risque pour la santé humaine.
Mots-clés. autisme, maladies liées au stress, maladies de civilisation,

Niko Tinbergen, Elisabeth Tinbergen, John Bowlby, attachement,
soins maternels, psychologie de l’évolution, psychiatrie évolutionniste
Introduction
Diseases of civilization, lifestyle diseases, stress diseases: these largely
interchangeable concepts express the idea that some of our mental
and physical ailments are caused by our ways of life, especially those
introduced during rapid social changes. Historian Charles Rosenberg
has called this discourse the ‘‘progress-and-pathology narrative,’’ and
has shown that it has a long history and has been reconfigured as
our way of life has transmuted from rural to urban to global.1 In
‘‘Pathologies of Progress’’ Rosenberg sketches some nineteenth-
century versions of what he considers ‘‘ventures into didactic cultural
pathology’’ and notes that the introduction of an evolutionary frame-
work at the end of the century led to a new version of the idea of
civilization as risk. Appealing to the idea that our minds and bodies
are adapted to an ancestral environment, this version suggests that
some pathological conditions are the result of a poor fit between
modern living conditions and our biological make-up.2
The significance of that framework for medicine was highlighted
in the 1973 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, awarded to
Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch.
The press release emphasized that the awardees’ research had led to
important results for psychiatry and medicine ‘‘especially as regards
possible means of adapting environment to the biological equipment
of man with the aim of preventing maladaptation and disease.’’3
The view that an evolutionary approach is essential to understand
and prevent diseases has grown in acceptance since the Nobel recog-
nition. The idea that a ‘‘maladapted mind’’ leads to mental disorders
Marga Vicedo 3
is the central tenet of evolutionary psychiatry.4 Yet we do not have a

full historical account of the development and significance of the
evolutionary framework for medicine and psychiatry.5
I will argue in this article that Niko Tinbergen’s work on dis-
adaptation and his work on autism, carried out jointly with his
wife, Elisabeth (Lies) Tinbergen, from the 1970s to the 1980s, are
an important part of that history. The Tinbergens maintained that
autism is one example of a variety of stress diseases resulting from
the increasing disadaptation of humans to their environment due
to numerous social changes brought about by modern civilization.
Specifically, they argued that autistic children are victims of environ-
mental stress caused mainly by their mothers’ failure to bond with
them.6 However, their work has not received much historical atten-
tion to date.
Historians of medicine have not examined their ideas, most
probably because the field of expertise of the 1973 Nobel laureates
was not medicine. All three recipients were experts on animal behav-
iour, with Tinbergen and Lorenz recognized as founders of ethology,
the biological study of behaviour. But in the 1960s Tinbergen became
convinced that his field could contribute to identifying and remedy-
ing diseases brought about by modern civilization. Ethology, as he
put it, should engage in ethopathology.7
Historians of ethology, for their part, have seen Tinbergen’s foray
into autism as a distraction from his important work on animal re-
search. In fact, his writings on human stress diseases have seemed
rather puzzling in the context of his earlier ideas. Ethology had
postulated that social behaviour is mostly a matter of instinctual
responses. But in his Nobel speech and in his autism work, Tinbergen
highlighted the importance of environmental factors. In addition,
he had always emphasized how little ethologists knew about human
behaviour, but later maintained that ethology was ready to intervene
in human affairs. Furthermore, many of his colleagues did not think
Tinbergen’s work on childhood autism measured up to the high
scientific standards he had established in his own work on animal
behaviour. According to Tinbergens’ former student and biographer,
ethologist Hans Kruuk, ‘‘his excursion into autism science did his
reputation little good.’’8 It is thus not surprising that ethologists
and historians of ethology have generally ignored Tinbergen’s work
on autism.
Most histories of autism also ignore the Tinbergens’ contribu-
tions or make only a passing reference to them.9 The main reason
is that by the time the Tinbergens started working on autism in
the early 1970s, most experts believed in the organic origins of

autism. The Tinbergens were going against contemporary explana-
tions of the aetiology of the condition as well as treading in a painful
history of mother blame. In 1943 American psychiatrist Leo Kanner
called attention to what he saw as a previously unidentified syndrome
characterized by some children’s inability to relate to other people; a
year later he named it ‘‘early infantile autism.’’10 Although Kanner
initially argued that childhood autism has an organic origin, in the
1950s he contributed to the notion that ‘‘refrigerator mothers’’ are a
factor in its development. This view became widespread in the 1950s
and 1960s through the work of many psychoanalysts, but most spe-
cialists had rejected it by the 1970s.11 In short, the Tinbergens were
out of step with contemporary developments, and most historians
have not considered their views worthy of examination. Adam
Feinstein, for example, briefly discusses Tinbergen’s views about
therapies as a ‘‘pseudo-scientific’’ approach to autism.12
To date, only sociologist Chloe Silverman has examined the
Tinbergens’ work in historical context. After describing their views,
she focuses on the reception of the Tinbergens’ therapeutic proposals
and argues that they found a more positive reception than had been
assumed. The reception of their views, she argues, was shaped by an
acrimonious debate about the role of hereditary and environmental
factors in autism. Although I agree with her thesis about the context
of their reception, I will argue that the Tinbergens’ position is not
truly environmental. To appreciate that, we need to situate their
ideas within Tinbergen’s views about evolution. Silverman notes
the evolutionary approach, but does not examine it.13 Here, I address
this unexplored but central aspect of the Tinbergens’ work.
Connecting the Tinbergens’ views closely to Niko Tinbergen’s
ideas about adaptation and disadaptation in evolution, this article
focuses on the evolutionary framework in which they presented
autism as a stress disease with grave consequences for the individual
and the human species. A closer examination of this framework
should be of interest to historians of medicine for several reasons.
First, Tinbergen was the co-founder of what Nobel laureate Peter
Medawar assessed as ‘‘one of the most influential movements in
modern science,’’ ethology, and one that the Nobel committee and
others saw as having important implications for medicine.14 Second,
the concept of adaptation has played a central role in diverse pro-
posals to understand human health and disease in the last century,
and we need to understand better the various ways in which it is
deployed and to what effects. Third, key elements of the evolutionary
Marga Vicedo 5
framework developed by Tinbergen still underlie current visions of

human nature and psychopathology and are part of evolutionary psy-
chiatry and evolutionary medicine. In sum, examining the Tinbergens’
work on autism will help us to understand the history of autism as
well as the significance of an enduring and influential paradigm
about health and disease.
This article will show that situating the Tinbergens’ ideas within
the evolutionary framework developed by Niko Tinbergen in his
ethological studies is the key to understanding their views about
autism and to assessing the persistence of the general framework
they adopted. I argue that the Tinbergens’ views about the aetiology
of autism rested upon and contributed to a new articulation of the
idea that biological adaptation is central to explain and maintain
health. Like other versions of the pathologies of progress narrative,
the Tinbergens’ position was as much a critique of modern social
conditions as a scientific explanation of pathology. Building upon
ideas from psychiatrist John Bowlby about the mother–infant bond,
their views on the causes of autism reflected contemporary anxieties
about changes in the traditional model of the family. In addition,
by extrapolating the highly adaptationist vision of animal behaviour
that Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz had developed for animal
behaviour to humans, they elaborated a new justification for the
need to re-adapt humans to their environment. In doing so, their
views drew on and supported an evolutionary understanding of
human nature and health that gained momentum in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries, even when their position on
autism became discredited.
Tinbergen on Humans as Disadapted Animals and the

