Thinking about thinking: how Donald R. Griffin (1915–2003) remade animal behavior

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In January of 1970, I was finishing a grueling round of interviews as a prospective graduate student at Rockefeller University. An inexperienced but enthusiastic convert to ethology, I had just published a paper on the dance-language controversy. As Professor Griffin saw me off into the elevator, he asked “Do you think honey bees know what they are doing?” The doors slid shut on my feeble response, “I hope not.” Nothing in my reading of his hard-nosed papers and elegantly written books on echolocation and bird migration had prepared me for that startling query – frightening because it either meant my future mentor was slipping into an early senility (the most common hypothesis voiced in the 1970s to account for his new interest), or that ethology was ignoring many of the most important questions about animal behavior. What started Griffin thinking about animal minds? I asked him this several times over the years, and never got the same answer twice. A series of small things must have combined to draw him out: the dams of his beloved beavers (and their ingenuity in outwitting his attempts to maintain them in a swimming pool for study), the persistent pattern of psychologists and ethologists alike of underestimating the capacities of animals, the unexpected flexibility (and concomitant but telling stupidity) of bats in the presence of background noise or ample light, the “cognitive maps” (then hardly discussed) he and others inferred in rats and chimpanzees, a discussion with the Princeton philosopher Robert Nagel, and in particular the provoking negative feedback of his colleagues (to which he responded with stubborn passive aggression). But the story I choose to believe is the one he told about fiddler crabs. According to this version, Griffin had never given the subject a thought until he met the remarkable