I really appreciated her speaking to young people, even riding the NYC subway for the first time to record "Subway Takes" last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAkwo6JPV00
She was also on Spanish TV just five months ago, I was a bit surprised when she appeared there. Seems most of it is on YouTube as well (hoping it's not geo-restricted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE7lnl4ah9s
The Life Scientific is a wonderful and engaging podcast. The episodes delve into a scientist's field of study, but really bring out their human side. Hobbies, interests; scientists are people too :)
By "this alive" I think they meant physically active and wits about her despite her age. For many of us, unfortunately, it's not like that eventually: a slow and complete deterioration even before death.
i can still recall when she came to visit my high school to address its students many moons ago. it was quite an experience that still left a mark till this day.
she was quite an example of how anyone can impact the world while just doing what they love.
If you find Jane Goodall inspirational, you may be delighted to learn about Anne Innis Dagg [0], whose studies of wild giraffe predates Goodall's study of chimps. The documentary "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" [1] is fantastic and has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason you might not know Dagg's name is essentially that she was denied tenure for being a woman.
That was an absolutely lovely read. I did not think I would get so invested. However... I didn't know she died as well so the final sentence on her wiki article caught my off-guard :(
Being over looked because of your gender does not gain you notoriety either, otherwise notoriety would mean something completely different! There are so so many
But fighting back as Digg did, suing and campaigning - that is how you get notoriety, and help the people following in your footsteps.
“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”
-- Goodall at 2002 WEF panel discussion on Amazon rainforest
The population 500 years ago was around 500 million. The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Paul Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb" almost 60 years ago - all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
If I’m not mistaken, she goes on to say “but we don’t live in that world, and so we must…” and goes on to argue for policy that doesn’t neglect the poorest and least fortunate members of society.
>The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Unfortunately, we will return to that level. Then 25 years later, we'll be only half that number (or worse).
>all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
Hilariously wrong, you mean. I especially like the ones about how the UK would be filled with cannibal savages by the 1980s, because everyone would be starving.
There is a very simple metric, called "fertility rate". It is the average number of children born per woman over her entire lifetime. Since the male/female ratio in humans is nearly 1:1, she has to have 2 children (one to replace herself, one for the corresponding man) plus a tiny bit of extra... usually said to be about 2.1 children.
If she has fewer than that, population is shrinking, each generation is smaller than the last. In China and other parts of East Asia (not just China, this isn't the One Child Policy and its effects), it's already at or below 1.0. Heading that way everywhere else. This isn't a prediction, it's already happening. And in Europe, in North America, everywhere but a few countries in Africa (and they're trending towards this too).
This is real, I would say it can't be denied or ignored except most people are ignorant and in denial. Low fertility rates can become social norms, they do become social norms, and after that they never raise back to safe/healthy ones. Little children grow up thinking that having one child or no children at all is normal and they do not buck the trend when they become adults themselves. It's how humans become extinct.
Don’t you think it’s likely more of a pendulum? Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion, and there are times when people have more kids, and times of fewer. Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
No. For it to be a pendulum, it would have to be true that some little girl, herself the only child from a long line of only-children, who grows up in a society where people have only one child or more likely no children, all her role models being childless... her school teachers, celebrities, everyone she's heard of, that little girl would grow up and say "I want to be a mommy and have 5/8/12 kids!" And that's so absurd I don't know why you'd even ask.
Nor is it likely, as many of those with unearned optimism believe, that some "high fertility families" can just outbreed everyone and come out the other side of this. Their children become indoctrinated faster than they can have them... the Duggars aren't on track for 400 (20x20) grandchildren. Insularity doesn't help, the Amish only survive with their lifestyle as long as our lifestyle exists... it requires too much technology that they buy from us. They either would need to change and become like us, or revert to technology from centuries before after which their fertility plummets.
>Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion,
What's the life expectancy in China? Find that number, n. In that many years, China's population will be less than half what it is today. Much less. You have no intuitive sense of the math here. The current generation being born will live until that life expectancy number, then die (on average). So the current generation being born right now will evaporate in that number of years... but the generation they'll start giving birth to in about 25 years, it will be only half the size. The older generations, almost all of those will be dead in n years, since they're way past life expectancy.
It's fucking bleak.
>Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
There are no policies that can incentivize this that are also affordable. How much do you think you'd need to bribe someone who calls themselves "childfree" to have children? Sure, everyone has a price. Is that $1mil, or $1bil? And sure, the US government can afford even the $1bil number. But the United States can't afford $1bil times the 500,000 births we need next year. And if the US can't afford it, how the fuck will Portugal or Taiwan or Australia afford it?
It's not that you're thinking unclearly about this. It's that you haven't thought about it at all. Because no one's ever rang the alarm bell. And why haven't they? They keep telling you that it's no big deal. This is human extinction.
Taking a 23-year old phrase out of context to try to paint a just-deceased scientist as some sort of "freedom-hating vegan commie" attacking the Infinite Growth Paradigm (swt) that SV loves so much. Really great job.
Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more inventions etc.
The trick is doing it without wars and inequality, good luck with that.
> We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.
Have we? After the nightmare of The War to End All Wars, did anyone in the mainstream honestly expect Europe to turn into an even bigger charnel house (~30-50 million dead) two decades later?
It's been 80 years since then, and we've not had a 'large' industrialized war since then. But we have all been living under an atomic sword of Damocles.
Do you think we're going to get to 200 years without that sword falling? What odds do you give on that (We've had many close calls since then)? How many people would die if it does fall? If in 2145, half a billion[1] people will die in nuclear fire, will we retroactively consider the brief stretch of history we live in to just be a brief ceasefire?
---
[1] That would be a best case outcome for a nuclear war - a limited one, that wouldn't rise to the level of a global catastrophe.
> We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
10 billion is gonna be the high end by the looks of things, and that decline is going to be hardly conducive to utopia. The math of dependency ratios is inescapably painful.
> hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point
it is so dangerous and naive to think that utopia is possible, even if we all could agree that Star Trek is one, which we shall not, because I certainly do not think its depiction of watered down "luxury space communism with military ranks" is a desirable society.
The world/utopia as described in Star Trek is a world where there is no poverty and free electricity. You describe Starfleet. Obviously, the series do contain elitism. Joining Starfleet is seen as prestigious. And even on Earth there are slums during the time of the federation. So the “Utopia” is not complete. And Starfleet is necessary to protect the utopia from outside influences.
It is largely based on the premise of having copious amounts basically free energy, free food (through replicators), safety, and a wide open universe for settlers to join when they do not want to stay in the Federation. Basically, it is based on the absence of contention of resources. Until we have that, either through shrinking or expansions of habitat, we will retain conflict.
to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
The thing is that if you depopulate by reducing the birth rate, you end up in a situation where you have a whole lot of old people and very few young people, which cannot be sustained.
However, in the intermediate stage, you are desperately short of working-age people to help support the massive aging population.
This isn't a theoretical - most of Western Europe has been in this boat for a long time, and relies heavily on immigration to fill the labour gap (despite however much political posturing about wanting to restrict immigration)
If we do this on a global scale, there is nowhere to draw immigrants from, and a bunch of old folks are going to be abandoned to die...
What's the alternative though? Creating new humans purely to be able to have them work and pay for stuff for other existing humans? That doesn't seem a bit dystopian for you?
The problem I have with this logic is that it seems to assume a binary of the population either staying at least as high as it is or massively reducing. The idea that there's no middle ground where the population goes down slowly rather than massively spiking all at once feels like it needs much more justification rather than just assuming it.