Mother–Infant Bond
To understand the Tinbergens’s views on autism, one needs to ap-
preciate Niko Tinbergen’s concern about how rapid cultural changes
were derailing biological evolution. Although he was an expert on
the behaviour of seagulls and stickleback fish, in the latter part of
his career Tinbergen argued that ethology should become a key
area of medicine and saw his work on human behaviour as a contribu-
tion to ethopathology. In the area of child development, Tinbergen
was strongly influenced by John Bowlby’s writings about the signif-
icance of maternal attachment.
Niko Tinbergen (1907–1988) received a PhD in biology from
Leiden University in 1932 with a dissertation on the behaviour of
wasps. He married Lies Rutten that same year, and they left for
Greenland accompanying a meteorological expedition. Tinbergen
carried out fieldwork for over a year before returning to take a post
at the Department of Zoology in Leiden. His early work focused on
the parental behaviour of hobbies (a kind of falcon), the hunting
and homing behaviour of wasps, and the territorial behaviour of
sticklebacks (fish of the Gasterosteidae family). In 1936 Tinbergen
met Austrian researcher Konrad Lorenz. Excited by the similarity
of their goals, they decided to develop a new branch of biology:
‘‘ethology.’’ Ethology’s central tenet was that animal social behav-
iour is mainly driven by instincts, defined as innate species-specific
behaviour patterns that are activated by a combination of internal
and external releasers and are the product of evolution by natural
selection.
After WWII, ethology became highly successful as a discipline
and among the general public. Tinbergen moved to Oxford Univer-
sity, England. Students of animal behaviour dissatisfied with be-
haviouristic laboratory studies welcomed ethological fieldwork. In
addition, books such as Lorenz’s 1949 best-seller King Solomon’s
Ring and Tinbergen’s The Herring Gull’s World (1953), Bird Life
(1954), and Curious Naturalists (1958) encouraged a wide interest in
animal behaviour among various disciplines and large audiences.15
Ethology included humans from the start, but Tinbergen cautioned
about using animal research to explain human behaviour. In 1953,
American psychologist Daniel Lehrman questioned the explanatory
value of juxtaposing behaviours from different species to argue for
their instinctive character. Accepting Lehrman’s criticisms, Tinbergen
stressed that a biological science of behaviour could deal only with
observable conduct, not with intentions and subjective states. Thus,
he opposed the tendency of some students of human behaviour ‘‘to
apply to Man our conclusions rather than our methods.’’16
However, Tinbergen changed his position at the end of the
1960s, as he worried about the ‘‘human predicament,’’ that is, the
menace of nuclear war, the overexploitation of natural resources,
overpopulation, and a technological mode of life that threatened
the well-being and the very survival of humans. During that decade,
researchers from other fields became increasingly interested in the
animal roots of human behaviour. For example, in 1964 Tinbergen
was invited to give the Adolf Meyer Lecture to the American Psy-
chiatric Association, to speak on ‘‘the contributions of ethology and
comparative psychology to the understanding of human behavior.’’17
Overwhelmed with work commitments, Tinbergen was unable to
Marga Vicedo 7
accept this invitation. However, he turned toward this topic amidst

widespread scholarly and popular attention to it encouraged by best-
selling books such as Lorenz’s On Aggression and Desmond Morris’s
The Naked Ape.18
Exploring the evolutionary dimensions of human behaviour,
Tinbergen concluded that humans are ‘‘disadapted’’ animals because
a modern technocratic lifestyle has introduced an environment at
odds with their innate behavioural patterns. For Tinbergen, many
human behaviours are adaptations designed by natural selection in
the ancestral environment. Cultural evolution later introduced a
myriad of ‘‘distortions’’ that disrupted the fit between humans and
their environment. This was most worrisome because, in his view,
genetic evolution cannot keep pace with cultural evolution. As a
result, continuous lifestyle changes exacerbate the gap between cul-
tural and genetic evolution. Genetic evolution, furthermore, had set
the range of flexibility in individual development. The problem was
that modern cultural changes were pushing humans beyond their
limits.19
Tinbergen presented three examples: disturbances to traditional
maternal care, childhood autism, and modern educational practices
that did not pay attention to the children’s emotional growth or
their need for engaging in activities that connect them to nature
and to other human beings. Tinbergen saw the first two areas of
malfunctioning, disturbances of maternal care and childhood autism,
as closely connected.
Tinbergen’s views on child development had been influenced by
the work of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby.
Working at the Tavistock Institute in London, Bowlby achieved inter-
national recognition after the World Health Organization (WHO)
published his 1951 report Maternal Care and Mental Health.20
Bowlby argued that without proper maternal care and love, a child’s
mind would not develop properly. Events that disturb the maternal
bond, from divorce to a mother working outside the home or being
preoccupied with intellectual pursuits, put a child’s mental health
at risk. Bowlby’s WHO report became enormously influential world-
wide. As several historians have shown, maternal deprivation became
the focus for analyzing disruptions in the relationship between
mother and child in the 1950s, as well as the lens through which
a variety of social problems were reinterpreted as resulting from
children’s emotional problems.21 Although Bowlby’s conclusions were
criticized, leading the WHO to publish a 1962 report reassessing
the effects of maternal deprivation, his ideas remained prominent.22
Bowlby also turned to Tinbergen’s field, ethology, in search of a

biological foundation for his views on the significance of the
mother–infant bond in infancy. Using the ethological concept of
instinct and the notion of imprinting developed by Lorenz in his
studies of geese and ducks, Bowlby claimed that children have an
instinctual need for maternal love.23 His 1969 book Attachment
also postulated that the mother–infant attachment is an adaptation
forged by natural selection in what he called the ancestral environ-
ment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Contemporary trends in
child rearing, such as day care centres for infants, put the natural
mother–infant attachment at risk, with serious consequences for
the child’s psychological development. The idea that distorted forms
of maternal love lead to children’s psychopathologies and even
mental illness has a long history.24 However, the adoption of an
evolutionary framework to support it and the appeal to ethological
science as evidence for it provided a novel and powerful justification.
Furthermore, Bowlby’s views also contributed to the narrative of
civilization as a peril to mental health, since he said that maternal
separation brought about by changes in family arrangements and
parental roles caused ‘‘mal-adaptations.’’ 25
Bowlby and Tinbergen influenced each other. They had interacted
in scientific gatherings since the 1950s, such as the Royal Society
study group of non-verbal communication started in 1965 to study
gestures in social behaviour.26 As Tinbergen became interested in
human behaviour, they started corresponding regularly about their
work. When Bowlby finished his book Attachment, he wrote to
Tinbergen that he had adopted the scientific perspective he learned
from him and from Cambridge animal researcher Robert Hinde.27
The influence went both ways.28
In the 1972 lecture in which Tinbergen had presented his views
on human disadaptation, he referred to Bowlby’s work and agreed
with his view that maternal care and love are essential for a child’s
adequate social development. Furthermore, he claimed: ‘‘Work on
the development of mother-infant relations and of socialization in
other mammals, in part inspired by Bowlby’s work, gives increasing
support to his thesis. Indeed, it becomes very likely that it is not just
the presence of a stable mother figure, but an extremely intricate
pattern of maternal behaviour that is required.’’
Tinbergen also highlighted the perils of too much maternal care:
‘‘Conversely, over-intrusive, underoccupied mothers may well, through
interfering at moments when a child wants to play on its own or
with peers, make a child withdraw.’’29
Marga Vicedo 9
Concurring with Bowlby, Tinbergen believed disturbances in the

mother–child relationship are a sign of disadaptation with serious con-
sequences for mental health. Collaborating with his wife, Tinbergen
turned to examine what they believed was one especially damaging
manifestation of the derailment of the natural mother–child bond:
childhood autism.
The Tinbergens on Autism: From Gulls to Children

In April 1970, Oxford psychologists Corinne and John Hutt sent
their book Direct Observation and Measurement of Behaviour to
Tinbergen, thanking him for encouraging their studies into how to
‘‘record, measure and meaningfully interpret the behavior of brain-
damaged and autistic children.’’30 In reply, Tinbergen noted that
most students of human behaviour did not carry out good observa-
tional work. Just back with his wife from a lecture tour in Canada
that included 16 universities and many meetings with biologists,
psychologists, and psychiatrists, Tinbergen confided that many
scholars were surprised when the Tinbergens talked about ‘‘quite
commonplace behavioural observations on children.’’ Tinbergen
added: ‘‘I am fully convinced that even the best students of human
behaviour are even observationally still at the beginning.’’ Even
Bowlby was ‘‘ignorant of a number of straightforward observables
in mother-infant relations’’ because his information came mostly
from ‘‘interviews with mothers, not from intensive watching them
with their children.’’31
Lies Tinbergen added some comments about autistic children.
Observations of children and analyses of films had led the Hutts to
conclude that ‘‘apart from aversion from the face, all other com-
ponents of the social encounters of these autistic children are those
shown by normal nonautistic children.’’32 But Lies wrote that she
had also observed gaze aversion in normal children. She thus wondered
whether the aversion of autistic children to eye contact was just an
extreme version of the behaviour of insecure or timid children. If
true, continued attempts to establish eye contact would lead a child
to ‘‘withdraw into its shell.’’ She surmised that perhaps ‘‘over intru-
sion’’ at a sensitive stage could cause autism in a sensitive or insecure
child.33
The Tinbergens believed that students of child development did
not sufficiently recognize the negative effects overbearing parents
have on their children. In their view, there was ‘‘a whole syndrome
of the over-intrusive parent, and of children’s reactions to it.’’ They
added: ‘‘We have tried to convince Bowlby of the danger of over-

