Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Jane Goodall, 1934-2025
Jane Goodall came into this world in the midst of a global depression, in Hampstead, London, born to a British army officer father and a novelist mother. In her early years, they moved to the seaside town of Bournemouth, and she attended Uplands School but could not afford university. That beginning did not portend a life of science and intellectual revolution, but as the poet said, "the future is unwritten." Without university training, she went to Africa and became the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees. As a result, she changed not only humanity's understanding of its closest relatives, it changed how humans see themselves, if they look carefully.
In 1957, she went to Africa and managed to get an appointment to see Louis Leakey, the famed anthropologist and archeologist. That led to her securing a job with him and being put on a path to study the great apes. How good was her work? In 1962, Dr. Leakey arranged funding and Ms. Goodall entered the Cambridge University doctoral program without an undergraduate degree -- something only 7 other people had done since the university was founded in 1209 AD.
What Dr. Goodall did was quite simple; she observed. The simply sat and watched the chimps of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She broke with custom by giving the chimps names rather than assigning them numbers, and she also discovered that the definition of human was wrong. In the days before her research, homo sapiens was defined often as "the only species that uses tools." She obeserved a chimp strip the leaves off a stick, put it in a termite mound and extract it to eat the termites on the stick.
As a result, Dr. Leakey wrote, "Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human." The biology world has not yet confidently answered this one way or another. However, the fact that DNA sequencing shows that humans and chimps share 98.6% of the same DNA (something neither Dr. Leakey nor Dr. Goodall could have known in 1962) suggests that the last option is not really unrealistic. The fact that she proved chimps are not vegetarian and that they engage in warfare underscores that.
Then, Dr. Goodall did something that was revolutionary. Unlike most scientists who pursue their version of fame in peer-reviewed journals and at conferences, she became a TV star of sorts as she campaigned to protect the environment of her beloved chimps. She spent less and less time with them and more and more time on TV shows and doing documentaries to get the word out that the planet needs saving from mankind.
National Geographic, which funded a lot of her work, wrote, "Goodall saw how a caged animal was turned into a diminished, demeaned version of itself that was reflected in its eyes and in the way it moved. It was her moral imperative to change that. 'We should be kind to animals because it makes better humans of us all,' she told Mary Smith, the photo editor at the magazine who helped shepherd her stories into print. She influenced the National Institutes of Health to end the use of chimpanzees in medical research and enlisted Secretary of State James Baker in 1989 to help suppress the African wild meat trade."
In short, Jane Goodall, the little girl from Hempstead and Bournemouth changed how the human race sees itself and its fellow living beings. Not everyone is onboard with her findings, and Creationists hated her work. But being better humans is possible and worthwhile. And that starts with understanding not just what differentiates homo sapiens from the rest of life on Earth but also all the similarities, both good and bad.
Dr. Goodall left the world a much better and wiser place than she found it. Not bad for a 98.6% chimp, an observation she likely would have loved.
© Copyright 2025 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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