This thread in GQ (yes, its a revived zombie but has recent, interesting comments) got me to thinking about the three women sometimes known as “Leakey’s Angels”: Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Birute Galdikas.
I hadn’t realized, until I read that thread, that Jane Goodall was anything less that revered. AFAIK, Diane Fossey’s rep is that she tried to do good but was a little weird about it. As for Birute Galdikas (whose facility in Kalimantan I have visited, though I did not meet her personally), I’ve heard criticisms that the approach they take to saving/studying oranghutans corrupts their natural behavior and makes it impossible for for them to ever be truly wild. I have photos of an oranghutan washing himself with a bar of soap, covering himself with suds - so obviously there are primates there who are no longer fully in their natural state. OTOH, what people do to oranghutans in Indonesia is appalling, and anything she has done to save these creatures and at least give them a shot at a better life has to be a positive.
So anyway, what’s the view of people in the know about these three women and their legacies?
Like I intimated in the other thread, I’m OK with unorthodox methodologies if it turns out that those get us information we would never have gotten by other means, whether through clinical distance or prejudiced beliefs in what behaviour was expected.
I’ve raised this before, but I think there’s often a fallacy perpetrated that there’s one true Scientific Method (or Philosophical Method), only Vulcans and robots can truly practice it, and other observations are somehow invalid. Which is a load of bullshit.
By all means, aim for non-interference if you want, but interacting is a valid mode for anthropology, and I consider it valid for primatology as well. Not the only mode, and one that should be held to rigorous scrutiny, but not “unscientific” or however people choose to dismiss it.
Like I said, it’s amusing to me to see other contemporary primatologists pooh-pooh Goodall, when they never observed chimp tool use or hunting before she did. They didn’t even think to look, and the question remains - would they ever have, if not for her?
I agree. I don’t understand criticism in the face of groundbreaking work like she did. The only funny thing, really, is that it took so long for western scientists to recognize tool use in the non-human animals at all. It’s not just chimps-- it’s all over the place. Now, chimps also make tools (instead of just using tools), which is a big step, but tool use is not at all uncommon in non-human animals. Anyone watching sea-otters off the coast of CA, for example, knows that.
Besides, just how much “interference” was she responsible for?
Well, the main thing is that the chimps were lured to the study site with food, which would mean interactions around that site, especially aggressive ones, might not be the same as what would ever occur in the wild with a less concentrated food source. Other observers elsewhere have reported less chimp aggression. So it might have been circumstantial.
But that could also be because they didn’t immerse themselves in the troop like Goodall so weren’t placed to see it. Also, I highly doubt there are never local abundances of wild food sources that lead to competitive behaviour.
Is that some practice she started later on? I was under the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that she first acclimated herself to chimp troops over a very long period of time, not that she lured them into a study area.
I see a version of the “Noble Savage” idea floating around too–that the “natural” state is morally superior to any interaction with “unnatural” H. sapiens. It’s not that simple. We can’t assume any particular human interaction is negative, nor that any specific case of non-interference is positive. And that goes for science and scientists as well: studying both unperturbed and perturbed states can be useful. Devaluing information because it doesn’t meet someone’s moral standards does not advance understanding of the world.
This is just an anecdote. I went to a lecture by Leakey when I was an undergraduate at Cornell about 1970. He said he deliberately chose young women to undertake these studies because he thought that they would be less likely to react aggressively if threatened by the apes. Male researchers were programmed to respond to threats by trying to defend themselves rather than reacting submissively, which might have been fatal.
I met Goodall about four years ago when she came to Panama, where she is associated with an educational foundation, and gave her a tour of the Biomuseo where I was the curator.
It’s also a fallacy because there’s no such thing as an animal in E Africa, of all places, that has not, in some way, been interacting with human beings for ages. It’s just that usually that interaction isover a fire, maybe with a nice peanut sauce and *fufu *or some plantains on the side…