By Kamran Nayeri, October 10, 2025
Jane Goodall, one of the world's leading primate ethologists
and one of the most popular conservationists, died at the age of 91 on October
2, 2025, during a speaking tour in Los Angeles (see note 1).
Goodall abandoned the prevalent anthropocentric attitude of
biologists by the way she studies the chimpanzees in Gombe, East Africa.[i]
This enabled her to uncover their complex behavior through living alongside
them. In 1965, the University of Cambridge awarded Goodall a PhD in ethology. Jill
Tiefenthaler, executive director of the National Geographic Society, wrote: “To know Jane was to know an extraordinary scientist,
conservationist, humanitarian, educator, mentor and, perhaps most profoundly,
an enduring champion for hope.”
Goodall was born on April 3, 1934, in London. When she was
five years old, his father left home, and her mother raised her. Goodall attributes
her self-reliance to her mother's upbringing. From an early age, she was fond
of nature and was influenced by
books and stories about animals, such as The Story of Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan.
Dr. Doolittle's story is about a doctor who understands animal language, treats
animals, and becomes a naturalist. Tarzan is the story of a European boy who chimpanzees in the jungles
of Africa raised, understood the language of animals, and lived among them. As
a teenager, Goodall worked in a restaurant to save money to go to Africa.
Goodall worked in
a restaurant to save money so she could travel to Africa.
In 1957, Goodall
traveled to Kenya, where he met paleontologist Lewis Leakey and became his
secretary. Leakey believed that studying the life of chimpanzees in their own environment
could help better understand human life in the Stone Age. Chimpanzees and
humans share 98 to 99 percent of their DNA. Leakey was looking for someone who
could live in Africa alongside chimpanzees with enough patience to get to the
chimpanzees and document their behavior.
Goodall seemed to Leakey to be an ideal person, especially since she was
not university-trained so she could view the chimpanzees with a fresh eye.
Jane Goodall's
career is an example of the difficulties women faced at that time (and still
they do in most places) to advance in a male-dominated society.
When she applied
for financial support from the National Geographic Society, a committee of
eighteen men who decided on applications expressed reservations that a young
woman of delicate stature would be able to live amid wild animals and poisonous
snakes and environment infested with malaria mosquitos even though Goodall had
already documented that chimpanzees make tools to hunt termites.
This was a great
discovery. When she telegraphed her findings to Leakey, he was excited
and replied that either chimpanzees
are human, or we must accept that toolmaking is not what defines us as humans.
Despite Goodall's
discovery, the grant-making committee of National Geographic refused to pay her
$1,120 for daily expenses, doubting her ability to withstand harsh weather,
wild animals, venomous snakes, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, as she lacked a
college education. Eventually, Leakey was able to convince the committee
otherwise. Three years later, the University of Cambridge awarded Goddall an
honorary doctorate!
15
years at Gombe
In July 1960, the
twenty-six-year-old Goodall began studying a group of chimpanzees in Kasakela,
in the rainforest of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania (hereinafter
Gombe). Goodall’s approach to learning about the lives of chimpanzees
was fundamentally different from the usual way biologists study wildlife from
afar or in zoos and laboratories. Goodall had decided to get to know them as
their neighbor (see note 2). At first, she relied on her binoculars to monitor the
chimpanzees' behavior, as trying to get closer to them would cause them to
flee.
Gradually, chimpanzees got used to the presence of their
neighbor. Goodall also recorded her observations in a notebook and with a pen.
In October 1960, she observed a chimpanzee that she named David Greybeard
trimming a small branch, making it wet, and then pushing it into a termite
hole. He would then eat the termite that stuck to the damp branch as he pulled
it out.
Goodall also
documented the complex communication and behavior between chimpanzees, showing
that chimpanzees sometimes fight with each other and sometimes even eat
meat. Later, she observed chimpanzee groups
fighting over territory. Goodall showed that there could be social and
emotional connections between humans and chimpanzees.
After Goodall's early successes, Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch
nobleman and photographer, was sent to document Goodall's activities and the
chimpanzees' lives. They fell in love and married in 1964. Three years later,
they had a son, Eric Louis van Lawick, nicknamed Grubb.