Oh, for sure, that alternative is not great either. We've built a society on the myth that infinite growth is possible, and at some point the chickens are coming home to roost...
I guess the question is just whether we want to be the generation that decides to try to do something about this problem or let it keep going on for a later generation to solve. Either way, we won't be the ones who actually are around when the pain starts to be felt, and it's not like as individuals we can do a whole lot about it anyhow. My wife and I have no interest in having kids, so I guess we're doing as much as we can, although our decision is pretty much completely unrelated to any opinions about population I might have.
Humans are humans, at the end of the day. Especially as someone who grew up at the height of EU open borders, I'm not real bothered which side of an imaginary line on a map someone happened to be born on
If you don't want Europe to look like Sudan or India, you might want to start caring about those "imaginary lines" that your ancestors until very recently held in such high regard that they would fight and die to defend or advance them.
If Europeans are replaced by foreigners, there is no Europe any more.
If the only argument behind why Europe should exist is that you don't like people who look like the people from Sudan or India, then maybe it shouldn't.
(If you instead want to claim that you're not trying to talk about ethnicity and are instead talking about economies or whatever, consider whether the ancestors you mention drawing those imaginary lines over places like Sudan and India were motivated by their desire to colonize and extract wealth from them at the expense of the local populations, and whether that's more responsible for the economic differences between them and Europe than the lines themselves)
In order to achieve this, though, we desperately need to get every country well below replacement-level fertility rate, and sustain that for a long, long time. Not sure it's possible, particularly when some political factions still consider "below replacement" to be a bad thing.
Understanding what chimpanzees are like has made me realize that we humans are not so different from other animals as we used to think. What makes us most different is that we are far more clever than even the cleverest chimp, and we have words. We have a spoken language. We can tell stories about what happened a week or a year or a decade ago. We can plan for the future, and we can discuss things - one person's idea can grow and change as other people contribute their ideas. Great ideas become greater, problems are solved.
chimpanzees are animals, and the only people who think differently are the straw men in the imaginations of people I prefer not to spend time talking to.
But what determines that? If not socioeconomic factors then genetics? Is it possible genetic differences between the races might have some observable outcome as well?
"But what if black people really _are_ subhuman?" No thanks. Not biting. I disagree, but arguing that topic just makes me sad and angry, and I've never changed a racist's mind.
Wait, what? I'm actually laughing that you can't even acknowledge genetic differences between races without your mind immediately going to blacks being "subhuman". Freudian?
I'm an openly-racist White Nationalist "Nazi" and even I don't think that.
She last appeared in Detroit at the Fisher theatre just three weeks ago. Knew some folks who attended and they raved about her one person show. Thought I might catch her next time she's there. But I didn't realize how old she was or I might have made it more of a priority. She was pretty high energy for someone in their nineties.
I just saw her two weeks ago taping her interview for Overheard with Evan Smith. She was in top notch form and had the audience at the edge of our seats and in tears at moments. I am glad I got to go -- but I am sad the world lost Jane.
Thanks to Jane for her contributions. Some great quotes from her: "We have a choice to use the gift of our lives to make the world a better place." and “If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.”
One of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"[114] Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity". They were stymied by Goodall herself: when she returned and saw the cartoon, she stated that she found the cartoon amusing.[115]
Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have gone to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the controversy, and the institute's letter was included next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection.[116] She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals. In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
Always amusing when a bunch of lawyers over-react to something, supposedly on their client's behalf, and then when the client finds out about it, they have to talk the lawyers out of it and tell them to chill. I've always wondered if lawyers are born without a sense of humor or if they lose it during one of the semesters of law school.
You appear to have misunderstood what happened. It was her management team that thought it was in bad taste. They then got the lawyers to draft a letter. The lawyers weren't acting "supposedly on their clients behalf", they were doing exactly what their clients asked them to do - which is their job. In this case, it was the management team that was acting "supposedly on their clients behalf" and who needed to chill out.
> She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals.
I like the strip that shows a scientist who has invented an animal translator learning that what dogs are really saying is "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!"
> Frodo's aggression was not limited to colobus monkeys and other chimpanzees. In May 2002, he killed a 14-month-old human child that the niece of a member of the research team had carried into his territory.[61] As a result, the Tanzanian National Parks Department considered killing Frodo.[61] In 1988, he attacked visiting Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, leaving him bruised and scratched.[61] Frodo had a history of attacking the researchers observing him; Goodall was attacked by Frodo on multiple occasions and, in 1989, the ape beat her head so violently her neck was nearly broken.[61]
They were going to, but ultimately he was just exhibiting natural behavior and unfortunately the person broke the rules - only 12+ year olds were supposed to enter the park
Those with organs for judgement are found as liabilities when said judgement structure is faulty and they can be responsible for damage.
Those which are structurally whimsical - well, if you had to deal them as liabilities, then you would have to do it preemptively (it may not be that it's Chimpy that is so brutal - they just can be brutal).
And that, to all you aspiring entrepreneurs, is how you deal with shit. Please don't take your cues from our current industry and political "leaders".
Tech (and business, and politics) tends to attract a lot of people who are convinced they already know everything and who could probably benefit from a little more confidence and perspective.
That combination makes for a lot of thin-skinned bullshit. I could name names, but you all know the people I am talking about.
Yes, it's the typical behaviour of "those who saw the Master" (which they may have forgotten "came to see the sick") - a pretty well known tendency in humanoids.
Several years ago my niece dressed up as Jane Goodall for Halloween. Through a string of random connections, someone sent Jane a picture of her. She wrote my niece an incredibly nice note complimenting the costume and all its details.
For all the good Jane Goodall has done in the world, I am forever grateful that she cared enough to give a young girl a gift she can treasure forever.
You don’t have to be a biologist or zoologist to appreciate what Jane Goodall brought to the world.
Her work transcended science. It touched on compassion, respect for all living beings, and a deep curiosity about the natural world that inspired generations. She didn’t just study chimpanzees; she taught us what it means to observe with empathy, to advocate with conviction, and to act with hope. Her legacy will echo for a very long time.
I'm guessing just one in a hundred is that person. But maybe not impossible, after all, that'd it'd be someone like her. Did you see what she saw? From the article:
> Her most disturbing studies came in the mid-1970s, when she and her team of field workers began to record a series of savage attacks.
> The incidents grew into what Goodall called the four-year war, a period of brutality carried out by a band of male chimpanzees from a region known as the Kasakela Valley. The marauders beat and slashed to death all the males in a neighboring colony and subjugated the breeding females, essentially annihilating an entire community.
I typically feel pretty disconnected when a major public figure passes away, but this one really got to me. Dr. Goodall was one of my heroes... I read a couple of her books when I was much younger and had dreams of being a primatologist.
It was so gratifying to see her turn into a global leader in conservation, compassion, and peace. I had a former supervisor who got to meet her personally at a conference on wildlife conservation in Africa several years ago (I was quite jealous)... I was fortunate to see her speak publicly though.
When I was young, not knowing who Jane Goodall was, I was dragged into lunch by event planner who showed her around Beijing, and wondered why this lady was talking about chimpanzees so much. This was the year the Nokia released Snake, I remember getting enamoured/distracted by her monkey talk and lost a near perfect snake run.
Monkeys are just the simiiformes minus the apes. That's just a paraphyly, which is totally fine.
