GRIFFIN, Donald (Redfield) 1915-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 3, 1915, in Southampton, NY; died November 7, 2003, in Lexington, MA. Zoologist, educator, and author. Griffin studied animal behavior and was the founder of the field of cognitive ethology, which holds that it is possible that animals possess awareness and can think rationally. Educated at Harvard University, he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1942 and embarked on his academic career there as a junior fellow in 1940. Working at Harvard's laboratories in the 1940s, Griffin first made a name for himself when he and a colleague discovered how bats use echolocation—a term he coined—to navigate in the dark. His findings are included in his Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men (1958), which earned the National Academy of Sciences Elliot medal in 1961, and Echoes of Bats and Men (1959). In 1946, he joined the faculty at Cornell University, becoming a professor of zoology there in 1952 before moving back to Harvard the next year. At Harvard, Griffin taught in and chaired the zoology department from 1962 to 1965; he then became a professor at Rockefeller University, where he remained until his retirement in 1986. It was only because of his firmly established reputation as an excellent scientist that Griffin's ideas about animal cognition received any audience at all among his scientific colleagues. Biologists and philosophers have for a long time held that animals do not think or have emotions or motivations, other than those guided by instinct. Griffin, however, felt that scientists should keep open minds about this area, since there was no hard evidence that disproved animals could think in rational ways. He wrote on this subject in his books The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (1976; 2nd edition, 1981), Animal Thinking (1984), and Animal Minds (1992; revised edition, 2001). Griffin was also the author of Bird Migration (1964), which won a Phi Beta Kappa prize in 1966.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, November 17, 2003, section 4, p. 12.

Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2003, p. B20.

New York Times, November 14, 2003, p. A23.