Donald Redfield Griffin (August 3, 1915 - November 7, 2003) was an American professor of zoology at various universities who did seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics. In 1938 he began studying the navigational method of bats, which he named echolocation in 1944. In Question of Animal Awareness, he argued that animals have conscious minds like those of humans. August 3 is the 215th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (216th in leap years), with 150 days remaining. ... 1915 (MCMXV) was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... November 7 is the 311th day of the year (312th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 54 days remaining. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Zoology (Greek zoon = animal and logos = word) is the biological discipline which involves the study of animals. ... Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour (particularly of social animals such as primates and canids), and is a branch of zoology. ...-1... See: Animal echolocation: animals emitting sound waves and listening to the echo in order to locate objects or navigate. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... The mind is the term most commonly used to describe the higher functions of the human brain, particularly those of which humans are subjectivel // holaMedia:Example. ... [[{{{diversity_link}}}|Diversity]] {{{diversity}}} Binomial name Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Trinomial name {{{trinomial}}} Type Species {{{type_species}}} Subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu (extinct) Homo sapiens sapiens [[Image:{{{range_map}}}|{{{range_map_width}}}|]] Synonyms {{{synonyms}}} Homo (genus). ...
Publications
Listening in the Dark (1958)
Question of Animal Awareness (1976) ISBN 0865760020
Animal Minds (1992)
Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (2001) ISBN 0226308650
Donald Redfield Griffin was elected a Member of the Corporation in 1964 and an Honorary Member of the Corporation in 1986.
Griffin spent his final years in Lexington, MA working at Harvard University's Concord Field Station, where he was using microphones to study the noises beavers made in their lodges.
DonaldGriffin was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Animal Behavior Society and the American Physiological Society.
Griffin notes that a variety of experiments have shown "that laboratory animals can learn relatively abstract rules, such as oddity or the difference between a regular and an irregular pattern." He notes further that pigeons don't do very well at these odd-one-out problems, but they nevertheless do better than cats and raccoons.
Griffin thinks that this result "suggests recognition of a variety of pigeons as something equivalent to "one of us," although it has not been demonstrated that pigeons can learn more easily to recognize pictures of pigeons than other animals such as dogs or hawks.
Griffin notes that Capaldi and Miller, along with Davis, Mackenzie and Morrison, have recently "demonstrated that rats are capable of a simple form of discriminating what is sometimes called "numerosity" to distinguish it from the sort of counting by mentally assigning successive numbers as we usually do.
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