donald redfield griffin · web were all those involved in “whitewashing the fence” à la tom...

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 149, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2005

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3 august 1915 . 7 november 2003

D O N A L D R E D F I E L D G R I F F I N

[400]

biographical memoirs

MAGES FROM A LIFE: Two enthusiastic Harvard undergradu-

ates discover that bats have sonar. . . . A father carefully lowers his

children into cave passages too small for an adult to collect bats. . . .

A scientist flies a light plane and diligently follows a large gannet on

the wing. . . . Standing outdoors before distinguished foreign visitors

(Marie-Claire and René-Guy Busnel), an apparently serious professor

shoots a pebble (intended to provoke a bat to pursue the “insect”) and,

at first try, this American cowboy hits a flying bat in the wing . . .

wisely doesn’t try again. . . . A loving wife asks, “And how is your

‘whitewashing the fence’ [a reference to Tom Sawyer’s escapade] com-

ing along these days?” . . . In Italy, wife Jocelyn, dictionary in hand,

rehearses, with Don and bat colleague Jim Simmons, contingency

phrases in Italian should they encounter a farmer while climbing a lad-

der: “Oh, sir, I have not come to elope with your daughter. I just want

to look at your bats.” . . . Technical advice sent to me as I study plovers

includes not manuals for my electronic equipment, but Michener’s

Chesapeake.

. . . Eighty-seven years old, still clambering over snow

and ice, he threads a video cable into a beavers’ lodge to record their

activities.

And, of course, many more images and tales abound in recalling

the life and accomplishments of Donald Redfield Griffin. He is consid-

ered one of the outstanding scientists of the twentieth century, for most

of his life “a scientist’s scientist, noted for rigorous research in animal

behavior” (a description by Donald Dewsbury). As such, he is recog-

nized for that initial discovery of bat echolocation with Robert Galam-

bos (1938) and for subsequent years of study, much of which provided

an essential basis for the development of radar and sonar. He is re-

nowned, as well, for his work on birds’ navigational abilities and for

his contributions to and re-awakening of scientific interest in (and con-

troversy over) animal cognition and consciousness. In his last years he

was also avidly exploring near-field acoustics in honeybee communica-

tion and the apparently purposeful behavior of beavers.

Don Griffin’s most formative educational years probably occurred

during two years of “home tutoring” on the land and waters of Cape

Cod, before entering Andover Preparatory School, from which he

graduated in 1934. His formal academic career continued with gradua-

tion from Harvard University (1938) and with a Ph.D. awarded by

Harvard in 1942. He was appointed to the faculty of Cornell Univer-

sity (1946–53), where he became a full professor, and then joined the

Harvard faculty (1953–65) in the biology department. There, for sev-

eral years, he served as chair. He then moved to the Rockefeller Insti-

tute (now University), New York, until his “retirement” in 1986 to

Harvard’s Concord Field Station.

I

donald redfield griffin

401

Don Griffin was elected to and a member of several distinguished

societies: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American

Physiological Society, and the Corporation of Woods Hole Oceano-

graphic Institution. He was a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and

was awarded the Elliot Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in

1961 and the Phi Beta Kappa Science Prize in 1966. He also served as

president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (1979–83).

I would hope that he is remembered not only for his outstanding

scientific achievements, accomplished from his early youth to his last

days, but also as the remarkable human being he was. In many ways,

he was reserved and private, dignified and gracious, yet simultaneously

welcoming, with a charming, even devilish, sense of humor. He under-

stood that science, at its very best, is a collegial affair, and lived his life

that way. Too many of us, involved in the competitive interactions that

much of science can be, forget that essential collegiality. To Don, an

idea was worth attending to, no matter whether the proponent was

another professional scientist or an enthusiastic high school student.

