Featured Columnistย โ Meditations Martin LeFevre |
Jane Goodall, the aging but still very active doyenne of chimpanzee studies in the Gombe Reserve, Tanzania, was interviewed recently on Americaโs premier TV magazine show, โ60 Minutes.โ Watch Video. In the most evocative moment of the interview, Goodall says, โI thought they were like us, but nicer. But theyโre just like us.โ
Goodallโs stature in the United States lies somewhere between saint and scientist, between an icon of the romantic solitary in the wilderness, and a tireless advocate for her beloved and endangered chimpanzees.
With a bit of hyperbole and adulation, the announcer says โJane Goodall was the first to discover that wild chimpanzees were capable of making and using tools, a revelation that turned the scientific world upside down, challenging the convention that tool-making is what made humans unique.โ
Itโs true that Goodall, who hadnโt trained as a scientist, made new discoveries about chimp behavior in the wild, but they came at a time when the mythos of โman the toolmakerโ was being challenged. Her findings certainly didnโt โturn the scientific world upside down.โ
Even today, Goodall speaks in poetic rather than scientific terms about those early years, a half century ago, in Tanzania: โIt was a kind of magical place, where I never knew each day what I might see or discover.โ
Janeโs practice of giving names to the chimps in the wildโfor example, grandmother Gremlin, mother Gaia, and baby Google–raises difficult questions. Doesnโt doing so imbue the chimps with human personal qualities, when itโs more accurate to say they possess the same basic range of emotions that we do?
Itโs true that โhumans share more than 98% of the same DNA with chimpanzees,โ and that we are close enough biologically for chimps to give us blood transfusions, if they wanted to. (Of course that doesnโt stop man from continuing to make them guinea pigs in our labs, objects to gawk at in our zoos, pets for our wealthy, and meat for our desperate.)
Humankind cannot resolve the immense dilemma of our place on this planet by blurring the lines between our closest primate cousins and ourselves.
Goodall has done great work with the Gombe Reserve chimpanzees. It took years of excruciating patience in the beginning, when she had to accustom the wild chimps to her presence before they would trust her enough to observe them in close proximity. It eventually allowed โJane to enter the world of these wild animals, yielding the personal details she spent 50 years documentingโฆthe largest scientific database in the world for this species.โ
Goodall says, โIt was obvious watching them that they could be happy and sad.โ Strong human correlatesโโkissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, shaking the fistโ—make thinking people reflect on what it means to be human. However giving wild chimpanzees names and collecting personal details cuts two ways. Chimps arenโt human, and humans arenโt chimps.
When asked what she found out about them that she didnโt like, Goodall betrays her romantic view of animals in nature when she says, โI hated the fact that chimps could be very cruel and brutal, and that they have a dark side just like us.โ
Usually over territoriality (โjust like usโ) chimpanzees sometimes kill their own species, and have even been observed making war and committing genocide against neighboring troops.
Indeed, a male chimp she named โFrodoโ nearly killed Goodall, by stomping on her, bashing her head against a rock, and pushing her over a steep cliff.
In fact, though it wasnโt mentioned on the show, many Tanzanians speak of the โkiller Frodo,โ who wasnโt euthanized despite having killed and partially eaten a young child, because of Goodallโs intervention. Does Goodall value chimp lives more than human lives?
Also, if chimps are โjust like us,โ shouldnโt they be held responsible for murderous acts, like humans are? The idea is vaguely absurd of course, but personalizing chimpanzees in the wild is also absurd.
The crucial question is: Why does Goodall hate the fact that chimps turned out to be so much like humans? After all, if humans really are inseparable from nature, then our murderous tendencies must have roots in evolution. Chimpanzees can give us, if weโre willing to look and question, insight into where man went wrong.
Martin LeFevre