New Book Opens an Unexplored Field

Animals may have the ability to plan and make conscious choices, a former chairman of the Biology Department suggests in his recently published book, "The Question of Animal Awareness".

"There is still a great deal to be learned and it is a very exciting field, one which few have explored thoroughly," Donald R. Griffin '38 now a professor of biology at Rockefeller University in New York City, said yesterday.

A chapter in the book, printed in the current issue of "American Scientists" under the title "A Possible Window on the Minds of Animals," proposes that the ability of animals to communicate may allow humans to discover their mental experiences and intentions.

Open Eyes

"Opening our eyes to the theoretical possibility that animals have significant mental experiences is only a first step towards the more difficult procedure of investigating their actual nature and importance to the animals concerned," the article states.

Language has generally been regarded as a human attribute only, a distinction based on the idea that animals lack a conscious attempt to communicate, "whereas men know what they are doing," Griffin states.

The problem of studying animal awareness and attitudes has been restricted so far because of the difficulty involved in this kind of research.

"A new generation of ambitiously pioneering ethologists might open up an enormously powerful new science of participatory research in interspecies communication," Griffin wrote in his article.

"First, though, they must overcome the feeling of embarrassed outrage" at the notion of communicating with animals at their own level and then develop the necessary techniques of disguise, imitation and communicatory interaction."

Griffin said that animals do communicate in ways which are relatively sophisticated, although not as complex as human language and writings.

He has discovered behavioral patterns in such instances as the dance communication system of honeybees, "in which we can see a complex but orderly communication process underway."

Griffin's article discusses the work of a scientific group that developed a system of communicating with apes by teaching them sign language. He suggests that models be developed to "act as transmittors of information via whatever communication system is natural to the animals under study."

Robert L. Trivers, professor of biology, said yesterday that Griffin's purpose is to make the subject a respectable one again.

"He has little to offer that wasn't commonplace knowledge before," Trivers He explained that his situation at the time was different from Hughes' and Moynihan's. He had been working for five months as an untenured lecturer before he left, and returned to the business school only after the election was over.

The University put no pressure on him to take the time off, but he said he hadn't felt that this was necessary. He added that if he were to run again, he would not teach while campaigning