If you don't like paraphyletic labels for aesthetic reasons, just include the apes to make it monophyletic. The main reason we don't is that many people have strong, visceral reactions to being called a monkey.
You can't do that to fish or trees without including a bunch of things that are obviously not trees and fish.
"If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey, even if it has a monkey-kind-of shape. It if doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey; if it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey: it's an ape."
Sad to hear this. She was a symbol of a kinder relationship with nature. I grew up in Kenya and have many fond memories of seeing her name on the Chimpanzee sanctuary in Sweetwaters
I remember in grade school so many in the class being inspired by her, then as I grew up every time I encountered her on television or in print she was equally inspiring, empathetic, and informative. I will miss her.
> When the strip ran, the Jane Goodall Institute was not amused, promptly drafting a cease and desist letter. Larson maintained he had no ill will towards Doctor Goodall. At the time of the controversy, Goodall had been out of the country, but saw the cartoon for herself when she returned–and loved it. Goodall instructed the institute to drop the issue. In the aftermath, Goodall reached out to Larson, and the two became friends; Larson even licensed the cartoon to the Institute to produce a t-shirt that was then used to raise funds. Goodall even went so far as to write a preface for one of The Far Side’s collected editions.
Good(all?) on her, it's nice to see leaders both have a sense of humor and actually lead.
> I was born loving animals - all kinds of animals - and she was just so supportive. To give you one example: when I was four-and-a-half years old, she took me for a holiday onto a farm in the country - a proper farm, not these terrible factory farms that we have today. So I met, for the first time, cows and pigs out in the fields, and I was given a job to collect the hens’ eggs. The hens pecked around in the farmyard, but at night they slept in these little wooden hen-houses to keep them safe from foxes. My job was to go and collect the eggs. I’d go around these little hen-houses, and if there was an egg I would put it in my basket.
> But I kept asking people, “But where does the egg come out of the hen, because I can’t see a hole that big?” And nobody told me. So one day - I remember this really well - I saw a hen (she was brown) going into one of these hen-houses, and I must have thought, “Ah, she’s going to lay an egg”. So I crawled after her. Big mistake! Squawks of fear - she flew out. But now I’m on the path of discovery: I’m going to jolly well find out how this egg comes out. So I waited in an empty hen-house, and I waited for four hours. For a child of four - some of you are parents - that’s a lot of patience. My mother was about to call the police; nobody knew where I was. And then she sees this excited little girl rushing towards the house, because I had seen how a hen lays an egg and where the egg comes out. I don’t know who was more excited - me or the hen. Anyway, so she sat down to hear this wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.
> I tell that story because isn’t that the making of a little scientist? Curiosity, asking questions, not getting the right answer, deciding to find out for yourself, making a mistake, not giving up, and learning patience - it was all there.
I saw her talk in London earlier this year. She was hilarious, eloquent, and inspiring. I found listening to her quite moving in a way I hadn't anticipated.
Remarkable woman. I feel thankful to have had the chance to just stand there and listen to her and look around at all the other rapt faces around me.
Sad to read this. But also a long life well used and, I hope, well lived. As well as helping us to understand some of our companions on this planet, she helped us humans to see ourselves more clearly too.
I think I finally kinda understand what it means when someone says they're personally touched by the loss of a celebrity. I really will miss this lady.
I was fascinated by Koko's abilities and took them at face value until I saw her famous climate change speech:
> I am gorilla. I am flowers, animals. I am nature. Man Koko love. Earth Koko love. But Man stupid. Stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry! Fix Earth! Help Earth! Hurry! Protect Earth. Nature see you. Thank you.
I saw that and felt like I was in crazy land. That's supposedly the kind of talking Koko's been doing this whole time?? Turns out, there was a lot of government funding into ape communication in the 70s, and when researchers figured out that apes can't meaningfully communicate, the funding dried up. Her handler, Penny Patterson, pivoted from research to PR. And how.
The other thing that stood out for me was - if that was so successful - why do we not have other Kokos? Did we just get lucky and find the one genius who could do this or did we maybe trick ourselves?
> Some viewers took the video a little too literally, however, and were surprised at Koko's pithy and timely exhortation to heed the perils of global warming. But nothing about the video indicates that Koko can actually entertain, much less communicate to humans, thoughts about environmentalism.
Personally I never took it literally. I saw the video and knew right away it was just a marketing stunt, but that didn't mean I suddenly thought research into ape intelligence and language should stop. I do wish they had made it more clear that it was just a stunt because I'm sure people like you felt mislead.
You're not alone ... the whole world has forgotten how to spell "led" ever since spell checkers came into existence. It's a pet peeve and a common error, making its way even into the most prestigious publications.
Damn. Jane Goodall was the reason I am the pro-environmentalist person I am today. Learned about her from a young age as an "easy day TV class" sort of day, and it fundamentally shaped how I viewed the world.
This is awful news, though I can't help but to feel she really did it all the right way. Happy she was a part of my timeline.
Jane Goodall and the late E.O. Willson were two great treasures of humanity. They 're leaders of a generation of scientists and public intellectuals who transcendent politics and remained faithful to the motto of great citizens - lead by example.
Sad day. Some of these folks dedicate their lives to otherwise thankless job/work with such dedication has always made me feel so positive about humanity in general I do understand when religious people do it but Goodall like people are modern day sages.
RIP Jane Goodall. Not to make a flippant pun but, thank you indeed for all the good you brought to all of us. By discovering humanity in our chimpanzee cousins, you helped us see the humanity in each other.
When I was 10, I was bored one day and my grandma brought me from a neighbour "In the Shadow of Man" to read, which I loved. I don't know anyone else who read that book.
The weird thing is just today I had recommended that book to a friend.
Growing up in the 1960s with access to National Geographic Magazines, Jane Goodall was one of the trio of scientists I grew up with, the others being Leakey and Jacques Cousteau. Her articles were fascinating! RIP
Jane came to my high school and I forged a pass to sneak in to her talk. I am not sure why every class didn't get the opportunity to see her, but I am glad I did. RIP
I hope that one day aging and the growing inexorability of death as life progresses into old age ceases to be a thing. She being 91 does not negate the tragedy of her death for me.
The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big".
We have learnt to communicate with them, but they also don't seem to ask questions, at least not the way that humans do.
There is obvious intelligence in their eyes and deliberation in their movements, but they seem to be content with an almost static culture. Which was also true for the Neanderthals.
What was the last subtle mutation that prodded our species onto the road of intellectual curiosity?
For most of human history cultural change was extremely slow, so slow as to be imperceptible. I'm not sure the neanderthals experienced any less dynamic a culture than the modern humans living at the same time.
Perhaps expecting change makes change more likely. Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off.
I'm pretty skeptical that cultural change was meaningfully slower (except as limited by effective population sizes). Cultural change for early humans is nearly invisible in the material record. Imagine that all archaeologists of the far future find nothing from the current era except iphones without working storage. Do they indicate a unified global culture without cultural change outside WWDC?
Obviously not, even though there are aspects of a shared global culture indicated by their global distribution. Material culture is related to culture, but it's an imperfect and imprecise record. The same issue occurs with correlating culture with genetics or language.
Sure, but this is true of neanderthals as well. So we can't say we are especially creative or dynamic in our culture. We can say that our material culture, that small fragment of it that was preserved, was static.
That was the point: I also wouldn't say that about neanderthals.
The evidence on the ground is of course, limited. But it's a fairly common view among anthropologists/archaeologists that our perspective on ancient societies is immensely limited by the material record, hence the generally positive reception to Dawn of Everything despite its sketchy details and interpretations.
"Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off."
True, but not the entire picture either. From what we know, even hunters and gatherers living in inhospitable regions have a rich oral culture and extensive pantheons of gods, demigods and legendary heroes. There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious.
I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are strongly motivated to find this to be true. On the one hand, it flatters us. On the other hand, it justifies believing we are ethically distinct. This same way of thinking has been applied to other humans with results we now deplore.
Are we special, the chosen creatures? Maybe. We sure want to believe we are. It's fun and useful to be special! But maybe we should be cautious leaping to that conclusion. I think Jane Goodall was of this mind as well.
"Special" means different things for different people.
For me, humans are special in their capability to create extensive culture. That does not mean that $deity has created us in its image, it may well be a random fluke of evolution.
But we haven't seen a cave painting done by non-humans yet, nor heard a story narrated by them.
This was ages ago when I was in college, but the theory then was the ability to walk upright freed our hands to do other things. Chimps primarily knuckle-walk, so they can't easily carry objects (food, tools, etc) from point A to point B.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Ok, show me apes who unambiguously ask abstract questions.
The Neanderthal claim is what you can call unsubstantiated (so, one claim, not so many), but I would like to draw your attention to the extreme stability of the Mousterien industry. No Homo sapiens sapiens industry comes close to this level of stability.
"infected with exceptionalism"
So, we aren't exceptional at all? How do you square this rejection with the fact that you have never encountered, say, a written comment by a member of another species?
The word "infected" is very negative. I like intelligent animals, but no one except for us has, for example, as versatile hands as we do.
To elaborate, there seems to be a difference between physical curiosity and intellectual curiosity.
Many mammals, especially when young, are very curious about their environment, peeking, sniffing, burrowing in the ground etc. So are human children.
But the ability to ask more abstract questions "why do the stars shine?" does seem to be limited to humans alone, and maybe not even all humans. And it is very uncertain if archaic humans had it as well.
I guess it’s mainly related to the fact that we have a different kind of consciousness than other mammals. Maybe that’s tautological? Maybe asking questions about stars defines our consciousness?
I really appreciated her speaking to young people, even riding the NYC subway for the first time to record "Subway Takes" last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAkwo6JPV00
She also was speaking on a panel just a week ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df0GWlZm3gk
She was also on Spanish TV just five months ago, I was a bit surprised when she appeared there. Seems most of it is on YouTube as well (hoping it's not geo-restricted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE7lnl4ah9s
I will add it is one of the most watched shows on prime time.
Highly rate her episode of the BBC’s The Life Scientific https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jmsd
The Life Scientific is a wonderful and engaging podcast. The episodes delve into a scientist's field of study, but really bring out their human side. Hobbies, interests; scientists are people too :)
crazy how you can just be this alive one year and then dead the next. I get 91 is old, but still
That is truly a gift, to be able to be that active until almost the end of your life.
Life well earned!
People don't think it's like that but it is, for all of us, eventually.
By "this alive" I think they meant physically active and wits about her despite her age. For many of us, unfortunately, it's not like that eventually: a slow and complete deterioration even before death.
My friend had tickets to see her in LA this Friday.
i can still recall when she came to visit my high school to address its students many moons ago. it was quite an experience that still left a mark till this day.
she was quite an example of how anyone can impact the world while just doing what they love.
What the hell is that stuff after 17m? https://youtu.be/CAkwo6JPV00?t=1022
If you find Jane Goodall inspirational, you may be delighted to learn about Anne Innis Dagg [0], whose studies of wild giraffe predates Goodall's study of chimps. The documentary "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" [1] is fantastic and has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason you might not know Dagg's name is essentially that she was denied tenure for being a woman.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Innis_Dagg
[1] https://thewomanwholovesgiraffes.com/
That was an absolutely lovely read. I did not think I would get so invested. However... I didn't know she died as well so the final sentence on her wiki article caught my off-guard :(
It's stated in the first sentence.
Jane Goodall did not have tenure
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No, but it is a way people can get financial security to be able to spend time on more public-facing efforts
That’s correct, but being forced out of academia is a good way for scientists to disappear from research and publication.
> Tenure is not how people gain notoriety
Being over looked because of your gender does not gain you notoriety either, otherwise notoriety would mean something completely different! There are so so many
But fighting back as Digg did, suing and campaigning - that is how you get notoriety, and help the people following in your footsteps.
A pox on their bigoted hierarchies.
“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”
-- Goodall at 2002 WEF panel discussion on Amazon rainforest
The population 500 years ago was around 500 million. The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Paul Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb" almost 60 years ago - all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
If I’m not mistaken, she goes on to say “but we don’t live in that world, and so we must…” and goes on to argue for policy that doesn’t neglect the poorest and least fortunate members of society.
>The only way we return to this level is de-industrialization.
Unfortunately, we will return to that level. Then 25 years later, we'll be only half that number (or worse).
>all of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.
Hilariously wrong, you mean. I especially like the ones about how the UK would be filled with cannibal savages by the 1980s, because everyone would be starving.
> Unfortunately, we will return to that level. Then 25 years later, we'll be only half that number (or worse).
What are your main reasons for thinking that?
There is a very simple metric, called "fertility rate". It is the average number of children born per woman over her entire lifetime. Since the male/female ratio in humans is nearly 1:1, she has to have 2 children (one to replace herself, one for the corresponding man) plus a tiny bit of extra... usually said to be about 2.1 children.
If she has fewer than that, population is shrinking, each generation is smaller than the last. In China and other parts of East Asia (not just China, this isn't the One Child Policy and its effects), it's already at or below 1.0. Heading that way everywhere else. This isn't a prediction, it's already happening. And in Europe, in North America, everywhere but a few countries in Africa (and they're trending towards this too).
This is real, I would say it can't be denied or ignored except most people are ignorant and in denial. Low fertility rates can become social norms, they do become social norms, and after that they never raise back to safe/healthy ones. Little children grow up thinking that having one child or no children at all is normal and they do not buck the trend when they become adults themselves. It's how humans become extinct.
> It's how humans become extinct.
Don’t you think it’s likely more of a pendulum? Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion, and there are times when people have more kids, and times of fewer. Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
>Don’t you think it’s likely more of a pendulum?
No. For it to be a pendulum, it would have to be true that some little girl, herself the only child from a long line of only-children, who grows up in a society where people have only one child or more likely no children, all her role models being childless... her school teachers, celebrities, everyone she's heard of, that little girl would grow up and say "I want to be a mommy and have 5/8/12 kids!" And that's so absurd I don't know why you'd even ask.
Nor is it likely, as many of those with unearned optimism believe, that some "high fertility families" can just outbreed everyone and come out the other side of this. Their children become indoctrinated faster than they can have them... the Duggars aren't on track for 400 (20x20) grandchildren. Insularity doesn't help, the Amish only survive with their lifestyle as long as our lifestyle exists... it requires too much technology that they buy from us. They either would need to change and become like us, or revert to technology from centuries before after which their fertility plummets.
>Maybe the equilibrium is 5-7 billion,
What's the life expectancy in China? Find that number, n. In that many years, China's population will be less than half what it is today. Much less. You have no intuitive sense of the math here. The current generation being born will live until that life expectancy number, then die (on average). So the current generation being born right now will evaporate in that number of years... but the generation they'll start giving birth to in about 25 years, it will be only half the size. The older generations, almost all of those will be dead in n years, since they're way past life expectancy.