stressing, as he does in his book (probably as reaction against sub-
normal maternal activity), the need for the mother ‘doing things’
with the child; impressed by the effects of mother deprivation, he
underemphasized the bad effects of over-active mothering.’’34 Later
that year, Tinbergen wrote to Bowlby that ‘‘mothers should be given
precise but tactful advice . . . about the dangers of both under-
involvement with their children and over-intrusive behaviour.’’35
On the basis of observations of normal children during visits with
friends or when riding the bus, the Tinbergens then proposed a
possible explanation and treatment for autism: ‘‘(a) autism could
be based on either inherent or acquired pathological insecurity, and
(b) could be cured only by very slowly building up a relation with an
adult by using first all the many kinds of ‘bonding’ signals while
avoiding the much too crude direct eye contact (which the child
already notices peripherally when the adult looks at it, however
friendly).’’36
In this letter to the Hutts, we find the main elements in the
Tinbergens’ position on autism: their call for more observations
of normal and autistic children in their social contexts; the belief
that the gaze and visual gestures are key in social encounters; the
hypothesis that autism is an extreme version of the behaviour seen
in timid children; and the view that over-intrusive mothers are often
responsible for provoking or worsening the condition. During the
following months, the Tinbergens drafted an article adding the
scaffolding of Niko’s ethological work to support those views.
At this point, it is important to note that the Tinbergens co-
authored most of their publications on autism, but they made different
contributions. Lies carried out the observations on children. Niko
provided the ideas about animal behaviour and about the evolu-
tion of behaviour. For example, in a letter to Bowlby talking about
their first joint article, Tinbergen explained that he wanted to ‘‘give
some of Lies’s very precise and perceptive observations a general
ethological setting.’’37 Referring to the Tinbergens’ work on autism,
Kruuk notes that Niko ‘‘wrote it all.’’38 However, since their contri-
butions are distinguishable, in what follows I will refer to either or
both of them depending on the particular ideas under consideration.
The Tinbergens sent their manuscript, ‘‘Social Encounter in
Normal and Autistic Children – An Ethological Study,’’ to leading
experts in childhood autism, including Leo Kanner in the United
States and Michael Rutter and Lorna Wing in England. Kanner
was about to become the editor of the new Journal of Autism and
Marga Vicedo 11
Childhood Schizophrenia and was receptive to publishing a condensed

version of their manuscript.39 Rutter and Wing were critical of
the Tinbergens’ methods and ideas. Wing welcomed the use of the
observational methods of ethology, but pointed out that a detailed
clinical history is also essential in diagnosis. Tinbergen replied by
boasting that regarding observational methods, ‘‘ethology simply is
30 years ahead of most psychiatrists,’’ as psychiatry was still in ‘‘a
pre-scientific stage.’’ Wing and Rutter also accused the Tinbergens
of confusing symptoms and syndromes. Because the Tinbergens
cast a very wide net in their identification of autism, they reached
conclusions about its aetiology radically different from the views of
most experts. In 1968, for example, Rutter had published a clear
and thorough review of the field, concluding that ‘‘the balance of
evidence seems against the view that autism is psychogenically
determined’’; instead, some cognitive or perceptual defect appeared
to be the root of the problem. Finally, Wing, the mother of an
autistic child, expressed her disappointment that the Tinbergens
had breathed new life into ideas so painful to mothers of autistic
children. As she wrote to Tinbergen: ‘‘I am sure you would agree
that it is neither sensitive, humane, nor helpful to the children to
resurrect the old-fashioned view that their parents have caused their
problems.’’40
But these criticisms did not deter the Tinbergens. After some revi-
sions, they submitted the article to Science. When the editor rejected
the article, in light of referee reports that criticized the anecdotal
character of the observations provided and lack of evidence for their
rejection of the organic origin for autism, Niko pursued other venues
to publicize their ideas.41 On 2 February 1972, he presented their
views in a seminar at Bowlby’s institutional home, the Tavistock
Institute in London. He emphasized the need to give a ‘‘method-
ological face-lifting’’ to human psychology in general and the study
of autism in particular.42 He also included their views on autism in
his May 1972 Croonian Lecture at Oxford, in which he developed
his ideas on disadaptation discussed in the previous section. Finally,
he sent their joint article to an important ethology journal that
published it in one of its supplements.
The new title of the booklet, ‘‘Early Childhood Autism – An
Ethological Approach,’’ underscored their methodological contribu-
tion. The Tinbergens aimed to make visible the significance of
ethology for understanding human behaviour and pathology since
‘‘in spite of the widely available, lucid and incisive writings of
J. Bowlby (e.g. 1951, 1958, 1969) most psychopathologists have not
even begun to inform themselves of certain ethological, indeed

generally scientific methods which might well turn out to be of deci-
sive importance for our future understanding of human behaviour.’’43
The Tinbergens believed their expertise was of special relevance
to studying autism for two reasons. First, ‘‘all phenomena described
of autistic children can often be observed in normal children. This
makes our work on normal children relevant to the problem of
autism.’’ Second, observational methods developed to study the
behaviour of animals with whom one cannot communicate could
be useful to study autistic children, who were often non-verbal. For
them, ethology could help by providing ‘‘meaningful’’ observations
of both normal and autistic children in their social context.44
Lies had carried out the pertinent observations in three ‘‘semi-
controlled situations’’: meeting a mother and child during shopping;
sitting near a mother and child on a bus; and visiting with family
and friends.45 She observed whether the child made or avoided eye
contact and classified behaviours into two categories: socially positive
(bonding, sociable) or negative (rejecting, withdrawing). Behaviours
within each category got an intensity rating of mild or strong.46
On the basis of these observations, the Tinbergens defended that
all behaviours present in autistic children are also present in normal
children. As evidence, they presented several examples from their
own children and from relatives.47
To explain their observations, the Tinbergens turned to ‘‘one of
the more advanced areas of Ethology’’: the study of motivational
conflicts. Here they presented Niko’s studies of courtship behaviour
in herring gulls and black-headed gulls. When the male and female
gulls approach each other, their efforts are hampered because two
behaviour systems, each with ‘‘survival value in its own right,’’ pull
them in different directions. The male initially responds to an
approaching female with aggressive reactions, since she also presents
stimuli characteristic of a rival male. But this aggressive response is
mixed with the male’s tendency to approach the female and to let
her approach. In turn, the female is conflicted between approaching
and withdrawing. For the Tinbergens, the female behaviour was
most relevant because the female finds herself in a situation similar
to what a child encounters when meeting a stranger.48
The Tinbergens claimed that applying ethological methods to
children led them to discover the similarity between conflict situa-
tions for gulls and for children encountering strangers. Children are
attracted to the stranger, make eye contact, approach, or engage in
some social interactions. At the same time, they are afraid or anxious.
Marga Vicedo 13
A straight look at a timid child, for example, could elicit increased

timidity. According to the Tinbergens, in normal children and
those only ‘‘temporarily autistic’’ the initial conflict is quickly solved
if the stranger positively elicits approach and contact.49 But the
anxiety created by the approach–withdrawal conflicts during social-
ization could lead some children into autism. Thus, for them, ‘‘the
core of the problem would seem to be found in desparate [sic] frustrated
attempts at socialisation combined with constant and intense fear.’’50
In this model of socialization, a mother plays a central role ‘‘not
only because the mother can herself behave over-intrusively towards
a child, but because she may be a powerful agent in eliciting, and
even soliciting such over-instrusive [sic] behaviour in visitors.’’ Wary
of the sensitivity surrounding this issue, the Tinbergens said they did
not blame the mothers. For them, both autistic children and their
mothers were victims: ‘‘We submit that autistic children are probably
not primarily ‘problem children,’ but are the victims of our modern,
urbanised, crowded, rationalised and stressful environment – a
‘problem environment’ in which even healthy, normal parental behav-
iour may misfire.’’51
To support their views, the Tinbergens appealed to Bowlby’s work,
although they had expressed strong reservations in the past.52 In
their letter to the Hutts, they had criticized Bowlby for relying
mostly on interviews and reports rather than observations. Regard-
ing the interactions between mother and infant, Tinbergen also told
a colleague: ‘‘We find that Bowlby gives a rather one-sided picture
(also his ethology is not quite mature).’’53 But the Tinbergens
believed that maternal behaviour misfired by departing from the
dictates of nature. In a letter to Bowlby, Niko reported that he had
learned much about motherhood ‘‘from watching female mammals
in the process of rearing their young. . . . In this respect it seems
that working-class and peasant mothers are, intuitively or of neces-
sity, better mothers than many intellectuals and over-affluent mothers
with few children.’’54 Thus, like Bowlby, the Tinbergens considered
the ideal mother to be the ‘‘natural mother.’’ The more mothers’
behaviour departed from the designs of evolution, the more they
threatened the natural balance needed for optimal functioning.
The Tinbergens next situated their views about autism within a
larger framework about diseases, and Niko got an invaluable oppor-
tunity to present them. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
His acceptance speech, ‘‘Ethology and Stress Diseases,’’ discussed
what he saw as two prominent examples of civilization diseases:
problems in body posture and autism.
Autism, Stress Diseases, and Re-Adaptation