(Though it might be noted that he did have a file labeled “Cranks,”

mostly filled with enthusiasts’ ideas that he regarded less enthusiasti-

cally.) Fellow human beings were treated with respect. If, however, we

foolishly ignored his raised hand waving us off (worse yet, two raised

hands!) as he was focused on his writing or another project, we might

well be met with a harsh “Not now”—soon to be followed by an apol-

ogy for his “rudeness.”

What good fortune to be among those in Don Griffin’s “web”—

not his Web site, for he did not have one, and really did not succumb

to the latest Internet technologies, if he could avoid them. In Don’s

“web” were his colleagues: scientists and philosophers who were

immersed in such matters as animal communication, cognition, and

consciousness, or in his other passions: the migratory feats of birds, the

use of ultrasound by bats, the buzzes of dancing honeybees. Also in his

web were all those involved in “whitewashing the fence” à la Tom

Sawyer’s task—in Don’s case, not doing the work

for

Don, but rather

fortunate enough to be

with

Don: as they tried radio collars on various

critters to assist in tracking movements; as they waited in the dark for-

est for the bats that might come (though the mosquitoes did so more

reliably); or, at his wife Jocelyn Crane Griffin’s insistence, as they

accompanied him over rocky or slippery mud forest paths to reach the

beaver lodge in Estabrook Woods’ pond, part of Harvard’s Concord

Field Station. Likewise in his web were the reporters and film makers

getting “the story,” such as the recent, award-winning documentary

Superbat

, by Florence Tran. She was captivated by bat studies and by

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Don Griffin, and her fine video both reported accurate bat science and

captured some of Don’s essence as human being and as scientist. Others

from the media may not remember Don quite so fondly. One pair,

imposing, more than appreciated, on a scientist’s time and difficult

work, found themselves wading through foul-smelling bat manure per-

haps a little longer than necessary for the story, as “payback” for their

extensive intrusion. (This was for a long-ago

National GeographicMagazine

story, I believe.)

I knew Don Griffin in the latter part of his life, when I was in his

lab at Rockefeller University, and when he “retired” to the Harvard

Field Station. (Would that some of us in our “prime” could accomplish

what he did in his “retirement.”) Those were all the days when his pri-

mary focus was on animal cognition and consciousness and when he

was actively conducting lab and field research on the communication

systems of honeybees, bats, and beavers. He also aided and abetted me

in my field explorations of injury-feigning and other communicative

behaviors of plovers.

Don, throughout his life, was passionate about his work, loved it,

loved the comradeship and the haunts where he studied the animals.

He realized, too, the importance of creating such passion in his collab-

orators and assistants, though that seldom required much manipula-

tion; his own enthrallment was infectious. In my case, during our first

study site visit to Virginia’s coastal islands, he encouraged my wander-

ing along the shore, collecting shells, finding a perfect old Indian

arrowhead in the sand. Don was very much a “gadget man,” so, in

turn, he and my field assistant enthusiastically tested (a scientific euphe-

mism for “played with”) “my” stuffed, predatory raccoon atop a radio-

controlled dune buggy, which was intended to safely “maraud” the

plovers to provoke anti-predator behaviors. I patiently waited to use it.

The “technical advice” I later received from Don was an under-

lined episode in Michener’s

Chesapeake

, in which a headstrong young

woman, like me a mother of young children, ignores local advice and

goes out in a storm; she is later found drowned, long hair flowing. This

was sent after my small inflatable research boat, laden with recording

equipment and heavy batteries, almost capsized in an approaching

storm.

Among Don’s other strengths was his ability to focus intensely and

to persist adamantly, overcoming obstacles whether they be technolog-

ical difficulties or the fervent opposition by many to his ideas that ani-

mals are conscious and that such consciousness should be the subject

of scientific study. Indeed, one extreme opposing view termed a book

of his about animal mentality (Griffin 1984) the “Satanic Verses of

Animal Behavior.” Don’s writing skills were enviable; his rough “first


403

drafts,” whether dictated or written, were more akin to the latest ver-

sions the rest of us struggled to produce. Manuscripts he generously

agreed to review came back filled with slashes and revisions, reducing

our verbiage to succinct, apt phrases.

