Colin Pittendrigh

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Colin Stephenson Pittendrigh (born October 13, 1918 in Whatley Bay , England , † March 19, 1996 in Bozeman , Montana ) was a British biologist and co-founder of chronobiology . He was also a botanist, his author's abbreviation is Pittendr.

Biographical

Colin Pittendrigh was born in northeast England (now Tyne and Wear ) in 1918 and studied at the University of Durham . He was married and had two children. During the Second World War he was sent to Trinidad by the British government to develop a method to protect British troops from malaria .

After the war ended, Pittendrigh went to Columbia University to write his doctoral thesis with the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky . Pittendrigh became a US citizen in 1950. In 1968 he moved to Stanford University . Pittendrigh's great hobby was fly fishing .

Work area

While working in Trinidad during the Second World War, he began to be interested in the temporal organization of living beings. This interest led him to continue working in the field at Princeton. With his work he was able to show that biological time management and the observable rhythms of around 24 hours in animals are endogenous and not, as many scientists thought, were triggered by signals from the environment. He developed an oscillator model and described the properties of an internal pacemaker and its entrainment in the daily cycle of light and dark. Together with Jürgen Aschoff , he made a fundamental contribution to today's understanding of the temporal organization of organisms, for example the human sleep-wake rhythm, hibernation , the sky navigation of animals or jet lag .

Pittendrigh also introduced the concept of teleonomy , which he used in the book "Behavior and Evolution" (1958) edited by Anne Roe and George Gaylord Simpson to characterize cellular control mechanisms that are determined by objective laws. He deliberately contrasted the term teleonomy with teleology , which he considered to be an unscientific and idealistic interpretation of biological control mechanisms. A teleonomic process or a teleonomic behavior is a process or behavior that owes its goal-directedness to the action of a program.

  • 1940 graduated from the University of Durham in England
  • until 1945 work on malaria in Trinidad (on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation)
  • 1945–1946 Doctoral thesis at Columbia University (graduated in 1948)
  • 1947 Assistant Professor of Biology at Princeton University
  • 1950 Pittendrigh becomes a US citizen
  • 1969 Pittendrigh begins his work at Stanford University
  • 1976–1984 director of Hopkins Marine Station

Membership / cooperation / prices

personal data
SURNAME Pittendrigh, Colin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pittendrigh, Colin S .; Pittendrigh, Colin Stephenson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biologist, co-founder of chronobiology
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Whatley Bay , England
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1996
Place of death Bozeman , Montana , USA