From the imposing Nobel speech podium, Tinbergen presented
autism as an example of a larger set of pathological conditions:
stress diseases caused by modern civilization. He defended the posi-
tion developed with his wife that autistic children are ‘‘potentially
normal children, whose affiliation and subsequent socialization pro-
cesses have gone wrong in one way or another; and second, this can
often be traced back to something in the early environment – on
occasion a frightening accident, but most often something in the
behavior of the parents, in particular the mothers.’’ He emphasized
that both autistic children and their parents are ‘‘victims of some
kind of environmental stress.’’55
The connection between stress and ailments of the mind was not
new. Writing about the origins of social psychiatry, physician and
medical historian George Rosen showed that the idea that stress is
related to the causation of mental illness went back to the eighteenth
century. At the time of his writing in 1959, he claimed that there
was a ‘‘widespread conviction . . . that a close interdependence exists
between the social environment in which individuals live and the
development of mental illness.’’56 More generally, concern about
the impact of stress on health had become ubiquitous by the time
Tinbergen presented the Nobel speech. Although stress had been
perceived as the cause of illness before, the post-war and Cold War
period witnessed a resurgence of interest in understanding how
the strains of life pushed humans to their physiological and mental
limits, as Mark Jackson has shown in The Age of Stress. Austro-
Hungarian researcher Hans Selye, working at the Institute of
Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal
in Canada, developed his ‘‘general adaptation syndrome’’ to explain
the ‘‘stress of life.’’ His work stimulated others to think about this
topic.57
Though Tinbergen’s focus on the stresses of life was different
from Selye’s, their approaches shared some features. Selye examined
the impact of stress on the body, and his notion of adaptation as
internal physiological regulation borrowed from Walter B. Cannon’s
notion of homeostasis. It was thus different from Tinbergen’s em-
phasis on the adaptation of an organism to its environment resulting
from evolution. But both frameworks saw the relations of the organ-
ism with its environment as key to understanding the organism’s
reactions. The ideas of both researchers thus exemplify what historian
Marga Vicedo 15
Robert G.W. Kirk has called the relational nature of the stress con-
cept.58 They also took advantage of the flexibility and multiple
meanings of ‘‘stress,’’ which allowed the concept to be productively
used to connect processes and ‘‘act as a vector of communication
across disciplines.’’59
Tinbergen did not cite Selye’s publications in the Nobel lecture,
but he was aware of them and the growing interdisciplinary work
on the topic. As Kirk has noted, during the 1950s it had become
fashionable in Britain to assert that the stress of modern life leads
to an increase in mental illness.60 In 1958 the Mental Health Re-
search Fund held an international conference at Oxford University
on ‘‘Research on Stress in Relation to Mental Health and Mental
Illness.’’ The main goal was to reach a synthesis of the work carried
out in different sciences, including physiology, endocrinology, bio-
chemistry, ethology, psychology, and psychiatry. Seyle gave a presen-
tation, as did Bowlby and Cambridge animal researcher Robert
Hinde. Bowlby presented his work on the effects on the young child
of separation from the mother, while Hinde focused on how birds
responded when subjected to conflicting stimuli or deprivation.61
Soon afterwards, a second conference on stress and psychiatric dis-
orders was held again at Oxford.62 In his Nobel lecture Tinbergen
cited a volume of 44 articles from another major international con-
ference dealing with the many different aspects of stress and the
methodological issues involved in addressing them. This volume
included articles by Selye and other major figures in the field, and
also an article by ethologist Eric Fabricius on the ethological evidence
about the effects of changing environmental conditions on genetically
determined behaviour patterns.63
Thus, ethology had been part of the discussion about stress,
adaptation, and health from early on. Now, Tinbergen’s Nobel
address conferred visibility on both its past and potential contribu-
tions. He conveyed the relevance of the ethological approach not
only for autism, but also for stress diseases that many believed were
reaching epidemic proportions. In turn, adopting the framework
of stress diseases allowed Tinbergen to benefit from the widespread
interest about stress at the time. By presenting autism as a stress
disease leading to maladaptation, he could claim the larger authority
and prominence of this framework for his views on autism. How-
ever, the reactions to this idea were not all favourable.
Most autism experts rejected the Tinbergens’ conception of autism
as a stress disease. Before the Nobel address, many had simply
ignored their work. But Tinbergen’s Nobel speech appeared in
Science in 1974. Though the part on autism was a summary of the

article that the journal had rejected earlier, now the Tinbergens’
ideas reached a wide audience and had to be addressed. Four letters
responding to the Nobel speech appeared in Science, all of them critical.
American psychologist Bernard Rimland applauded Tinbergen’s
efforts to apply ethology to the study of pathology, but pointed out
that the view that autism was ‘‘caused by psychological stress rather
than by organic factors’’ was at ‘‘variance with that of scores of
researchers.’’64 In his 1964 book Infantile Autism, Rimland had
demolished psychogenic accounts that blamed mothers for their
children’s condition. He then became a leader in mobilizing parents
of autistic children and a co-founder of the National Society for
Autistic Children in the United States. Rimland maintained a
friendly correspondence with Tinbergen, but he also told him: ‘‘We
differ enormously in our views.’’65
Other autism researchers published scathing reviews. The new
editor of the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, Eric
Schopler, accused Tinbergen of not being aware of any develop-
ments in the field. A psychologist who in 1972 had founded
TEACCH (Treatment and Education of Autistic and Related Com-
munication Handicapped Children), a pioneer program that treated
parents as co-therapists, Schopler praised Tinbergen’s call for more
observations and also for work on animal behaviour research that
could help understand childhood autism. But he challenged the
Tinbergens’ views on diagnosis and aetiology. He noted that
Tinbergen cited only three cases of severe autism. ‘‘It is doubtful that
anyone observing animals to this extent would impress Dr. Tinbergen
with any sweeping generalizations,’’ he poignantly concluded.66 Two
years later, Lorna Wing and Derek M. Ricks published another
critical appraisal.67 They saw no reason to postulate that the behaviour
of normal children was related to the patterns found in autistic chil-
dren. Although other researchers had noted that normal children
sometimes show symptoms found in autistic children, such as hand
flapping or withdrawal, those are transitory in normal children.
They also questioned the idea that lack of maternal bonding caused
autism, as there was no evidence showing that autistic children had
suffered more ‘‘disruption of social bonding than comparable groups
of normal children or children with other handicaps.’’68
Those who supported the Tinbergens’ views on autism did so
because they shared the more general view that changes in social and
family arrangements in modern life could have pathogenic effects.
As Silverman has shown, a significant minority of researchers and
Marga Vicedo 17
therapists, in particular those ‘‘eager to see autism as a symptom of

more widespread social malaise,’’ welcomed the Tinbergens’ ideas.69
In his 1976 book Stress in Health and Disease, Selye included a
chapter on ‘‘Diseases of Adaptation’’ and summarized Tinbergen’s
Nobel lecture as related to stress of parents and children.70 Thus,
the pathologies-of-progress narrative is essential to understand the
resonance of their views at the time. It is worth noting the similar-
ities and differences with other ailments attributed to the strains of
civilization.
The Tinbergens’ ideas about autism as a stress disease have
similarities with views about other conditions that belong in the
pantheon of diseases of modernity, such as neurasthenia, stress,
and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.71 As was the case in dis-
cussions of those conditions, the Tinbergens’ views about the causa-
tion of autism reflected anxieties about cultural changes and fears
that civilization poses a risk to human health. In the case of autism,
the Tinbergens worried about transformations in the Western tradi-
tional model of the family that affected children. As Rosenberg
argued, the discourse about the pathologies of progress is not only
about medical conditions but also an expression of cultural fears
about social change.
But the Tinbergens’ program differed from earlier pathologies-
of-progress narratives in one crucial aspect. Rosenberg showed that
Victorian narratives of civilization as risk saw pathologies of progress
as the costly but inevitable price to pay for the benefits of modern
civilization.72 However, the Tinbergens believed that in some areas,
humankind could not sustain the changes introduced by modern
lifestyles. Since the gap between genetic and cultural evolution put
at risk the survival of the species, the Tinbergens defended ‘‘turning
back the social clock ’’ to regain a functional balance.
Fortunately, the science of ethopathology could help restore a
healthy balance by reverting cultural changes that departed too
radically from the ancestral environment. Tinbergen had already
presented the solution in his 1972 article on ‘‘Functional Ethology.’’
The first task for students of human behaviour was to ‘‘peel off ’’
cultural variations in order to ‘‘reconstruct the behaviour and the
environment of our pre-cultural ancestors.’’73 Once the ‘‘deeper
structure’’ of humanity was revealed, researchers could investigate
the signs of ‘‘disadaptation’’ and then think about ways to reach
‘‘re-adaptation.’’ In the area of autism, re-adaptation was to be
achieved through a process of re-bonding with the mothers. This
idea, and the focus on treatments, was to occupy the Tinbergens in

