Robert Hinde served as the emeritus Royal Society research professor of zoology at the University of Cambridge.
24 Facts About Robert Hinde
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Robert Hinde was born in Norwich, the county town of Norfolk, England, on 26 October 1923, to Ernest and Isabella Robert Hinde.
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The family had a keen interest in the natural sciences that included long mountainous hikes, which allowed Robert Hinde to develop an interest in birdwatching.
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At 14, Robert Hinde attended Oundle School, an all-boys boarding school in the market town of Oundle in Northamptonshire.
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At Oundle, Robert Hinde was encouraged out of the natural sciences and into the "harder sciences", such as chemistry.
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Robert Hinde joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 at the age of 17, one year after England declared war on Germany.
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Robert Hinde had been in the Officers' Training Corp while at Oundle, and when he was called up in the RAF, Hinde was sent to the Air Crew Receiving Centre in St John's Wood.
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Robert Hinde would remain in the RAF for 6 years, rising to the rank of Flight Lieutenant before being given an early release in 1946 for a special exhibition at St John's College, Cambridge.
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However, after the end of World War II, Robert Hinde slowly concluded that the "preciousness of peace" was far more important than wartime victory.
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Specifically, Robert Hinde emphasized the need to distinguish various levels of aggression, from individual conflict to group conflict to world war.
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Robert Hinde received a first in Part II zoology in 1948.
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In 1948, Robert Hinde accepted a position at Balliol College, Oxford, studying under David Lack.
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Tinbergen was on the cusp of becoming a seminal figure in the field of ethology and behavior with his "four 'why's' of behavior", and this allowed Robert Hinde to learn the ethological methods early on and apply them to the rest of his career.
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Robert Hinde carried out a variety of research projects in avian species, in the areas of comparative ethology, imprinting, motivation and habituation, and canary nest-building behavior.
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Robert Hinde's experience working with primates at Madingley led to him being heavily involved in the founding of several field sites for the study of great apes in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Robert Hinde worked with Louis Leakey, the founder of many of the sites, and trained many of the young researchers that would become some of the best-known primatologists.
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Robert Hinde agreed to take her on as a PhD student and to handle the bureaucratic issues that would arise from pursuing a PhD without a bachelor's degree but was initially her "sternest critic until he came to Gombe".
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Robert Hinde would visit the site at Gombe several times and would be integral to the introduction of his quantitative recording methods at the site.
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Robert Hinde's work would make the data collected by Goodall and colleagues more objective and more comparable across multiple observers at different time periods; this allowed for the longitudinal data collection that was a hallmark of the site.
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Robert Hinde trained Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas at the Virunga field site; Fossey came to Madingley to become Robert Hinde's student before returning to Rwanda.
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Robert Hinde's supervising emphasized the objective ethological data collection methods that he had popularized in the field through his work with the rhesus macaques at Madingley.
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Robert Hinde retired from Cambridge in 1994, but continued to write extensively on ideas of religion and morality.
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Robert Hinde argued that this conflict was managed by what is commonly called morality.
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Robert Hinde was survived by his second wife, Joan Stevenson-Hinde, his six children, eighteen grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.