During this time, Goodall's study of the chimpanzees
deepened. The chimpanzees now considered Goodall as their own, and she became
close friends with a female chimpanzee named Flo, who had a daughter. Goodall wrote
that she learned a lot about motherhood from Flo, and her own experience made
her more aware of chimpanzee mothers’ behavior. Soon after, Flo also had a son whom
Goodall named Flint. Flo looked after
her son and wouldn't even let her daughter get close to her baby for a while. She
was very gentle and loving with her baby, teaching her son about his
surroundings and how to live. As Flint grew bigger, Flo allowed her daughter to
help her care for him.
After Flint grew up, one day, when Flo was passing through
the stream her heart suddenly stopped, and she died. For some time, Flint tried
to get the usual affection from the corpse of his mother. Eventually, he
realized that Flo was dead, and he suffered a severe depression. A few weeks
later, Flint also died.
At the same time, funding for Hugo's work as a photographer
and videographer in Goodall’s project was cut off. To earn an income, Hugo
began filming animals in the Serengeti National Park. On the other hand,
Goodall received funding to establish the Gombe Research Station, where biology
students could live and conduct chimpanzees research. Gradually, Goodall's work
was to administer students' research.
When Goodall’s son was 6 years old, he was sent to London to
study and to live with Goodall’s mother. At the same time, Goodall's
professional career and her husband’s separated them. Finally, they divorced in
1974.
Goodall witnessed two tragedies at Gombe. The first was in
1966 when chimpanzees contracted polio virus. The virus paralyzed them in the
hands, legs, neck, and chest. Goodall and her colleagues hid the polio vaccine
in bananas and gave it to chimpanzees to save those who were not infected. This
was contrary to the accepted standards at the time. An important lesson from
this experience was the need to prohibit direct contact between researchers and
wild animals. Goodall forbade any direct contact with the chimpanzees after that
bitter experience.
The second tragedy was the four-year war (1974-1978) between
two groups of chimpanzees, which had split into the Kasakela group. Within
eight months, a group of chimpanzees separated themselves. They formed a new
group in the southern part of the region, consisting of six male chimpanzees,
three female chimpanzees, and their offspring. Eight males, twelve females, and
their offspring remained. The war ended when all males were killed. The cause
of this bloody conflict was territorial control for access to food.
Goodall concluded from this experience that war between
humans must be motivated by similar motives. Of course, Goodall also witnessed solidarity
within species in times of danger. She was with Hugo when he was filming, a
group of wildebeest in the Serengeti attacked a group of lions that had
overtaken a single wildebeest. The herd, after initial hesitation, attacked the
lions en masse and saved the individual from certain death.
The debate over the influence of culture versus nature in the
formation of human nature and behavior has been ongoing.
Goodall, Darwin, and Marx
In 2002, on a TED
program about her research, Goodall said, "We have found that there is no sharp
line separating humans from the rest of the animal world." In his epoch-making
book, On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin proposed the theory of
natural selection, which hd developed by studying artificial selection (breeding).
He argued that higher animals possess thought, morality, and emotions such as
love, affection, and sympathy, like humans. He also suggested that the
underlying moral principles of human behavior are instincts, similar to those
found in other animals.
Thus, for nearly
a hundred and seventy years, we have known that there is an excellent likelihood
that human nature may not be merely the sum of his social relations, as Marx asserted
in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Of course, Marx and Engels in The German
Ideology (1845) corrected this assertion by saying that the history of humans
should begin with an examination of their natural conditions of life. However, they
acknowledge that this lies outside the scope of their book, which outlines
their theory of society and history, known as historical materialism. They
consciously focused on examining social relations in class society by abstracting
from nature, making their theory anthropocentric by design. The reason for this
is apparent: the theory of history, which embeds human society in its natural settings,
requires knowledge gradually gained from the middle of the twentieth century in
disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, and biology.
Although Darwin's
theory of evolution scientifically rejected the anthropocentric view of the
world and proposed an ecological view instead, the attitude of many scientists
and activists of social change, including Marxists, remained anthropocentric.