the next decade.
But first Niko had to recover from the distress caused by the
critics. He had battled depression before. Now, he relapsed. He
believed the criticisms aimed to ‘‘deflate’’ him, as he wrote to
Bowlby. Tinbergen also found it difficult to live up to the high
expectations that others had about Nobel Prize winners, and the
negative response to his views on autism had exacerbated his in-
securities. But Tinbergen’s depression also strengthened his belief
that he could understand autism: besides his scientific background,
he now gleaned insight from his own experiences of withdrawing
from social relations. As he reported to Bowlby: ‘‘I had already for
years said to Lies that I could empathize with autistic children be-
cause I felt that I had so much in common with them emotionally.’’
In his view, he shared the experience of a deficient maternal bond
in childhood. Tinbergen had been born shortly after the death of
an older brother, and he feared this experience had affected his
mother’s relationship with him.74 In sum, Tinbergen believed that
his scientific knowledge of animal behaviour and his own personal
experiences gave him a privileged position from which to understand
infantile autism.
The Tinbergens expanded on the disastrous consequences brought
about by disadaptation and offered their views for the treatment
of autism in their 1983 book ‘‘Autistic’’ Children: New Hope for a
Cure.75 They reiterated their position that autism is an emotional
disturbance created by motivational conflicts that affect children in
different degrees. As for the source of motivational conflicts, the
Tinbergens focused on events that disturbed the mother’s ability to
respond adequately to her child’s signals. Potential ‘‘autismogenic
factors’’ included a birth by Caesarian section, the stay of a premature
baby in an incubator, the birth of a sibling within 18 months of
a child’s birth, moving house, urban conditions such as living in
high-rise buildings, un-experienced mothers, over-anxiety, uncertainty,
serious or preoccupied parents, and divorce. Often, a combination
of factors would be responsible.76
Emphasizing that deterioration of the social environment leads
to ‘‘stress diseases,’’ the Tinbergens deplored the lack of attention
to the signs of ‘‘psychosocial pollution.’’77 They referred to the growing
literature on stress diseases, referring to ‘‘the new scientific journal
Stress, founded by Dr. Hans Selye,’’ as an ‘‘important source of infor-
mation’’ about the detrimental effects of modern civilization.78 The
Marga Vicedo 19
Tinbergens argued that stress diseases not only have pernicious con-
sequences for mental health; they also put at risk future generations.
Adopting a perspective that reminds one of eugenic fears at the turn
of the twentieth century, the Tinbergens claimed: ‘‘We are damaging
the human breeding stock of tomorrow.’’79 It was thus imperative to
realize the magnitude of the problem of disadaptation and stress
diseases, of which autism was but a distressing example.
The Tinbergens’ book also devoted much space to therapies.
They advocated restoring the emotional bond between child and
mother by ‘‘supermothering.’’80 They endorsed Martha Welch’s forced
holding as the best therapy. Forced holding consists of embracing
the child in a face-to-face position, smiling and talking to him or
her, even if the child resists it. As shown by Silverman, some practi-
tioners around the world had written to the Tinbergens and
reported good results with this therapy.81
Once again, however, the reception of their ideas was mixed.
Edward A. Sassaman, a professor of pediatrics, saw the Tinbergens’
work as a model for future research, but he objected that the book ’s
title raised too many expectations.82 But English researcher Uta
Frith penned a scathing review.83 Perhaps most revealing is the
review by Anthony Storr, an English psychoanalyst smitten with
ethological work. Although he was ‘‘unconvinced’’ by many of their
worries about contemporary parenting, he found that the Tinbergens
were correct in emphasizing the significance of the ‘‘mother-child
bond,’’ which had been ‘‘shown also by John Bowlby.’’84
Storr was prescient in his assessment. The Tinbergens’ ideas
about autism did not stand the test of time, but their views about
the central role of maternal care and love in the psychological develop-
ment of children remain alive and well in attachment theory, one of
the most influential theories in developmental psychology, and one
that still sees variations from secure attachment to the mother as
pathological.85 In addition, their idea that disease must be under-
stood within an evolutionary framework has gained supporters.
So far this article has shown why situating the Tinbergens’ ideas
within the evolutionary framework developed by Niko Tinbergen in
his ethological studies is the key to understanding them. Next, I
propose that it is also central for appreciating the power of their
views about autism and for assessing the persistence of some com-
ponents of their evolutionary framework about disease.
The Tinbergens’ Legacy: Evolution, Autism, and

Civilization Diseases
Grasping the power of the Tinbergens’ position on autism requires
apprehending Tinbergen’s conception of the organism as a set of
behavioural systems that are adaptations forged in the ancestral envi-
ronment of human evolution. As I have argued elsewhere, Tinbergen
transferred his strongly adaptationist views about animal behaviour to
human behaviour.86 This position influenced his view that humans
are unable to adapt to rapid cultural changes because genetic evolu-
tion cannot keep up with cultural evolution. For Tinbergen, our
evolutionary history has tightly constrained our options for healthy
lifestyles because we are still adapted to our ancestral environment.
Thus, socio-cultural changes that depart radically from the ancestral
environment endanger the individual’s health and the survival of the
human species.
In their work on autism, and seemingly paradoxically, the Tinber-
gens emphasized the environmental triggers of autism. They did so
because they thought a genetic cause made the possibility of recovery
more difficult.87 Tinbergen was well aware that this position was at
odds with ethology’s traditional perspective. As he noted in a letter
to Kanner:
It is to us ethologists ironical that, where in the past we have

been arguing in favour of ‘‘innateness’’ of behaviour and were
mercilessly criticized by psychologists and Freudians, we now
find ourselves stressing the importance of early environment,
and find in particular Rimland (in his book) and Lorna Wing
(in letters) arguing pretty strongly in favour of a predomi-
nantly genetically preconditioned aspect.88
Despite the Tinbergens’ emphasis on the importance of the child’s

early environment, their position cannot be called ‘‘environmental’’ in
the standard sense of the term. For them, the behaviour of an autistic
child is a reaction to external stimuli (the intrusive actions of others).
But the need for certain environmental inputs is biological because
evolution has designed organisms in specific ways. In the case of
child socialization, natural selection has determined what maternal
behaviours and emotions a child needs for proper psychological
development. Rather than being ‘‘environmental,’’ the Tinbergens’
position entails a naturalization of nurture.
In this naturalization of nurture, Lorenz and Bowlby were also
main participants. Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Bowlby asserted that
Marga Vicedo 21
natural selection designed the appropriate responses of an organism

