Jane Goodall's career was not just a watershed in ethology and primate psychology, but in the way science is done.
I vividly remember reading Jane Goodall's descriptions of the chimpanzees in her Gombe project. Here we had been looking for intelligent alien life with SETI, and wondering about life on Mars. But she revealed that intelligent, curious personalities exist right here, on Earth, in the African forest. Alien, but not so alien. Indeed, they loved their families, suffered heartbreaking losses, and fought vicious battles. They had cultures, and tools, deviousness and generosity.
What was striking was not just the implications of all this for us as humans and as conservationists, but also what it overturned about scientific attitudes. Science had traditionally had a buttoned-up attitude- "hard science", as it were. This reached a crescendo with behaviorism, where nothing was imputed to the psychology of others, whether animals or children, other than machine-like input/output reflexes. Machines were the reigning model, as though we had learned nothing since Descartes.
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This was appalling enough on its own terms, but it really impoverished scientific progress as well. Goodall helped break open this box by showing in a particularly dramatic way the payoff possible from having deep empathy with one's scientific object. Scientists have always engaged with their questions out of interest and imagination. It is a process of feeling one's way through essentially a fantasy world, until one proves that the rules you have divined actually are provable via some concrete demonstration- doing an experiment, or observing the evidence of tool use by chimpanzees. It is intrinsically an empathetic process, even if the object of that empathy is a geological formation, or a sub-atomic particle.
But discipline is needed too. Mathematics reigns supreme in physics, because, luckily, physics follows extremely regular rules. That is what is so irritating and uncomfortable about quantum mechanics. That is a field where empathy sort of fails- notoriously, no one really "understands" quantum mechanics, even though the math certainly works out. But in most fields, it is understanding we are after, led by empathy and followed by systematization of the rules at work, if any. This use of empathy has methodological implications. We become attached to the objects of our work, and to our ideas about them. So discipline involves doing things like double-blind trials to insulate a truth-finding process from bias. And transparency with open publication followed by open critique.
In the 20th century, science was being overwhelmed by the discipline and the adulation of physics, and losing the spark of inspiration. Jane Goodall helped to right that ship, reminding us that scientific methods and attitudes need to match the objects we are working with. Sure, math might be the right approach to electrons. But our fellow animals are an entirely different kettle of fish. For example, all animals follow their desires. The complexities of mating among animals means that they are all driven just as we are- by emotions, by desire, by pain, by love. The complexity may differ, but the intensity of these emotions can not possibly be anything but universal.
- "He will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government."