From this
perspective, the efforts of E. O. Wilson, a renowned entomologist, biologist at
Harvard University, and conservationist who died in 2021, are noteworthy. His
theory of sociobiology is an ambitious project that seeks to establish a common
foundation based on Darwin's theory of evolution, integrating the natural
sciences, social sciences, and humanities as a single theory (Wilson, 1998).
Marxists have
criticized this project. Criticism from
Marxists, including Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, Wilson's colleagues at
Harvard University, emphasized Marx's theory of how social relations influence
the determination of human nature. Although they were respectively prominent
ecologist (Levins) and biologist (Levinas), who wrote Dialectical Biology
(1985), they could not deny the evolutionary origin of human nature. However,
they focused on capitalist society as a more prominent factor in the determination
of human nature. On the contrary, Wilson insisted on the essential role of the
evolutionary factors that cause social relationships that contribute to human behavior.
A discussion of this
critical debate lies outside the scope of this essay. My critique of Wilson's
theory (Nayeri, 2015) is an attempt to elevate this debate in light of today's
knowledge. Today, human nature can only be understood through animistic
materialism, which gives historical agency to all beings, not just human beings.
Furthermore, on this basis, history began at least 2.8 million years ago with the
emergence of the genus Homo. Marx and Engels’ theory of history is limited to
the rise of civilization (class societies) five thousand years ago (Nayeri,
2021; 2025 Chapter 19)..
Thus, human
history is deeply embedded in natural history, which began at least with the
emergence of life on Earth 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago.
Today, with the
discovery of the microbiome, we know that nature lives inside our bodies as
well as outside of us. The microbiome, a collection of bacteria, viruses,
fungi, and algae in our gut, is not only fundamental to our health but also
influences our brain activity and plays a role in determining our
personality.
Thus, the theory
of human nature as well as the theory of society and history must be based on
animistic materialism and the latest knowledge of the twenty-first century if
we want to tackle effectively the existential ecological crises of our time.
Goodall as a
pioneer
Goodall was a pioneer
who questioned the commonly held anthropocentric views despite the central
message of Darwin's theory of evolution and showed us that we are animals and
kin to the rest of the animal kingdom.
Goodall argued that
nonhuman animals, like humans, are individuals and hoped to speak for those who
could not speak for themselves. The philosopher James Rachels (1990), an
environmental ethicist who based his views on Darwin’s theory, agreed.
In 1977, she
created the Jane Goodall Institute for the conservation of chimpanzees and wildlife.
In 1991, she introduced the Roots and
Buds program to the Institute’s mission to educate children about the
importance of preserving ecosystems. Today, it operates in 100 countries.
Toward the end of
her life, Jane Goodall campaigned to mobilize people to confront the
existential ecological crises. Since Goodall never developed an understanding
of the systemic causes of these crises, she focused her energy on instilling
hope in the public by arguing that everyone can contribute to the solution by
making simple lifestyle changes.
Still, her vision
mattered. Goodall endorsed Henry David Thoreau's valuable edict that "in wildness
is the preservation of the world. "
1.The reader is interested in the life of Jane Goodall, I recommend watching her documentary on YouTube, which is also free. https://youtu.be/d3b6zSpy7P4?si=uaVgNLb4EN8-
2.
References:
Levins, Richard and
Richard Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist. 1985.
Nayeri, Kamran. “An Ecological Socialist's Reflection on Edward O.
Wilson's Sociobiology.” Our Place
in the World: An Ecosocialist Journal. 2015.
____________. “The
Case for Ecocentric Socialism.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of
Ecocentric Socialism. 2021.
___________. Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric Socialism.
2025.
Morning, Brett. Jane. 2017.
National Geographic: Jane Goodal: A Look Inside.
2018.
Peterson, Dale. Jane
Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man. 2023.
Rachels, James. Created
from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism. 1990.
Thoreau, Henry D. “Walking.” Atlantic Monthly. 1862.
Wilson, E.O. Consilience:
The Unity of Knowledge. 1998.
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