It's fucking bleak.
>Even if we drop to 3 billion, the world would find ways to go on, likely implementing policies that make big families more favorable again.
There are no policies that can incentivize this that are also affordable. How much do you think you'd need to bribe someone who calls themselves "childfree" to have children? Sure, everyone has a price. Is that $1mil, or $1bil? And sure, the US government can afford even the $1bil number. But the United States can't afford $1bil times the 500,000 births we need next year. And if the US can't afford it, how the fuck will Portugal or Taiwan or Australia afford it?
It's not that you're thinking unclearly about this. It's that you haven't thought about it at all. Because no one's ever rang the alarm bell. And why haven't they? They keep telling you that it's no big deal. This is human extinction.
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Taking a 23-year old phrase out of context to try to paint a just-deceased scientist as some sort of "freedom-hating vegan commie" attacking the Infinite Growth Paradigm (swt) that SV loves so much. Really great job.
"freedom-hating vegan commie" - this is what is known as a straw man. Hopefully you will develop a little more nuance in your thinking.
Why?
Yeah I've seen this before, we could all drive V12s and eat only beef but it's not a very meaningful insight. We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
We came from the caves, we didn't know any better we just multiplied like a cancer. More population also brings more benefits, more geniuses more inventions etc.
The trick is doing it without wars and inequality, good luck with that.
It's pretty clear we're not going to hit 10B
At current trends, the global population will begin actively shrinking as soon as 2040, just 15 years away.
We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.
Inequality not so much but much progress has been made in eliminating abject poverty.
> We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.
Have we? After the nightmare of The War to End All Wars, did anyone in the mainstream honestly expect Europe to turn into an even bigger charnel house (~30-50 million dead) two decades later?
It's been 80 years since then, and we've not had a 'large' industrialized war since then. But we have all been living under an atomic sword of Damocles.
Do you think we're going to get to 200 years without that sword falling? What odds do you give on that (We've had many close calls since then)? How many people would die if it does fall? If in 2145, half a billion[1] people will die in nuclear fire, will we retroactively consider the brief stretch of history we live in to just be a brief ceasefire?
---
[1] That would be a best case outcome for a nuclear war - a limited one, that wouldn't rise to the level of a global catastrophe.
> We're going to stabilize around 10 billion by 2080 according to projections and then decline, hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point.
10 billion is gonna be the high end by the looks of things, and that decline is going to be hardly conducive to utopia. The math of dependency ratios is inescapably painful.
Utopia literally means "no place" for a reason. We're always going to be just what we are right now . . . humans.
Whatever subset of projections you're looking at seems to leave out any that take global warming into account.
> hopefully reaching some kind of Star Trek utopia at some point
it is so dangerous and naive to think that utopia is possible, even if we all could agree that Star Trek is one, which we shall not, because I certainly do not think its depiction of watered down "luxury space communism with military ranks" is a desirable society.
The world/utopia as described in Star Trek is a world where there is no poverty and free electricity. You describe Starfleet. Obviously, the series do contain elitism. Joining Starfleet is seen as prestigious. And even on Earth there are slums during the time of the federation. So the “Utopia” is not complete. And Starfleet is necessary to protect the utopia from outside influences.
It is largely based on the premise of having copious amounts basically free energy, free food (through replicators), safety, and a wide open universe for settlers to join when they do not want to stay in the Federation. Basically, it is based on the absence of contention of resources. Until we have that, either through shrinking or expansions of habitat, we will retain conflict.
Thank you Mr. Spockz.
That’s the real trouble with Utopia, differing ideas on what kind of Utopia we want.
to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
I think she advocating for fewer births. The 8 billion deaths would eventually happen by themselves, most of them of old age.
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
The thing is that if you depopulate by reducing the birth rate, you end up in a situation where you have a whole lot of old people and very few young people, which cannot be sustained.
It doesn't need to be sustained, the whole point is that eventually when the next generation ages up, the number of old people won't be as high.
However, in the intermediate stage, you are desperately short of working-age people to help support the massive aging population.
This isn't a theoretical - most of Western Europe has been in this boat for a long time, and relies heavily on immigration to fill the labour gap (despite however much political posturing about wanting to restrict immigration)
If we do this on a global scale, there is nowhere to draw immigrants from, and a bunch of old folks are going to be abandoned to die...
What's the alternative though? Creating new humans purely to be able to have them work and pay for stuff for other existing humans? That doesn't seem a bit dystopian for you?
The problem I have with this logic is that it seems to assume a binary of the population either staying at least as high as it is or massively reducing. The idea that there's no middle ground where the population goes down slowly rather than massively spiking all at once feels like it needs much more justification rather than just assuming it.
Oh, for sure, that alternative is not great either. We've built a society on the myth that infinite growth is possible, and at some point the chickens are coming home to roost...
I guess the question is just whether we want to be the generation that decides to try to do something about this problem or let it keep going on for a later generation to solve. Either way, we won't be the ones who actually are around when the pain starts to be felt, and it's not like as individuals we can do a whole lot about it anyhow. My wife and I have no interest in having kids, so I guess we're doing as much as we can, although our decision is pretty much completely unrelated to any opinions about population I might have.
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Humans are humans, at the end of the day. Especially as someone who grew up at the height of EU open borders, I'm not real bothered which side of an imaginary line on a map someone happened to be born on
If you don't want Europe to look like Sudan or India, you might want to start caring about those "imaginary lines" that your ancestors until very recently held in such high regard that they would fight and die to defend or advance them.
If Europeans are replaced by foreigners, there is no Europe any more.
If the only argument behind why Europe should exist is that you don't like people who look like the people from Sudan or India, then maybe it shouldn't.
(If you instead want to claim that you're not trying to talk about ethnicity and are instead talking about economies or whatever, consider whether the ancestors you mention drawing those imaginary lines over places like Sudan and India were motivated by their desire to colonize and extract wealth from them at the expense of the local populations, and whether that's more responsible for the economic differences between them and Europe than the lines themselves)
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From what I can tell, all of the hate against minorities is coming from you, not anyone else
Europe is built on foreign things. What would life in England be like without Tea, Coffee and Curry?
I for one do not welcome an exclusionist Europe
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You're the only one obviously full of hate in these comments
europe to here with the ethnicism!
I can see why it might be undesirable socially but why not, economically? That's what technology is for.
In order to achieve this, though, we desperately need to get every country well below replacement-level fertility rate, and sustain that for a long, long time. Not sure it's possible, particularly when some political factions still consider "below replacement" to be a bad thing.
It's happening though. Birthrate in many countries are below replacement rate, and birthrates in all countries have declined:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2025/09/11/hu....
here's an AP news fact check article from 2022 if anyone is curious about what Goodall actually said: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-jane-goodall-populatio...
to straw-man what someone says and then get indignant is a waste of your emotional budget
And that's a charitable evaluation.
My favorite quote of her has been.
Understanding what chimpanzees are like has made me realize that we humans are not so different from other animals as we used to think. What makes us most different is that we are far more clever than even the cleverest chimp, and we have words. We have a spoken language. We can tell stories about what happened a week or a year or a decade ago. We can plan for the future, and we can discuss things - one person's idea can grow and change as other people contribute their ideas. Great ideas become greater, problems are solved.
My Life with the Chimpanzees (1996), p. 140
In 2025 that is problematic and we must all agree that our differences are purely due to socioeconomic factors.
holy racist dogwhistle, batman.
chimpanzees are animals, and the only people who think differently are the straw men in the imaginations of people I prefer not to spend time talking to.