He delved into the densest works by philosophers of mind, who

were exploring some of the same issues of the nature of consciousness

and attempts to describe cognitive capacities that were absorbing him.

Don’s interests were broad and his intellectual prowess impressive.

But let us return to early years.

Don Griffin grew up primarily in Barnstable on Cape Cod, Massa-

chusetts, with some years before that in Scarsdale, New York. For two

years on Cape Cod, he was “home-educated” by a tutor and parents;

he recalled those years with especial delight. His explorations during

that time seem instrumental in allowing him to identify and develop his

own lifelong interests and to realize that understanding and knowledge

need not derive only from academia. His appreciation for the scientific

contributions of people of diverse interests may well have had its foun-

dation in that time.

During those years, Don Griffin’s father, retired and physically

weak due to ill health, was a serious, scholarly amateur historian. He

particularly oversaw Don’s education in the Greek and Roman classics

and in history. Some remaining poesy suggests both a delight in verbal

wordplay and a charming wit, perhaps contributing to Don’s more

devilish side. Don’s uncle, Alfred C. Redfield, a founder of the Woods

Hole Oceanographic Institution, encouraged his interests in biology.

On the Cape, the young Don Griffin had extensive opportunity to roam

and explore the environs of land and sea. At an early age, he became a

naturalist, investigating the lives of creatures in his family’s backyard.

He learned to trap and skin animals, first engaging in small-scale fur

trading and ridding neighboring homes of unwanted skunks and musk-

rats, but then learned to make study skins of various species. Sailing he

loved from the start, off on his own by the age of ten and continuing

to sail throughout his life. His Uncle Alfred encouraged him in that

enthusiasm, too.

His journals (excerpts generously provided by his family) revealed

that at the tender age of thirteen, not content with “Mummy’s” label-

ing of a dead “mole,” he searched a field book of mammals and identi-

fied it as

Neosorex palustris albibarbis

, the “white skinned water

shrew.” Shortly thereafter, while reading the

Journal of the BostonSociety of Natural History

, he realized that the shrew was an unusual

find for the region. “Thinking that this may be of some use to science, I

am writing to the

Journal of Mammology

” (23 August 1928).

By age fifteen, he had created, edited, written, and published the

404


first issue of the

Journal of the Cape Cod Zoological Society.

In that

issue were his articles about small rodents, and his initiation of the free

“Liberary Loan Program.” He had also established an issue of “Liber-

ary Loan Bonds” paying 6 percent annual interest, but apparently

(wisely) there were no takers.

His and Robert Galambos’s discovery, as undergraduates, of bats’

echolocating abilities, was made possible by the generosity of the Har-

vard physics professor George Washington Pierce. Pierce lent these two

young men his precious, newly created invention that would translate

supersonic sound into frequencies within the human range of hearing.

Thus, the young men were able to find concrete, scientific evidence for

their ideas about the nature of bats’ capacities to navigate in the dark

around obstacles and through closely placed thin wires. Don often re-

called that generosity, perhaps, I imagine, further encouraging his own.

In the course of Don Griffin’s continuing bat studies, he was his

usual thorough and persistent self. He strove to understand as much as

possible of the natural history of bat species. To investigate bat longev-

ity and migratory patterns, he and a team actually banded sixteen

thousand bats in New England between 1935 and 1938.

The bats’ abilities to determine the distance and location and even

the size and shape of objects in their path, and to search for and cap-

ture minuscule flying insects, were described in the book Don wrote

two decades later. That book,

Listening in the Dark

(1958), however,

met with both ridicule and awe. Few scientists would accept that ani-

mals could have such sophisticated abilities, which are, to this day, still

unduplicated by human invention. And Don’s longtime collaborator,

Jim Simmons of Brown University, continues to discover ever more pre-

cise echolocation capacities of bats, recently indicating bats’ detection

of echo maxima in the nano-second range. Now, the reluctant scientific

community recognizes and hails these earlier discoveries by Don Grif-

fin, though still somewhat hesitant to accept all the feats described by

Simmons.

