Biographical Memoirs Volume 86 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Donald R. Griffin
Donald R. Griffin
Pages 188-207
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He discovered (with Robert Galalubos) a new and unique sensory world, echolocation, in which bats can perceive their surroundings by listening to echoes of ultrasonic sounds that they produce.
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In his autobiographical writings Griffin described his schooling as "extraordinarily irregular." After a few years at local private schools his "longsuffering" parents decided on home schooling. His father taught him English, history, Latin, and French.
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Recruiting friends, he banded tens of thousands of little brown bats, Myotis lucifugus. (For the rest of his life he readily found research volunteers to help in such things as lugging heavy electronic equipment into the field, climbing into unexplored caverns, following birds in an airplane, building huts on remote sand spits, and navigating Amazon rivers in dugout canoes full of recording devices.)
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UNDERGRADUATE YEARS As an undergraduate biology major, Griffin took his first science courses but reported mediocre grades in everything but the courses on mammals or birds. At this time John Welsh was studying circadian rhythms in invertebrates and encouraged Griffin to do so in bats.
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When Griffin was a senior, he was in a quandary about applying to Harvard's graduate school in biology because its faculty had little regard for Griffin's current interest in bird navigation. "Wiser heads emphasized that if I really wanted to be a serious scientist I should put aside such childish interest and turn to some important subject like physiology." The problem was solved with the announcement of the joint appointment of Karl Lashley to the Harvard psychology and biology departments.
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Don divided a sound treated experimental room into equal parts by hangirg a row of wires from the ceiling We aimed the microphone of the Pierce device at this wire array, ar d began to count the number of times a bat flyir g through the wires will hit them when normal, or deaf or mute ,,, The impairments we produced [by plugging the ears or tyirg the mouth shut] were all reversible We also recorded the output of the Pierce device ar d correlated the bat's vocal output as it approached the barrier with whether it hit or missed the wires Ever thing we predicted did happen Nothir g ever went we or g We never disagreed We suspected our claims might be controversial ar d decided a movie demonstration might help silence the skeptics [In recent years this original silent and sour d movie has been increasingly shown on nature and science television programs in many different countries arourd the world Galambos at age 90 is still a very active professor of neuroscience at the Uriversity of California, Sar Diego ]
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Griffin's thesis, by prior agreement, was on bird navigation, the problem he had originally planned to study in graduate school experiments. The central question was whether birds released in unfamiliar territory immediately determined the homeward direction and flew directly back to their nests.
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After the war Griffin moved to the Cornell zoology department for seven years before returning to Harvard for
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Another direction initiated by Griffin with his collaborators Alan Grinnell and Nobuo Suga (and encouraged by Galambos) was the neurophysiology of bat echolocation.
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In the last weeks of his life Griffin was out "night after night" on Cape Cod "still trying to learn more about bats." BIRDS AND OTHER CREATURES Griffin continued to work on the mysteries of bird navigation. What made this a difficult problem was that although it became clear that birds (or some birds under some conditions)
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Indeed, the number of anecdotes about the field studies he carried out in his last, and eighty-eighth, year that I collected while preparing this memoir is a measure of the man. THE ROCKEFELLER INSTITUTE AND BACK TO HARVARD In 1965 Griffin left Harvard to organize a new institute for Research in Animal Behavior jointly sponsored by the Rockefeller University and the New York Zoological Society.
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COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY For about the first 40 years Griffin's career had been that of the very hard-nosed empiricist and skeptic, typified by the following oft told tale (attributed to Griffin's students Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford and FDA commissioner; and Roger Payne, among others)
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C Lloyd Morgan reacted against this approach and formulated what became known as Lloyd Morgan's canon, essentially the application of the law of parsimony to animal behavior: "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychological faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." This quickly came to imply the rejection of animal consciousness and awareness, and a wariness to impute any complex cognitive function to animals.
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Another argument was that animal communication, albeit admittedly fundamentally different * om human language, might provide "a window on the animal mind." In his next two books, Animal Thinking (1984)
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Although many biologists and psychologists are still skeptical or uneasy about Griffin's attribution of consciousness to nonhumans, particularly invertebrates, there is no question that he has radically opened up the field of animal behavior to new questions, ideas, and experiments about animal cognition. Because of his own towering achievements as a meticulous and skeptical experimental naturalist, his cogent and repeated arguments about studying the animal mind and his support and encouragement of others, coupled with his unusual modesty and soft-spoken nature, Donald Griffin was able to affect a major revolution in what scientists do and think about the cognition of nonhuman animals.
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In addition, the following provided helpful comments on Griffin's life and contributions: Robert Galambos, Alan Grinnell, James Simmons, Roger Payne, Marc Hauser, Greg Auger, Jim Gould, Janet Abbott, and Herb Terrace.
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The echolocation of flying insects by bats Amine. Behav.
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:136. 1992 Animal Minds.
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