in the ancestral environment. Thus, changes either in those responses
or in the environment disrupt the fit achieved in human adaptations
and can lead to serious problems. Concerning the mother–infant
dyad, they all postulated the existence of instinctual maternal behav-
iours and emotions that release the natural instinctual responses in
the infant. As part of a behavioural system that is an adaptation,
the mother’s conduct must remain within certain limits. Deviations
from ‘‘natural’’ maternal care and emotions put the child’s mental
health at risk and also jeopardize the survival of the species.89
This conception of the individual as a set of adaptations already
formed in the ancestral environment grounded a novel and influen-
tial version of the pathologies-of-progress narrative. Although earlier
versions had appealed to the notion of ‘‘maladaptation’’ and lack of
balance between an organism and its environment, there were few
explanations for those states. Tinbergen’s conception of the ‘‘genetic
lag,’’ the gap created by the faster pace of cultural evolution over
genetic evolution, provided an explanation that was consonant with
current biological knowledge and resonated powerfully in a golden
age of biological research. Herein lies the power of the Tinbergens’
ideas.
Here, too, the work of the Tinbergens built upon and contributed
to a larger discourse of civilization at risk promoted by Bowlby and
Lorenz. In his 1969 book Attachment and in other writings, Bowlby
used the ethological vision of humans as systems already designed
for optimal functioning in what he called the environment of evolu-
tionary adaptedness (EEA) to warn about the dangers that maternal
separation and deprivation posed for children’s mental health. In
his 1974 book Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, Lorenz identified
cultural ‘‘sins’’ that set humanity on a path of destruction. Along
with overpopulation and the devastation of the environment, he
included genetic decay and the disappearance of traditional extended
families. 90
For all these authors, the increasing number of women in the
paid workforce and the changes in maternal care brought about by
modern civilization were potential pathogenic factors. Their views
reflected and contributed to a cultural critique of changes in the
traditional model of the family. Numerous historians have shown
how the attribution of different psychological and medical condi-
tions to maternal behaviour reflected deeper concerns about the
effects of socio-cultural changes on the patriarchal family.
Yet how about the biological and medical views that helped legit-
imize that cultural critique? These have not received critical attention.
In the case of the Tinbergens’ ideas on autism, it is remarkable that
none of the reviewers questioned the biological assumptions underly-
ing them, though those assumptions are problematic in at least two
crucial respects. First, the Tinbergens never justified the analogy
between motivational conflict in pair-bonding in gulls and children’s
socialization. Moreover, it is not clear that the analogy sustains their
interpretation of the aetiology of autism. Niko had showed that in
motivational conflicts, gulls manage to go on with their business by
engaging in displacement activities that are not pathological. So,
if all there is to autism is a motivational conflict between the fear
and the desire to attach, how is it that it has such disastrous conse-
quences for many children?
Second, the view defended by the Tinbergens as well as by Lorenz
and Bowlby that behavioural systems were designed by evolution in
the ancestral environment and that deviations lead to malfunctioning
was an assumption that they never supported. It is a sign of the
authority of animal studies in this period that these central ques-
tions about Tinbergen’s biology, which were the very foundation of
the Tinbergens’ views on autism, were never raised.
Despite these problematic assumptions, the idea that we should
adopt an evolutionary framework to understand diseases has gained
prominence in psychiatry and medicine. The specific impact of the
Tinbergens’ ideas on evolutionary psychiatry is not straightforward,
however. As noted by Pieter Adriaens and Andreas De Block, evo-
lutionary psychiatry is a heterogeneous field tracing back to Darwin,
Freud, Jung, and various other thinkers with diverse agendas for
psychiatry and evolutionary theory. However, at least one of the
major schools owes much to the work of Lorenz and Niko Tinber-
gen.91 Tinbergen’s work, especially his 1963 article arguing that an
adequate explanation of behaviour has to account for its function,
causation, evolution, and development, is central to that school.92
However, only a few texts mention the Tinbergens’ work about
autism, which is where he developed most of his ideas about dis-
adaptation and stress diseases.93 The neglect of Tinbergen’s evolu-
tionary framework for psychiatry could be part of the more general
disregard for Tinbergen’s work on autism, as Adriaens and De
Block have suggested.94
Notwithstanding such neglect, the core belief that only by know-
ing the ‘‘adapted mind’’ can one establish the ‘‘maladaptive mind’’
Marga Vicedo 23
remains at the centre of evolutionary approaches in medicine and

psychiatry. Specifically, Tinbergen’s view that researchers in psychia-
try and medicine need to know the ‘‘animal roots’’ of human behav-
iour in order to ascertain what is normal and healthy has grown in
acceptance. In that sense, Tinbergen’s vision of an ethopathology
has survived under different names in evolutionary psychology and
psychiatry.
Conclusion
I have contextualized the Tinbergens’ conception of autism as a
stress or civilization disease, connecting it to Niko Tinbergen’s
belief that humans are becoming increasingly disadapted to their
environment. For the Tinbergens, autism is one of many stress
diseases that results from an unnatural lifestyle that is destroying
not only the physical environment, but also the social fabric. Of
particular concern is the derailment of the mother–infant bond.
Influenced by Bowlby’s work on maternal deprivation and attach-
ment, the Tinbergens saw that bond as the basis of an infant’s emo-
tional development. Like Bowlby and Lorenz, they believed the
bond between a mother and her infant is the result of an evolu-
tionary process. The bond had been designed by natural selection
and deviations endangered not only the infant’s mental health but
also the wellbeing of future generations.
I have shown that for them, autism is a failure of socialization but
the mechanisms that explain that failure are established by biological
evolution. For this reason, I have argued that the Tinbergens’ posi-
tion in autism should not be characterized as ‘‘environmental.’’ Instead,
we should understand their views in terms of the naturalization of
nurture, a theme they also developed along with prominent figures
such as Lorenz and Bowlby.
In the history of the use of evolutionary frameworks to identify
and remedy the pathogenic effects of progress, the Tinbergens’ ideas
are of special significance for three reasons. First, by arguing that
cultural change widens the gap between genetic and cultural evolu-
tion and that there is a limit to the adjustability of human behaviour,
Tinbergen’s ideas represented a novel articulation of an enduring
paradigm about disease. Thus, the Tinbergens’ views on autism
constitute an important episode in the twentieth century evolu-
tionary version of the pathologies-of-progress narrative that Charles
Rosenberg identifies as a protean tale about the detrimental effects
of cultural change on health.
Second, the Tinbergens’ proposals differed from earlier ones in

one crucial respect. Rosenberg tells us that none of the Victorian
explorers of the perils of modern civilization defended ‘‘turning back
the social clock.’’95 The Tinbergens, however, advocated exactly that,
arguing that human health and even the survival of humanity were
at stake. This emergency situation legitimized social interventions
aimed at re-adapting humans to the environment. Furthermore,
the Tinbergens’ belief in the existence of a conflict between the
requirements of human nature and the demands of modern culture
has increased its purchase in modern culture. The fear about the
dangers of pushing the limits set by evolution in our ancestral past
has percolated throughout the wider society via popular accounts
that promote the health benefits afforded by returning to a more
natural state. Every day we read about the superiority of the ways
of our ancestors – the Paleo diet, Paleo training, and what one
could call Paleo mothering are promoted as the healthy options for
individual development and for the human species. In these pro-
posals, we see echoes of the Tinbergens’ call for re-adapting humans
to their environment by turning back the clock and acting like our
forebears.
Third, the evolutionary framework developed by Tinbergen is
significant because it continues to be employed in areas of psychiatry
and medicine today. Tinbergen’s ideas have provided a powerful
grounding for the evolutionary argument about civilization as risk.
Finally, some current discussions in the field of autism trace its
roots to ideas developed by the Tinbergens. Simon Baron-Cohen
uses an evolutionary framework to support his ideas about autistic
people lacking a theory of mind. Dawn Prince-Hughes states that
her experience as a primatologist and autistic person leads her to
agree with the Tinbergens’ belief that ‘‘modern life, with its un-
natural living conditions, chemicals, broken-down social systems,
and chronic stress, overstimulates and assaults the human animal,
causing some to manifest the biological and psychological matrix
we call autism.’’96 Ongoing debates about the alleged effects of
vaccines on autism also appeal to the view that progress has a cost
to our health. In this sense, autism continues to be a platform for
discussing pathologies of progress today.
Marga Vicedo 25
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for financial support from a 2013 Social Science Re-
search Council Insight Grant, and a 2015–2016 fellowship from the
School of Historical Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton.
Notes
1. Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘‘Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civiliza-
tion as Risk,’’ in Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and
Now (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 77–95, 90.
2. Rosenberg, ‘‘Pathologies of Progress,’’ 79, 85–89.
3. Nobel Foundation, ‘‘Physiology or Medicine 1973 – Press Release,’’
Nobel Media AB 2014, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
medicine/laureates/1973/press.html.
4. For studies using an evolutionary perspective in medicine and psy-
chiatry, see Simon Baron-Cohen, ed., The Maladapted Mind: Classic
Readings in Evolutionary Psychopathology (Hove: Psychology Press,
1997); Michael McGuire and Alfonso Troisi, Darwinian Psychiatry,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Martin Brüne,
Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine: The
Origins of Psychopathology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015).
5. On the history of evolutionary psychiatry, see Pieter R. Adriaens
and Andreas De Block, ‘‘The Evolutionary Turn in Psychiatry: A
Historical Overview,’’ History of Psychiatry 21 (2010): 131–43, and
the other articles in that volume.
6. Niko Tinbergen, ‘‘Ethology and Stress Diseases,’’ Science 185 (1974):
20–27. For the history of ethology, see Richard Burkhardt, Patterns
of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of
Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On Tinbergen’s
life and work, see also Hans Kruuk, Niko’s Nature: A Life of Niko
Tinbergen and His Science of Animal Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
7. Niko Tinbergen to Aubrey Manning, 29 May 1981, Folder E.37,
Nikolaas Tinbergen Papers (henceforth NTP), NCUACS 27.3.91,
Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University
of Oxford.
8. Kruuk, Niko’s Nature, 278. Criticizing the Tinbergens’ ‘‘lack of
proper data in their publications’’ and ‘‘lack of objectivity’’ as well as
their ‘‘proselytizing style,’’ Kruuk concludes: ‘‘Hard science it was
not’’ (276).
9. Histories of autism that do not discuss Tinbergen include Majia