During these years, while at Harvard after his Ph.D., he met and

married Ruth Castle, his first wife. She was then a graduate student at

Harvard/Radcliffe, though she later pursued other interests and became

a dedicated secondary school teacher. They began raising a family

when he was still a graduate student at Harvard, and the family grew

while he was a young professor at Cornell.

As a grad student, Don Griffin tackled the problem of birds’ hom-

ing abilities. His research forays (literally) occurred during a time when

scientists believed those navigational skills were explicable by assum-

ing the simplest sort of exploratory behavior. Don thought the behav-

ior of birds on the wing was best understood if one was similarly “on


405

the wing,” and so he learned to fly. An early study was that of the her-

ring gull (1940), an effort beset by difficulties. The gulls tended to

climb under clouds, where they could not be seen, riding and soaring

on the updrafts, then gliding for several miles. They were also known

to range widely along the coast and inland, so one could not be certain

if homing were accomplished by the use of learned landmarks. When

Don’s studies resumed after World War II, he chose to follow gannets,

birds even larger than gulls, with a five-foot wingspan, and white—

thus more easily observable. The gannets were strictly marine birds,

and thus would not be knowledgeable about land-based cues, though

they, too, soared splendidly (and out of view) into and above the clouds.

Migrating birds likewise provided puzzles to scientists of those

(and these) days. Then, theories proposed that birds’ navigational abil-

ities depended on modified sensory organs, or else on sensitivity to cues

detected by humans, but usually overlooked by them. Possible cues

available to the birds, Griffin suggested, were visual landmarks of

buildings, rivers, or even stable cloud formations or ocean wave pat-

terns related to consistent trade winds. Even more important and

intriguing to Don was the possibility of celestial navigation, although

the seasonal and daily movement of star patterns and sun and moon

seemingly required advanced calculations with sextants, chronometers,

and navigation tables . . . at least, as accomplished by humans. Thus

most scientists, but not Griffin, dismissed those potentials. At the time,

Don was not persuaded by magnetic-field-based theories, though he

kept the “book open” on it. Now the role of celestial cues has been

accepted, as has the sound made by ocean waves breaking along the

shore. As Don Griffin contemplated, “[T]o the migrating bird, some-

thing speaks out from the earth or the sky with directions to guide its

journey” (

Bird Migration

, xi).

Don’s journeys studying bats took him on several occasions to

Simla, the Smithsonian Institution field station in Trinidad and center

for William Beebee’s bathysphere and other marine studies. It was there

that Don first met Jocelyn Crane, who later became his second wife.

Don moved from Harvard to Rockefeller University (then Rocke-

feller Institute) in New York City (1965). With his colleague Peter

Marler, he was instrumental in promoting Rockefeller University’s

acquisition of the Millbrook Field Station ninety miles upstate. Their

sensible argument was that such an acquisition was an asset, not only

as a field research site, but also as an attraction for field biologists,

who, as a group, tend not to like life in big cities. While at Rockefeller,

he and Jocelyn did at first live in New York City, but those days also

included many weeks when they stayed near and at that Millbrook

Field Station. Jocelyn worked there on her comprehensive treatise on

406


fiddler crabs, and later on her Ph.D. in art history, on the communicative

use of hand gesture in illuminated manuscripts—not very far removed

from the claw-waving gestures of her beloved fiddler crabs. Peter Mar-

ler established an active field laboratory at the station, and Don, Peter,

and the Rockefeller Institute managed to lure Fernando Nottebohm

to become a faculty member, with labs at the city campus and field

station.

These were the times of Don’s bat studies and of many expeditions

to study bird migration. Come a prediction of cloudy weather in spring

or fall, and Don would gleefully rub his hands together at the lunch

table. Such weather presents an optimal time to flee the city to Mill-

brook and study the migrating birds at night with radar. (Clouds mean

no visual land-based or celestial cues are available to the birds, requir-

ing their reliance on other guidance or possibly their failure.)