But what determines that? If not socioeconomic factors then genetics? Is it possible genetic differences between the races might have some observable outcome as well?
"But what if black people really _are_ subhuman?" No thanks. Not biting. I disagree, but arguing that topic just makes me sad and angry, and I've never changed a racist's mind.
Wait, what? I'm actually laughing that you can't even acknowledge genetic differences between races without your mind immediately going to blacks being "subhuman". Freudian?
I'm an openly-racist White Nationalist "Nazi" and even I don't think that.
She last appeared in Detroit at the Fisher theatre just three weeks ago. Knew some folks who attended and they raved about her one person show. Thought I might catch her next time she's there. But I didn't realize how old she was or I might have made it more of a priority. She was pretty high energy for someone in their nineties.
I just saw her two weeks ago taping her interview for Overheard with Evan Smith. She was in top notch form and had the audience at the edge of our seats and in tears at moments. I am glad I got to go -- but I am sad the world lost Jane.
https://video.austinpbs.org/video/jane-goodall-knw3gq/
Thanks to Jane for her contributions. Some great quotes from her: "We have a choice to use the gift of our lives to make the world a better place." and “If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.”
This is sad to hear. I saw her at a lecture about 20 years ago. I remember her passion for her subject and how elegant she was.
That's sad news. She completely changed the way we thought about primate intelligence. Fun fact: she really liked the Far Side cartoon about her.
https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
The full saga is humourous. from wiki.
Gary Larson cartoon incident
One of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"[114] Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste and had its lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity". They were stymied by Goodall herself: when she returned and saw the cartoon, she stated that she found the cartoon amusing.[115]
Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have gone to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the controversy, and the institute's letter was included next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection.[116] She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals. In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
Always amusing when a bunch of lawyers over-react to something, supposedly on their client's behalf, and then when the client finds out about it, they have to talk the lawyers out of it and tell them to chill. I've always wondered if lawyers are born without a sense of humor or if they lose it during one of the semesters of law school.
You appear to have misunderstood what happened. It was her management team that thought it was in bad taste. They then got the lawyers to draft a letter. The lawyers weren't acting "supposedly on their clients behalf", they were doing exactly what their clients asked them to do - which is their job. In this case, it was the management team that was acting "supposedly on their clients behalf" and who needed to chill out.
> She praised Larson's creative ideas, which often compare and contrast the behaviour of humans and animals.
I like the strip that shows a scientist who has invented an animal translator learning that what dogs are really saying is "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!"
> In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
That last sentence is missing from the Wikipedia page. What is the source on it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side#Jane_Goodall_cart...
On the Jane Goodall page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall#Gary_Larson_carto...
It's mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasakela_chimpanzee_community
Jesus! Frodo sounds like a bastard.
> Frodo's aggression was not limited to colobus monkeys and other chimpanzees. In May 2002, he killed a 14-month-old human child that the niece of a member of the research team had carried into his territory.[61] As a result, the Tanzanian National Parks Department considered killing Frodo.[61] In 1988, he attacked visiting Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, leaving him bruised and scratched.[61] Frodo had a history of attacking the researchers observing him; Goodall was attacked by Frodo on multiple occasions and, in 1989, the ape beat her head so violently her neck was nearly broken.[61]
Frodo also impregnated his own mother
https://blog.michael-lawrence-wilson.com/2014/01/19/frodo-30...
How did they not put him down after he killed an infant? That's crazy
They were going to, but ultimately he was just exhibiting natural behavior and unfortunately the person broke the rules - only 12+ year olds were supposed to enter the park
Those with organs for judgement are found as liabilities when said judgement structure is faulty and they can be responsible for damage.
Those which are structurally whimsical - well, if you had to deal them as liabilities, then you would have to do it preemptively (it may not be that it's Chimpy that is so brutal - they just can be brutal).
> In 1988, when Larson visited Goodall's research facility in Tanzania,[115] he was attacked by a chimpanzee named Frodo.
This just made the whole story so much funnier. I'm really glad to have read it. Poor guy, but hilarious to read about.
I mean, Goodall liked the cartoon but that doesn't mean everyone likes it!
And that, to all you aspiring entrepreneurs, is how you deal with shit. Please don't take your cues from our current industry and political "leaders".
Tech (and business, and politics) tends to attract a lot of people who are convinced they already know everything and who could probably benefit from a little more confidence and perspective.
That combination makes for a lot of thin-skinned bullshit. I could name names, but you all know the people I am talking about.
Everyone's fighting for Jane Goodall but Jane Goodall apparently
Why do you say that? I'm not sure how that follows.
It's a joke about both Frodo the Chimp and the Jane Goodall institute were defending her more enthusiastically than necessary
Yes, it's the typical behaviour of "those who saw the Master" (which they may have forgotten "came to see the sick") - a pretty well known tendency in humanoids.
Re-watch "Life of Brian".
Several years ago my niece dressed up as Jane Goodall for Halloween. Through a string of random connections, someone sent Jane a picture of her. She wrote my niece an incredibly nice note complimenting the costume and all its details.
For all the good Jane Goodall has done in the world, I am forever grateful that she cared enough to give a young girl a gift she can treasure forever.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall_Institute
You don’t have to be a biologist or zoologist to appreciate what Jane Goodall brought to the world.
Her work transcended science. It touched on compassion, respect for all living beings, and a deep curiosity about the natural world that inspired generations. She didn’t just study chimpanzees; she taught us what it means to observe with empathy, to advocate with conviction, and to act with hope. Her legacy will echo for a very long time.
She was one of my heroes. I'm terribly saddened by this loss.
Imagine what kind of world we would live in if we put these kinds of human beings in charge instead.
The first nations to do so would be invaded and conquered by their more militaristic neighbors.
Not necessarily! You can be both a kind person, and build a strong defence, knowing how dangerous our species is. Although maybe rare.
But would Jane Goodall have been that person?
I'm guessing just one in a hundred is that person. But maybe not impossible, after all, that'd it'd be someone like her. Did you see what she saw? From the article:
> Her most disturbing studies came in the mid-1970s, when she and her team of field workers began to record a series of savage attacks.
> The incidents grew into what Goodall called the four-year war, a period of brutality carried out by a band of male chimpanzees from a region known as the Kasakela Valley. The marauders beat and slashed to death all the males in a neighboring colony and subjugated the breeding females, essentially annihilating an entire community.
Beautifully put! Her legacy will inspire generations to come.
I typically feel pretty disconnected when a major public figure passes away, but this one really got to me. Dr. Goodall was one of my heroes... I read a couple of her books when I was much younger and had dreams of being a primatologist.
It was so gratifying to see her turn into a global leader in conservation, compassion, and peace. I had a former supervisor who got to meet her personally at a conference on wildlife conservation in Africa several years ago (I was quite jealous)... I was fortunate to see her speak publicly though.
RIP Jane Goodall!
NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/obituaries/jane-goodall-d...
When I was young, not knowing who Jane Goodall was, I was dragged into lunch by event planner who showed her around Beijing, and wondered why this lady was talking about chimpanzees so much. This was the year the Nokia released Snake, I remember getting enamoured/distracted by her monkey talk and lost a near perfect snake run.
Well, technically apes don't have tails, monkeys do, so the chimpanzee talk would be an ape talk. Learned that from her too
In the same sense that "there's no such thing as a tree" or "there's no such thing as a fish", there's"no such thing as a monkey".
