The legacy of Jane Goodall —from chimp whisperer to changing how science understands primates

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It's 1983, and Alan Bond has just won the America's Cup.

David Lahti (0:12)

The race of the century.

Mark Hauber (0:13)

I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not setting up the day is a bum.

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Clare Nicholls (0:37)

Imagine walking into the forests of Tanzania in 1960, notebook in hand, with no university degree, no formal training, just patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit quietly and watch. That's how Jane Goodall changed how we study primates forever. On this day, one year ago, Jane Goodall died at the age of 91 For more than six decades, she redefined what we understood about chimpanzees, and about ourselves. She wasn't just a scientist. She became one of the most influential conservationists of the last century, and created the foundation of modern primatology. Hello, I'm Clare Nicholls with Big Ideas, celebrating the legacy of Jane Goodall.

Before there was ever a debate about animal rights, or great ape consciousness, or whether a chimpanzee could grieve, there was one young woman ignoring every scientific principle.

Kristin Andrews (1:51)

Jane Goodall broke all those rules.

She named the animals she interacted with. She discussed them using gender pronouns. The scientific establishment then was very critical of her. Who is this untrained person writing these, you know, anthropocentric or romantic stories of the chimpanzees? But she persevered. She didn't let them shut her down. She kept doing it. And she kept doing what she thought she needed to do. And that was describe from the perspective of an anthropologist going into a new culture, what these individuals were doing as individuals and how they were creating community together.

Clare Nicholls (2:33)

That's Kristin Andrews, Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

She's on a panel of researchers, some of whom knew Jane Goodall personally. David Lahti is a Professor of Biology and Psychology. And Jessica Rothman is a Professor of Anthropology. Biologist Mark Hauber is asking the questions. And they are all from the City University of New York, where this conversation took place.

So what does it mean to carry Jane's work forward? How has Jane forever changed the way we study primates?

Mark Hauber (3:10)

So my first question will go to David. If you had to explain to a newcomer which one of Jane Goodall's early results most changed primatology and evolutionary biology, what would it be?

David Lahti (3:21)

That's a difficult question because even in her very first paper on feeding behavior in chimps, which represented the very first time anyone, not only a female, not only on chimps, had sat and had a long, she had 800 field hours at that point studying a great ape in its natural habitat. She has almost every line has something in there that had never been observed before. But I would say in terms of changing the field or changing how we view animals, I would have to have a top three.

Number three would be the tool use thing. I mean, she had to read this book called Man the Toolmaker at Cambridge during her Ph.D.

And literally she found evidence against that being a hallmark feature of humans. Not only tool use because some people came back and said, okay, but only humans manufacture tools. Well, that wasn't true either. She came up with a follow up paper that showed that they manufacture them on the spot, especially if they're not working quite right. And the first tool that she mentioned finding was these sticks that termites peel until they're sticky or even other materials that are more bendy like grass. And the chimp puts them into termite mounds and pulls it out, and the termites are stuck to them, and then they have a specialized way of eating them. So this idea that other animals share this feature that was thought to be by the scientific consensus, unique to humans was, I would say, a huge change. Number two, and this doesn't get mentioned very much, but it's sort of like a gestalt from her whole life of research, is individual differences. So from her favorite mother, Flo, who was just a wonderful mother and grandmother and formed strong coalitions, to this disturbed, distracted, volatile passion, another mother, and from the sort of reclusive David Greybeard that she befriended, all the way to Fegan, Flo's son, who was so friendly that even mothers would allow an adult male to play with their, with her toddlers. That is extremely rare in chimps. She documented how different chimps can be, and this rattled the establishment, too, because we were, I'm speaking, you know, in this lineage of ethology, we tended to think of organisms as being representative of their species. So if, you know, this is the way a tiger is, this is the way a squirrel is, et cetera. So to have this variety of personality within a species was something that I think changed the way we think. And this segues into number one, which has to be animal minds, right? I mean, it has to be this idea that chimps have a mental life, and for her, this meant intentionality, consciousness, emotion. I would challenge anybody to read the accounts, whether professional, semi-professional, or even her personal accounts of these animals, and then of several people after that, including Jessica's work, and not think that these animals have some sort of mind that demands our attention.