While he was at Rockefeller University, a central focus for Don

Griffin was the examination of animal consciousness. Just as con-

sciousness is an essential feature of human existence, likewise, Don

Griffin proposed, it is plausible to consider consciousness as an impor-

tant part of non-human animal existence. He argued that we recognize

evolutionary continuity in many human and animal characteristics,

such as anatomical structures and functions: so is it not reasonable to

expect continuity in mental capacities? Likewise, the same neuroana-

tomical features are found in humans and non-humans: for example,

the same neurotransmitters and neuronal cell types. There are, as well,

similar neurophysiological responses correlated with similar events: the

P300 wave and its apparent relation to expected events is one of the

most publicized. What is most important, Griffin suggested that animal

communication might well serve as a “window on animal minds,” a

scientific means to study consciousness. Indeed, his earlier studies of

bat sonar and bird navigation may be considered as precursors to his

later views. As with animal communication, these abilities require a

sophistication beyond that attributed to animals by most scientists;

they also depend on cues of which humans are typically unaware.

Don Griffin created a new field, cognitive ethology, and wrote sev-

eral books reviewing studies and observations in the lab and field,

offering insights into the more complex capacities the animals’ behav-

iors could reveal. While others, noting a single circumstance of appar-

ently rote behavior by an animal, thereby chose to dismiss the whole of

an organism’s behavior as rigid motor programs elicited by specific

stimuli, Griffin suggested a broader investigation of their capacities. A

beaver may indeed cover with mud a loudspeaker playing the sound of

rushing water (an apparent effort to “fix” a leaking dam), and a digger

wasp in some circumstances may well uselessly repeat investigations of


407

a burrow in which to place a larva, but these extreme responses can

also be seen as sensible “default” responses. The same beaver can deter-

mine the proper size of a rock or branch to fix an underwater dam

leak; many insects can successfully hunt others in complex maneuvers.

As Don noted, the small size of an insect brain can be viewed as pro-

moting the need for consciousness and awareness of goals, due to the

lack of neural “room” for the very many pre-programmed motor

sequences the insect would presumably need to carry out its many

tasks and to adapt to changing circumstances.

The examples of complex animal cognition that Don Griffin pre-

sented in his books are myriad. They range over many species from

insects to primates, and over many tasks from food searches and cach-

ing, to tool preparation and use, coordinated hunting, deception, and

communication.

In his writings, Don Griffin coined a number of apt phrases, of

which I present a few:

The GOP or “Groans of Pain” categorizes all animal communica-

tion as involuntary, not arising from any conscious attempt to commu-

nicate. A scientific analysis of the GOP stance could investigate whether

the vocalizations are made without the presence of an audience.

“Species solipsism” refers to the belief, derived from the solipsistic

philosophical position, that “no one can ever prove, with logical rigor,

that another person is conscious. We can only make inferences.” Most

persons do not hold such views. When applied to the presumed lack of

consciousness in non-human animals, and the lack of scientific inquiry

that proceeds from the possibility of consciousness, DRG termed the

view “species solipsism.”

His term “premature perfectionism,” later developed into “paralytic

perfectionism,” describes the response of much of the scientific commu-

nity as it demands “perfectionist” standards for what must of necessity

be the beginning (indeed, pioneering), and certainly not yet perfected,

analysis of animals’ consciousness and their subjective feelings.