Monkeys are just the simiiformes minus the apes. That's just a paraphyly, which is totally fine.
If you don't like paraphyletic labels for aesthetic reasons, just include the apes to make it monophyletic. The main reason we don't is that many people have strong, visceral reactions to being called a monkey.
You can't do that to fish or trees without including a bunch of things that are obviously not trees and fish.
... unless you include apes.
"If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey, even if it has a monkey-kind-of shape. It if doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey; if it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey: it's an ape."
With the one exception being Curious George.
Yeah but his tail was amputated, my neighbour had a cat without tail, bitten off by a dog or something, it's not that uncommon.
Perhaps the 'curiousness' of George was not his personality trait, but rather the curious affliction of his missing tail.
Sorry for your loss.
The snake game or her death?
Oh wow, I was just listening to her interview with the WSJ The Journal podcast a few days ago. Ryan Knutson may have been her last interview.
https://pca.st/episode/a724a8f6-b269-4a86-af32-18932f1efbf2
Listening to the podcast, I realized that Ryan Knutson and Jane Goodall were talking in front of an audience. Was there video?
a quick search and, as the french say, "Viola" :)
see https://www.wsj.com/video/is-jane-goodall-fighting-a-losing-...
Sad to hear this. She was a symbol of a kinder relationship with nature. I grew up in Kenya and have many fond memories of seeing her name on the Chimpanzee sanctuary in Sweetwaters
https://www.olpejetaconservancy.org/what-we-do/conservation/...
I remember in grade school so many in the class being inspired by her, then as I grew up every time I encountered her on television or in print she was equally inspiring, empathetic, and informative. I will miss her.
The sheer volume of a lifetime's effort in studying chimpanzees and primate behavior is huge. Her contributions are priceless.
No more will chimpanzees be able to conduct research with that tramp (https://screenrant.com/far-side-controversial-comic-strip-ja...).
> When the strip ran, the Jane Goodall Institute was not amused, promptly drafting a cease and desist letter. Larson maintained he had no ill will towards Doctor Goodall. At the time of the controversy, Goodall had been out of the country, but saw the cartoon for herself when she returned–and loved it. Goodall instructed the institute to drop the issue. In the aftermath, Goodall reached out to Larson, and the two became friends; Larson even licensed the cartoon to the Institute to produce a t-shirt that was then used to raise funds. Goodall even went so far as to write a preface for one of The Far Side’s collected editions.
Good(all?) on her, it's nice to see leaders both have a sense of humor and actually lead.
Jane Goodall: “My question was: How far along our human path, which has led to hatred and evil and full-scale war, have chimpanzees traveled?”
My favorite thing of hers was her documentation of the Gombe Chimpanzee War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
Been lucky enough to visit that park and it's a fantastic place. Take a walking tour and see the chimp groups up close.
To anyone who hasn't seen it (especially those who are fans of Philip Glass) watch this biopic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7207238
Of possible interest:
"60 Minutes" re-published a 2018 interview about Tom Mangelsen with Jane Goodall:
https://youtu.be/QSxvy0lKJTM
Also, the "Speech for History" last year:
https://youtu.be/_qnWuPHJwy4
> I was born loving animals - all kinds of animals - and she was just so supportive. To give you one example: when I was four-and-a-half years old, she took me for a holiday onto a farm in the country - a proper farm, not these terrible factory farms that we have today. So I met, for the first time, cows and pigs out in the fields, and I was given a job to collect the hens’ eggs. The hens pecked around in the farmyard, but at night they slept in these little wooden hen-houses to keep them safe from foxes. My job was to go and collect the eggs. I’d go around these little hen-houses, and if there was an egg I would put it in my basket.
> But I kept asking people, “But where does the egg come out of the hen, because I can’t see a hole that big?” And nobody told me. So one day - I remember this really well - I saw a hen (she was brown) going into one of these hen-houses, and I must have thought, “Ah, she’s going to lay an egg”. So I crawled after her. Big mistake! Squawks of fear - she flew out. But now I’m on the path of discovery: I’m going to jolly well find out how this egg comes out. So I waited in an empty hen-house, and I waited for four hours. For a child of four - some of you are parents - that’s a lot of patience. My mother was about to call the police; nobody knew where I was. And then she sees this excited little girl rushing towards the house, because I had seen how a hen lays an egg and where the egg comes out. I don’t know who was more excited - me or the hen. Anyway, so she sat down to hear this wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.
> I tell that story because isn’t that the making of a little scientist? Curiosity, asking questions, not getting the right answer, deciding to find out for yourself, making a mistake, not giving up, and learning patience - it was all there.
(From the "Speech for History".)
I saw her talk in London earlier this year. She was hilarious, eloquent, and inspiring. I found listening to her quite moving in a way I hadn't anticipated.
Remarkable woman. I feel thankful to have had the chance to just stand there and listen to her and look around at all the other rapt faces around me.
There is a video of the chimp Wounda returning to hug Jane before the chimp's liberation. It brings tears in eyes everytime I watch that.
Rest in peace, Jane. You will be missed.
Jane Goodall was a United Nations Messenger of Peace.
Jane Goodall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall
"Dr. Jane Goodall Teaches Conservation" https://www.masterclass.com/classes/jane-goodall-teaches-con...
This one is more about the "apes" (primates),
"Primatologist Answers Ape Questions From Twitter" https://youtube.com/watch?v=z4BmXSBXz-c
Sad to read this. But also a long life well used and, I hope, well lived. As well as helping us to understand some of our companions on this planet, she helped us humans to see ourselves more clearly too.
I think I finally kinda understand what it means when someone says they're personally touched by the loss of a celebrity. I really will miss this lady.
I saw her speak once many years ago. We would all be lucky to have a life as long and impactful as hers. May her memory be a blessing / זכרונה לברכה
Sad news. She lived an amazing life. I'll never forget seeing her and Nathan Myhrvold greet each other like chimps at a book signing in Seattle.
You mean greet each other like a chimp and a baboon.
In heaven with Koko
I suspect Koko's capabilities were completely over sold.
I was fascinated by Koko's abilities and took them at face value until I saw her famous climate change speech:
> I am gorilla. I am flowers, animals. I am nature. Man Koko love. Earth Koko love. But Man stupid. Stupid! Koko sorry. Koko cry. Time hurry! Fix Earth! Help Earth! Hurry! Protect Earth. Nature see you. Thank you.
I saw that and felt like I was in crazy land. That's supposedly the kind of talking Koko's been doing this whole time?? Turns out, there was a lot of government funding into ape communication in the 70s, and when researchers figured out that apes can't meaningfully communicate, the funding dried up. Her handler, Penny Patterson, pivoted from research to PR. And how.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/what-does-koko-know-about-...
The other thing that stood out for me was - if that was so successful - why do we not have other Kokos? Did we just get lucky and find the one genius who could do this or did we maybe trick ourselves?
There's a lot of evidence to suggest most of her research was fraudulent
I wonder how much of it was just a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans situation
Almost all of it was exactly this.
That's why it's never been done again. Because it was never done in the first place.
And at least in Hans' case, the general public could instantly verify the result, as opposed to having it interpreted by a biased handler.
From the Snopes:
> Some viewers took the video a little too literally, however, and were surprised at Koko's pithy and timely exhortation to heed the perils of global warming. But nothing about the video indicates that Koko can actually entertain, much less communicate to humans, thoughts about environmentalism.
