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Donald Griffin

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Introduction

If you start with his first scientific publication as a Harvard freshman, Donald Griffin spent nearly seven decades doing scientific work. Over the course of his career, he accomplished two things that few scientists achieve in their lifetimes (Gross 2009). He discovered a previously unknown natural phenomenon that he named echolocation. Later in life, he accomplished something greater than that. He changed the way we understand the minds of nonhuman beings. He did neither of these things alone, but his intellectual prowess and unflagging dedication to mustering evidence convinced many of us, including some of the skeptics that inevitably raise objections as science progresses.

Early Life

Born in Southampton on Long Island in 1915, Donald Griffin was an only child (Griffin 1998). His family moved to the countryside near Scarsdale, New York, then, after his father’s retirement for health reasons, to Barnstable, Massachusetts. Griffin’s early education combined stints of...

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References

  • Couffer, J. (1992). Bat bomb: World War II’s other secret weapon. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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  • Dewsbury, D. A. (1984). Comparative psychology in the twentieth century. Stroudsburg: Hutchinson Ross.

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  • Gould, J. L. (2004). Thinking about thinking: How Donald R. Griffin (1915–2003) remade animal behavior. Animal Cognition, 7, 1–4.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1934). Marking bats. Journal of Mammalogy, 15, 202–207.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1944). Echolocation by blind men, bats, and radar. Science, 100, 589–590.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1976). The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience. New York: Rockefeller University Press.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1978). Prospects for a cognitive ethology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 527–538.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1980). Early history of research on echolocation. In R.-G. Busnel & J. F. Fish (Eds.), Animal sonar systems (pp. 1–8). New York: Plenum Press.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1984). Animal thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1992). Animal minds: Beyond cognition to consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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  • Griffin, D. R. (1998). Donald R. Griffin. In L. R. Squire (Ed.), The history of neuroscience in autobiography (Vol. 2, pp. 68–93). San Diego: Academic.

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  • Griffin, D. R., & Galambos, R. (1941). The sensory basis of obstacle avoidance by flying bats. Journal of Experimental Zoology, 86, 481–506.

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  • Griffin, D. R., & Speck, G. B. (2004). New evidence of animal consciousness. Animal Cognition, 7, 5–18.

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  • Gross, C. G. (2009). A hole in the head: More tales in the history of neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • Pierce, G. W., & Griffin, D. R. (1938). Experimental determination of supersonic notes emitted by bats. Journal of Mammalogy, 19, 454–455.

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  • von Frisch, K. (1950). Bees; their vision, chemical senses, and language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Correspondence to Patrick Drumm .

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Drumm, P. (2018). Donald Griffin. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1053-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1053-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Donald Griffin
    Published:
    11 June 2018

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1053-2

  2. Original

    Donald Griffin
    Published:
    12 October 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1053-1