During these years, he interacted with a broad spectrum of scien-

tists and philosophers, worked closely with some, and encouraged the

work of many. Among his close colleagues were: at Princeton, Jim

Gould with bees; at Brown, Jim Simmons with bats; in Don’s Rocke-

feller lab, Ron Larkin and José Torre-Bueno with bird migration, and

myself immersed in studies of plover injury-feigning; at Cornell, Katy

Payne studying elephant communication; and at Harvard, Gayle Speck

reviewing neuropsychological phenomena of relevance to conscious-

ness. In those days, we would avidly await the latest word from Bernd

Heinrich on his studies with ravens—those in his home atrium and those

deep in the Maine woods. And we would query reviewers’ comments

408


on ours and colleagues’ papers. Some reviewers decried reports of single

or rare occurrences of a behavior, but we would parry, is that not how

one would expect to see examples of intelligent behavior, namely, when

an organism is confronted with a novel or changing circumstance for

which it has not been prepared either genetically or through prior

experience/learning?

After a time in New York, while still affiliated as an emeritus pro-

fessor with Rockefeller, Don moved with Jocelyn to Princeton. There

he found a colleague for his bee interests in Jim Gould of the Princeton

faculty and actively participated in the Princeton academic community

as well as the Rockefeller community.

Later, Don again “retired” to Harvard. He and Jocelyn moved to a

retirement residence in Lexington, Massachusetts, a sensible choice,

they knew, for their advancing years, though he always felt quite con-

strained there. At Harvard, Don was affiliated with the Concord Field

Station of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he maintained

an active lab ensconced in a trailer, and carried on fieldwork in Har-

vard’s Estabrook Woods and various other nearby woods and ponds.

In the lab trailer, one found jerry-rigged bits of common Radio Shack

and other, uncommon, gadgetry (even “spyware”) that allowed him to

videotape honeybees and to overcome the technical difficulties of near-

field acoustics to record honeybee sounds, which dissipate within

extremely short distances from a dancing bee. Many had already studied

information in the bees’ dances about distance and location of a source

for pollen or nectar or a potential new hive site. Don guessed these pre-

viously unstudied sounds might reveal new communicatory capacities

of the bees; the issue remains unresolved. All this work was conducted

with the most minimal funding: some support from Harvard University,

supplemented with out-of-pocket money. Not daunted, Don conducted

his studies, gave a semester seminar at Harvard, spoke at scientific meet-

ings around the world, and continued his lifetime of helpful scientific

collegiality.

Don Griffin likewise investigated beavers’ behavior and communi-

cation as they hid in their lodges or swam on Mink Pond in the

Estabrook Woods. This was accomplished by a lowlight mini video

probe into the lodge and an equipment-laden canoe paddled on the

pond.

Bats were sought at some of his youthful Cape Cod batting haunts

such as the Old Indian Meeting House in Mashpee, and in new sites,

both on the Cape and around the world. Jim Simmons and his Brown

University grad students worked together with Don Griffin and had

available extremely high-tech equipment on loan from the U.S. Army.

On one of my visits with them, we observed, on the “night vision”


409

video screen, bright green bats across the pond attempting to catch tiny

bright green spots, which were the mosquitoes. With the observations,

we heard the bats’ rapid clicks, which were the sonar frequencies con-

verted to human hearing range. Scientists have long hoped to be able to

record such synchronized data. Infrared illumination coupled with highly

sensitive infrared detection devices permitted the most precise data

gathering, while computer-assisted analysis of the videotapes allowed

interpretation of that data. The group of scientists could thereby inves-

tigate not only the nature of the sonar productions of various bat spe-

cies, but also the highly varied and flexible strategies the bats employed

to seek and capture a diverse array of prey, usually insects, but even

frogs for some bat species. The data likewise permitted the scientists to

explore complex intra- and interspecies interactions, such as cooperative

acoustic signaling when a large group of bats drank from the same pond

at the same time.

Don also spent considerable time at the Mashpee bat pond and the

bee station in the salt marshes with Peter Auger and his Barnstable

High School biology students and with Peter’s brother Greg. Greg

Auger, an IBM retiree and nature-videographer, was a frequent associ-

ate in the beaver and bat field work and data analysis and is, by Don’s

last wishes and Greg’s own ardent interests, continuing Don’s bat work

with Jim Simmons.