Personally I never took it literally. I saw the video and knew right away it was just a marketing stunt, but that didn't mean I suddenly thought research into ape intelligence and language should stop. I do wish they had made it more clear that it was just a stunt because I'm sure people like you felt mislead.
I am still fascinated with Koko and the brains of great apes! Also fascinating that they've never asked a question but at least one grey parrot has. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)#cite_note-jordan...
There's some interesting reading here (the section and the page generally):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Criticism_a...
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Regarding:
> I do wish they had made it more clear that it was just a stunt because I'm sure people like you felt mislead.
People like me felt like "what the hell was that?", maybe :D
The more you look into Penny Patterson's claims, the more you go "what the hell?"
misled
thanks I probably misspell that one a lot
You're not alone ... the whole world has forgotten how to spell "led" ever since spell checkers came into existence. It's a pet peeve and a common error, making its way even into the most prestigious publications.
And Harambe.
Wow she was just featured in an interview with the WSJ Journal podcast on Friday. Definitely worth a listen. Such a shame to hear this
Damn. Jane Goodall was the reason I am the pro-environmentalist person I am today. Learned about her from a young age as an "easy day TV class" sort of day, and it fundamentally shaped how I viewed the world.
This is awful news, though I can't help but to feel she really did it all the right way. Happy she was a part of my timeline.
As a young person I really appreciated how she worked to connect with our generation. She was such an inspiration.
I read one or maybe some (don't remember anymore) of her books about 15 or 20 years ago. Clearly a great person.
Jane Goodall and the late E.O. Willson were two great treasures of humanity. They 're leaders of a generation of scientists and public intellectuals who transcendent politics and remained faithful to the motto of great citizens - lead by example.
Sad day. Some of these folks dedicate their lives to otherwise thankless job/work with such dedication has always made me feel so positive about humanity in general I do understand when religious people do it but Goodall like people are modern day sages.
Not sure “thankless” really applies here. She enjoyed a sort of celebrity status for the past 40-50 years and was universally loved.
RIP Jane Goodall. Not to make a flippant pun but, thank you indeed for all the good you brought to all of us. By discovering humanity in our chimpanzee cousins, you helped us see the humanity in each other.
Such a wonderful soul. Few people have left an impression on me these many years later. I hope she's done the same for many here.
When I was 10, I was bored one day and my grandma brought me from a neighbour "In the Shadow of Man" to read, which I loved. I don't know anyone else who read that book.
The weird thing is just today I had recommended that book to a friend.
What a phenomenal woman, scientist and activist. We could use more people like her.
Rest in peace, Jane.
Growing up in the 1960s with access to National Geographic Magazines, Jane Goodall was one of the trio of scientists I grew up with, the others being Leakey and Jacques Cousteau. Her articles were fascinating! RIP
I thought she already died a few years ago I must’ve jumped universes again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
Jane came to my high school and I forged a pass to sneak in to her talk. I am not sure why every class didn't get the opportunity to see her, but I am glad I did. RIP
Rip Jane. We need more gentle souls like her, using soft power to get stuff done instead of bullying the world and everybody in it.
A true loss for the world, the scientific community, and nature.
Truly exceptional and outstanding.
RIP.
I hope that one day aging and the growing inexorability of death as life progresses into old age ceases to be a thing. She being 91 does not negate the tragedy of her death for me.
Mumkey Jones will not be happy to hear this
RIP Jane Goodall
Godspeed.
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The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big".
We have learnt to communicate with them, but they also don't seem to ask questions, at least not the way that humans do.
There is obvious intelligence in their eyes and deliberation in their movements, but they seem to be content with an almost static culture. Which was also true for the Neanderthals.
What was the last subtle mutation that prodded our species onto the road of intellectual curiosity?
We still don't know.
For most of human history cultural change was extremely slow, so slow as to be imperceptible. I'm not sure the neanderthals experienced any less dynamic a culture than the modern humans living at the same time.
Perhaps expecting change makes change more likely. Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off.
I'm pretty skeptical that cultural change was meaningfully slower (except as limited by effective population sizes). Cultural change for early humans is nearly invisible in the material record. Imagine that all archaeologists of the far future find nothing from the current era except iphones without working storage. Do they indicate a unified global culture without cultural change outside WWDC?
Obviously not, even though there are aspects of a shared global culture indicated by their global distribution. Material culture is related to culture, but it's an imperfect and imprecise record. The same issue occurs with correlating culture with genetics or language.
Sure, but this is true of neanderthals as well. So we can't say we are especially creative or dynamic in our culture. We can say that our material culture, that small fragment of it that was preserved, was static.
That was the point: I also wouldn't say that about neanderthals.
The evidence on the ground is of course, limited. But it's a fairly common view among anthropologists/archaeologists that our perspective on ancient societies is immensely limited by the material record, hence the generally positive reception to Dawn of Everything despite its sketchy details and interpretations.
"Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off."
True, but not the entire picture either. From what we know, even hunters and gatherers living in inhospitable regions have a rich oral culture and extensive pantheons of gods, demigods and legendary heroes. There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious.
I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are strongly motivated to find this to be true. On the one hand, it flatters us. On the other hand, it justifies believing we are ethically distinct. This same way of thinking has been applied to other humans with results we now deplore.
Are we special, the chosen creatures? Maybe. We sure want to believe we are. It's fun and useful to be special! But maybe we should be cautious leaping to that conclusion. I think Jane Goodall was of this mind as well.
"Special" means different things for different people.
For me, humans are special in their capability to create extensive culture. That does not mean that $deity has created us in its image, it may well be a random fluke of evolution.
But we haven't seen a cave painting done by non-humans yet, nor heard a story narrated by them.
This was ages ago when I was in college, but the theory then was the ability to walk upright freed our hands to do other things. Chimps primarily knuckle-walk, so they can't easily carry objects (food, tools, etc) from point A to point B.
Yeah, I read it too, but let's not take the book as a holy one.
Dolphins are plenty smart, but their absence of a material culture also leaves them exposed to various forces beyond their control.
Are dolphin moms not grieving when their baby gets eaten by killer whales?
This sort of threats is ubiquitous in nature, but almost unknown in a civilization.
True nature is brutal.
So many unsubstantiated claims, you find this pattern in someone infected with exceptionalism.
Ok, show me apes who unambiguously ask abstract questions.
The Neanderthal claim is what you can call unsubstantiated (so, one claim, not so many), but I would like to draw your attention to the extreme stability of the Mousterien industry. No Homo sapiens sapiens industry comes close to this level of stability.
"infected with exceptionalism"
So, we aren't exceptional at all? How do you square this rejection with the fact that you have never encountered, say, a written comment by a member of another species?
The word "infected" is very negative. I like intelligent animals, but no one except for us has, for example, as versatile hands as we do.
> The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big".
You will find a similar gap between some humans. Just saying.
Maybe asking annoying questions?
Maybe :)
To elaborate, there seems to be a difference between physical curiosity and intellectual curiosity.
Many mammals, especially when young, are very curious about their environment, peeking, sniffing, burrowing in the ground etc. So are human children.
But the ability to ask more abstract questions "why do the stars shine?" does seem to be limited to humans alone, and maybe not even all humans. And it is very uncertain if archaic humans had it as well.
Yes, that’s interesting.
I guess it’s mainly related to the fact that we have a different kind of consciousness than other mammals. Maybe that’s tautological? Maybe asking questions about stars defines our consciousness?
What’s this about Neanderthals?