Nadesan, Constructing Autism: Unravelling the ‘‘Truth’’ and Under-
standing the Social (London: Routledge, 2005); Mitzi Waltz, Autism:
A Social and Medical History (Basingstoke: Palmgrave, 2013); Gil
Eyal et al., The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epi-
demic (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Richard Grinker, Unstrange
Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (New York: Basic Books,
2007); John Donvan and Caren Zucker, In a Different Key: The Story
of Autism (New York: Crown, 2016); and Chloe Silverman, Under-
standing Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Books that include
brief discussions are Edward Dolnick, Madness on the Couch: Blaming
the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1998); Adam Feinstein, A History of Autism: Conversations
with the Pioneers (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Bonnie Evans,
The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in
Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
10. Leo Kanner, ‘‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,’’ Nervous
Child 2 (1943): 217–50; Leo Kanner, ‘‘Early Infantile Autism,’’ Journal
of Pediatrics 25 (1944): 211–17.
11. Leo Kanner and Leon Eisenberg, ‘‘Notes on the Follow-Up Studies
of Autistic Children,’’ in P.H. Hoch and J. Zubin, eds., Psychopathology
of Childhood (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1955), 77–89.
12. Feinstein, A History of Autism, 159.
13. Chloe Silverman, ‘‘‘Birdwatching and Baby-Watching’: Niko and
Elisabeth Tinbergen’s Ethological Approach to Autism,’’ History of
Psychiatry 21 (2010): 176–89.
14. Peter Medawar, ‘‘The Ape Redressed,’’ New York Review of Books,
8 March 1973.
15. Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1951); Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal
Ways (New York: Crowell, 1952; German orig. 1949); Niko Tinbergen,
The Herring Gull’s World (London: Collins, 1953); Niko Tinbergen,
Bird Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1954); Niko Tinbergen,
Curious Naturalists (London: Country Life, 1958).
16. Daniel Lehrman, ‘‘A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinc-
tive Behaviour,’’ Quarterly Review of Biology 28 (1953): 337–63;
Niko Tinbergen, ‘‘Aggression and Fear in the Normal Behaviour of
Some Animals,’’ in Ismond Rosen, ed., The Pathology and Treatment
of Sexual Deviation: A Methodological Approach (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 3–23, 3.
17. Jules H. Masserman to Niko Tinbergen, 12 November 1964; Niko
Tinbergen to Leon J. Epstein, 19 November 1964, Folder E.44,
NTP.
Marga Vicedo 27
18. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace and World,
1966; German orig. 1963); Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A
Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (London: Jonathan Cape,
1967). On Tinbergen’s move from animal to human behaviour,
see Marga Vicedo, ‘‘The ‘Disadapted’ Animal: Niko Tinbergen on
Human Nature and the Human Predicament,’’ Journal of the History
of Biology (2017): 1–31, https://doi:10.1007/s10739-017-9485-8.
19. Niko Tinbergen, ‘‘Functional Ethology and the Human Sciences,’’
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 182 (1972): 385–410,
386.
20. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health, 2nd ed. (Geneva:
World Health Organization, 1952). Originally published in Bulletin
of the World Health Organization 3 (1951): 355–533.
21. On the history of views about maternal deprivation and the role of
mothers, see Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Mother-
hood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010). On the connection between maternal deprivation and autism,
see Mical Raz, ‘‘Deprived of Touch: How Maternal and Sensory
Deprivation Theory Converged in Shaping Early Debates over
Autism,’’ History of the Human Sciences 27 (2014): 75–96. On the
history of attachment theory, see Marga Vicedo, The Nature and
Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Eduardo Duniec and
Mical Raz, ‘‘Vitamins for the Soul: John Bowlby’s Thesis of Maternal
Deprivation, Biomedical Metaphors and the Deficiency Model of
Disease,’’ History of Psychiatry 22 (2011): 93–107. On the multiple
theories of deprivation and how they shaped American social policy
in the 1960s, see Mical Raz, What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry,
Race, and the War on Poverty (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2013). On the construction of the ‘‘emotionally dis-
turbed child,’’ see Deborah Blythe Doroshow, ‘‘Residential Treat-
ment and the Invention of the Emotionally Disturbed Child in
Twentieth-Century America,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90
(2016): 92–123.
22. World Health Organization, Deprivation of Maternal Care: A Reassess-
ment of Its Effects (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1962).
23. John Bowlby, ‘‘The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother,’’ Inter-
national Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (1958): 350–73.
24. See Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families,
Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999); Anne Harrington, ‘‘Mother Love
and Mental Illness: An Emotional History,’’ OSIRIS 31 (2016): 94–
115.
25. John Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
26. J.M. Cullen and E.R. Leach, 7 February 1966, Announcement of

Meeting, Folder F.41, NTP.
27. John Bowlby to Niko Tinbergen, 13 April 1968, Folder E.31, NTP.
28. For different interpretations of Bowlby’s use of animal research, see
Vicedo, Nature and Nurture of Love, and Frank C.P. van der Horst,
John Bowlby: From Psychoanalysis to Ethology (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011).
29. Tinbergen, ‘‘Functional Ethology,’’ 403.
30. John Hutt to Niko Tinbergen, 2 April 1970, Folder D.1, NTP; S.J.
Hutt and Corinne Hutt, Direct Observation and Measurement of
Behaviour (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), xi.
31. Tinbergen to Corinne and John Hutt, 11 April 1970, Folder D.1,
NTP.
32. Hutt and Hutt, Direct Observation, 147.
33. Tinbergen to Corinne and John Hutt, 11 April 1970. This letter
contains separate portions written by Niko and by Lies.
34. Tinbergen to Corinne and John Hutt, 11 April 1970.
35. Tinbergen to Bowlby, 13 October 1970, Folder: D.19, NTP.
36. Tinbergen to Corinne and John Hutt, 11 April 1970.
37. Tinbergen to Bowlby, 20 September 1970, Folder PP/BOW/B.3/2,
John Bowlby Papers (henceforth JBP), Wellcome Library, Archives
and Manuscripts, London, England.
38. Kruuk, Niko’s Nature, 275.
39. Leo Kanner to Elisabeth and Niko Tinbergen, 29 September 1970,
in Box 100695, Folder 3, Leo Kanner (1894–1981) Papers (henceforth
LKP), Melvin Sabsin Library and Archives, American Psychiatric
Association, Arlington, VA.
40. Lorna Wing to Niko Tinbergen, 2 September 1970; Wing to
Tinbergen, 22 September 1970; Tinbergen to Wing, 2 October 1970;
Michael L. Rutter to Niko Tinbergen, 13 October 1970. All in folder
D.1, NTP. Michael Rutter, ‘‘Concepts of Autism: A Review of Re-
search,’’ Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 9 (1968): 1–25, 10.
41. Compare correspondence with Science editors in folder D.115, NTP.
When the article was finally published, the Tinbergens mentioned
this affair without revealing the name of the journal. Elisabeth A.
Tinbergen and Niko Tinbergen, ‘‘Early Childhood Autism – An
Ethological Approach,’’ Advances in Ethology, Supplement 10 (1972):
1–53, 51n22.
42. Niko Tinbergen, manuscript on autism presented to Tavistock seminar
(2 February 1972), Folder D.55, NTP.
43. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, ‘‘Early Childhood Autism,’’ preface
(unpaginated).
44. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 11. Italics in original.
45. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 13.
Marga Vicedo 29
47. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 19–20.

48. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 22–23, quotations from 22.
51. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 31, 34.
53. Niko Tinbergen to Irven DeVore, 12 November 1974, Folder E.32,
NTP.
54. Tinbergen to Bowlby, 13 October 1980, Folder D.19, NTP.
55. Tinbergen, ‘‘Ethology and Stress Diseases,’’ 20–27, 22, 23.
56. George Rosen, ‘‘Social Stress and Mental Disease from the Eighteenth
Century to the Present: Some Origins of Social Psychiatry,’’ Milbank
Memorial Fund Quarterly 37 (1959): 5–32, 5.
57. Mark Jackson, The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Hans Selye, ‘‘Stress and
Disease,’’ Science 122 (1955): 625–31; Hans Selye, The Stress of Life
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956); Hans Selye, Stress without Distress
(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1974).
58. Robert G.W. Kirk, ‘‘The Invention of the ‘Stressed Animal’ and the
Development of a Science of Animal Welfare, 1947–86,’’ in David
Cantor and Edmund Ramsden, eds., Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in
the Twentieth Century (Rochester: University of Rochester Press,
2014), 241–63, 242.
59. Kirk, ‘‘The Invention of the ‘Stressed Animal’,’’ 258.
60. Kirk, 241.
61. Special Correspondent, ‘‘Adaptation to Stress Conference of Behav-
ioural Scientists,’’ British Medical Journal 2 (1958), 382–84.
62. J.M. Tanner, ed., Stress and Psychiatric Disorder: The Proceedings of
the Second Oxford Conference of the Mental Health Research Fund
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1960).
63. Lennart Levi, ed., Society, Stress, and Disease, vol. 1, The Psychosocial
Environment and Psychosomatic Diseases (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971); Eric Fabricius, ‘‘Ethological Evidence of Genetically
Determined Behaviour Patterns, and Conflicts between These Patterns
and Changed Environmental Conditions,’’ in Levi, ed., Society, Stress,
and Disease, 71–78.
64. The letters in Science (written by Bernard Rimland; D.L. and B.
Bridgeman; Reuben M. Schonebaum; and Edward Maisel) and
Tinbergen’s response were published under the collective title ‘‘Autism,
Stress, and Ethology,’’ Science 188 (1975): 401–406. Quotation from
Rimland in p. 401.
65. Bernard Rimland, Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications
for a Neural Theory of Behaviour (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1964); Bernard Rimland to Niko Tinbergen, 14 August
1974, Folder D.8, NTP.
66. Eric Schopler, Editorial, ‘‘The Stress of Autism as Ethology,’’ Journal

of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia 4 (1974): 193–96, 195.
67. Lorna Wing and Derek M. Ricks, ‘‘The Etiology of Childhood
Autism: A Criticism of the Tinbergens’ Ethological Theory,’’ Psycho-
logical Medicine 6 (1976): 533–43.
68. Wing and Ricks, 538, 541.
69. Silverman, ‘‘‘Birdwatching and Baby-Watching,’’’ 183. See her article
for a description of that significant minority.
70. Hans Selye, Stress in Health and Disease (Boston: Butterworths, 1976),
819.
71. David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden, introduction to Cantor and
Ramsden, eds., Stress, Shock, and Adaptation, 1–18. On stress, see
other contributions to that volume, in particular Mark Jackson,
‘‘Evaluating the Role of Hans Selye in the Modern History of Stress’’
(21–48). See also Jackson, Age of Stress, and Rhodi Hayward, ed.,
‘‘Inventing the Psychosocial: Stress and Social Psychiatry,’’ special
issue, History of the Human Sciences 25 (2012): 1–147. On neurasthenia,
see David G. Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health,
Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 2011). On ADHD, see Matthew Smith, Hyperactive: The
Controversial History of ADHD (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).
72. Rosenberg, ‘‘Pathologies of Progress,’’ 84.
73. Tinbergen, ‘‘Functional Ethology,’’ 399.
74. Tinbergen to Bowlby, 1 June 1975, Folder PP/BOW/B.3/22, JBP.
75. Niko Tinbergen and Elisabeth A. Tinbergen, ‘‘Autistic’’ Children: New
Hope for a Cure (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).
76. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 121–36.
81. Silverman, ‘‘‘Birdwatching and Baby-Watching,’’’ 184–85.
82. Edward Sassaman, review of Autism in Adolescents and Adults, ed.
Eric Schopler and Gary B. Mesibov, and ‘‘Autistic’’ Children: New
Hope for a Cure, by Niko Tinbergen and Elisabeth A. Tinbergen,
New England Journal of Medicine 309 (1983): 618–19.
83. Uta Frith, review of ‘‘Autistic’’ Children: New Hope for a Cure, by
Niko Tinbergen and Elisabeth A. Tinbergen, Psychological Medicine
14 (1984): 461–63.
84. Anthony Storr, ‘‘Watching Our Children,’’ Sunday Times (London),
19 June 1983.
85. In this area, however, the critics also continue to grow. See Marga
Vicedo, ‘‘Putting Attachment in Its Place: Disciplinary and Cultural
Contexts,’’ European Journal of Developmental Psychology (2017): 684–
99, https://doi:10.1080/17405629.2017.1289838; Marga Vicedo,
Marga Vicedo 31
‘‘The Strange Situation of the Ethological Theory of Attachment

in Historical Perspective,’’ in Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds.,
The Cultural Nature of Attachment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017),
13–51; Gilda A. Morelli et al., ‘‘Taking Culture Seriously: Towards
a Pluralistic Theory of Attachments,’’ in Keller and Bard, eds., The
Cultural Nature of Attachment, 139–69.
86. Vicedo, ‘‘‘Disadapted’ Animal.’’
87. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, ‘‘Autistic’’ Children, 118.
88. Niko Tinbergen to Leo Kanner, 6 October 1970, Box 100696,
Folder 3, LKP.
89. Vicedo, Nature and Nurture of Love.
90. Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, trans. Marjorie
Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
91. Adriaens and De Block, ‘‘Evolutionary Turn in Psychiatry.’’
92. Niko Tinbergen, ‘‘On Aims and Methods of Ethology,’’ Zeitschrift
für Tierpsychologie 20 (1963): 410–433.
93. Brüne, Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry and Psychosomatic Medicine,
discusses both Tinbergen’s views and the 1972 ‘‘Early Childhood
Autism.’’ Anthony Stevens and John Price, Evolutionary Psychiatry:
A New Beginning, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000) develops
Bowlby’s ideas on what they call ‘‘pathogenic parenting’’ (44–45).
But often there is only a reference to the Tinbergens’ work, as in
McGuire and Troisi, Darwinian Psychiatry, and Brant Wenegrat, Socio-
biological Psychiatry: Normal Behavior and Psychopathology (Lexington
Books, 1990).
94. Adriaens and De Block, ‘‘Evolutionary Turn in Psychiatry,’’ 133.
95. Rosenberg, ‘‘Pathologies of Progress,’’ 84.
96. Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through
Autism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 223.
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Keywords. autism, stress diseases, civilization diseases, Niko Tinbergen,

CBMH/ BCHM 2018; ahead of print article doi: 10.3138/cbmh.191-122016

voyaient les enfants autistes comme des victimes du stress environnemental

Mots-clés. autisme, maladies liées au stress, maladies de civilisation,

is the central tenet of evolutionary psychiatry.4 Yet we do not have a

the early 1970s, most experts believed in the organic origins of

framework developed by Tinbergen still underlie current visions of

Tinbergen on Humans as Disadapted Animals and the

accept this invitation. However, he turned toward this topic amidst

Bowlby also turned to Tinbergen’s ﬁeld, ethology, in search of a

Concurring with Bowlby, Tinbergen believed disturbances in the

The Tinbergens on Autism: From Gulls to Children

added: ‘‘We have tried to convince Bowlby of the danger of over-

Childhood Schizophrenia and was receptive to publishing a condensed

even begun to inform themselves of certain ethological, indeed

A straight look at a timid child, for example, could elicit increased

Autism, Stress Diseases, and Re-Adaptation

Science in 1974. Though the part on autism was a summary of the

therapists, in particular those ‘‘eager to see autism as a symptom of

idea, and the focus on treatments, was to occupy the Tinbergens in

The Tinbergens’ Legacy: Evolution, Autism, and

It is to us ethologists ironical that, where in the past we have

Despite the Tinbergens’ emphasis on the importance of the child’s

natural selection designed the appropriate responses of an organism

remains at the centre of evolutionary approaches in medicine and

Second, the Tinbergens’ proposals differed from earlier ones in

9. Histories of autism that do not discuss Tinbergen include Majia

26. J.M. Cullen and E.R. Leach, 7 February 1966, Announcement of

47. Tinbergen and Tinbergen, 19–20.

66. Eric Schopler, Editorial, ‘‘The Stress of Autism as Ethology,’’ Journal

‘‘The Strange Situation of the Ethological Theory of Attachment

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