Also in those last years, Don and Gayle Speck wrote a paper con-

cerning animal consciousness that was subjected to endless reviews,

but, importantly, was finally accepted days before he died. That paper

examines the most current evidence of animal consciousness, including

studies of conditioning that suggested a need for awareness and recent

work on animal communication and on neural correlates of conscious-

ness (

Animal Cognition

7.1 [2003]: 5–18).

In the last years, Don kept the Lexington retirement residence, but

after his wife, Jocelyn Crane Griffin, sadly died in 1998, he returned

to Barnstable on Cape Cod. There he bought a house whose require-

ments were simple: a large, dry basement and a large garage. In the

garage were stored his sailboat, kayak, canoe, childhood dinghy, and

his car—an old station wagon, sensible for field work, complete with

a dangling stuffed bat (a toy gift, one of many received). In the base-

ment was some of his scientific apparatus; the rest was set up on fold-

ing aluminum tables in his spacious living room with its unused,

handsome stone fireplace. Upstairs a room sparkled in bright chil-

dren’s colors—this for the happily enjoyed visits with family and the

great-grandchildren. And adjoining the house was a wide preserved

expanse of forested land and a brook; nearby were old friends from

earlier times.

410


But he’s left us now. He leaves two daughters from his first mar-

riage to Ruth Castle: Janet Abbott of Arlington, Massachusetts, and

Margaret Griffin of Montreal, Canada, and a son, John Griffin, of Brigh-

ton, Massachusetts. Another daughter, Nancy Jackson, passed away

before Don did. Don Griffin also leaves many, many colleagues,

friends, and students to whom he served as a mentor and a model for

what science can be and how a scientist lives a fulfilling and highly pro-

ductive life . . . a life well lived.

And he leaves us many challenges to pursue, perhaps prime among

them a serious scientific appreciation of animal consciousness and the

extraordinary experimentation and field research into their abilities

that such an appreciation can suggest.

And he leaves us, too, with some thoughts written by him many

years ago. They concern birds’ navigational abilities, but may one day

be the final words concerning animal consciousness: “Occam’s razor

[assuming the simplest, most reductionist explanation] . . . proved in

this case to be unduly limiting. The actual facts turned out to support

what had seemed romantic speculation” (

Bird Migration

, 166).

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Don Griffin’s daughters, Janet Abbott and Margaret Griffin,

for sharing memories of their father, for providing the photographic portrait,

and for helpful comments on an earlier version of the memoir, Greg Auger and

Wendy Williams for their recollections of Don, and Jean Venable Menuez for

editorial suggestions.

Elected 1971; Committee on Membership II 1989–95

Carolyn A. Ristau

Psychology Department

Barnard College of Columbia University

Donald Redfield Griffin—A Timeline

•

3 August 1915: birth in Southampton, New York; only child of

Mary Whitney Redfield and Henry Farrand Griffin

•

1934: graduation from Andover Preparatory School

•

1938: discovery with Galambos that bats have sonar

•

1938: graduation from Harvard University

•

1940: instruction in flying a plane to follow homing birds (inter-

rupted by the war, resumed 1947)

•

1942: Ph.D., Harvard University


411

•

1942–46: fellowships and wartime research, Harvard University

•

1946–53: on faculty of Cornell University, eventually as full professor

•

1952: election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

•

1953–65: professor, then chair of zoology, Harvard University

•

1960: election to the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A.

•

1961: Elliot Medal, National Academy of Sciences

•

1965–86: professor, Rockefeller University

•

1971: election to the American Philosophical Society

•

1979–83: president, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; lifetime

board member from 1983

•

1986–2003: emeritus professor of animal behavior, Rockefeller

University

•

1986–2003: associate of zoology, Concord Field Station, Museum

of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

•

7 November 2003: death at his “city” home in Lexington, Massa-

chusetts

Donald R. Griffin—His Books

•

1958.

Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats andMen

. Reprinted 1986. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (Studies and

reflections on echolocation.)

•

1959.

Echoes of Bats and Men

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