Donald Redfield Griffin
- Born:
- August 3, 1915, Southampton, New York, U.S.
- Died:
- November 7, 2003, Lexington, Massachusetts (aged 88)
- Subjects Of Study:
- animal
- animal behaviour
- echolocation
- orientation
- senses
- navigation
Who was Donald Redfield Griffin?
What is echolocation?
Which universities did Griffin teach at during his academic career?
What were some of Griffin’s notable publications?
Donald Redfield Griffin (born August 3, 1915, Southampton, New York, U.S.—died November 7, 2003, Lexington, Massachusetts) was an American biophysicist and animal behaviorist known for his research in animal navigation, acoustic orientation, and sensory biophysics. He is credited with founding cognitive ethology, a field that studies thought processes in animals.
Early life
Born in Southampton, New York, Griffin spent his early childhood near Scarsdale. His father, Henry Farrand Griffin, was a reporter and novelist. His mother, Mary Whitney Redfield, nurtured his interest in reading from an early age. Griffin developed an early curiosity in biology, influenced by his uncle Alfred C. Redfield, a professor of physiology at Harvard University and a founding member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. As a teenager he studied local wildlife, which included trapping and observing small mammals—an early interest that laid the foundation for his later academic work.
Education and career
Griffin authored several books, including:
- Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men (1958)
- Echoes of Bats and Men (1959)
- Animal Structure and Function (1962)
- Bird Migration: The Biology and Physics of Orientation Behavior (1964)
- The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (1976)
Griffin received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in zoology from Harvard University, completing his Ph.D. in 1942. As an undergraduate, he used ultrasonic detection equipment developed by physicist G.W. Pierce—originally designed to study insect sounds—to investigate bat navigation. Along with fellow student Robert Galambos, Griffin demonstrated that bats produce ultrasonic sounds to navigate. Griffin coined the term echolocation for this process in 1944. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a research assistant at Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, Fatigue Laboratory, and other biological laboratories. He taught zoology at Cornell University (1946–53) and at Harvard (1953–65). In 1965 he became a professor at Rockefeller University and a research zoologist for the New York Zoological Society. He retired from Rockefeller in 1986. In the late 1970s Griffin proposed that animals might possess the ability to think and reason. This perspective led to the establishment of cognitive ethology, a field examining animal consciousness and mental experiences.
Later years
After retiring Griffin continued his research at Harvard’s Concord Field Station, studying animal communication. He died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, at age 88.