Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist who lived in Africa studying chimpanzees, delivered the keynote address April 4 during Elon's Spring Convocation for Honors. Details...
Goodall said she believes the world can overcome the political, economic and environmental problems it faces.
“There is a feeling that we’ve spent too much time on the materialistic outlook on life, that there is a need for new values, new meaning in life,” Goodall said during her keynote address to Elon’s Convocation for Honors. She said she is hopeful because of the power of the human brain, the resiliency of nature, the power of youth and the indomitable spirit of human kind. “Yes, there is hope for the future, but the hope lies in the hands of all of you and me. We hold the future of our children and grandchildren, and theirs, in our hands.”
She used the depletion of the world’s chimpanzee population as an example of the destruction humans have wrought on the planet. There were once 2 million chimpanzees on the Earth, Goodall said, but they now number only about 150,000. Their numbers have dwindled because of habitat destruction and hunters who kill them and sell their meat. “This is the kind of thing we’re seeing across the tropics. We’re poisoning this beautiful planet.”
During a question and answer session with students earlier in the day, Goodall said humans can learn important lessons from studying animals. “I think we can learn to be a little humble, because we are not the only beings on this planet with feelings and emotions,” Goodall said.
However, Goodall said the scientific community was slow to accept that animals had emotions and feelings similar to humans. When she studied at Cambridge University, she was excited to share what she had learned. “I found I was almost treated like an outcast. The consensus was that I shouldn’t have given the chimps names; I should have given them numbers, because that would have been more scientific. I wasn’t supposed to talk about them having personalities, because only humans were supposed to have personalities.”
But from the time of her arrival in the Gombe preserve of Tanzania in 1960, Goodall went to work dispelling those long-held myths. Her observations revealed that chimpanzees make and use tools, hunt for meat and have diverse personalities. She said the similarities with humans don’t end there. “Humans can get blood transfusions from chimps, because their immune systems are remarkably like ours.”
Goodall said the one characteristic which differentiates humans from chimps is the ability to use language to create and develop complex ideas. But she said that does not mean chimps are unable to communicate. “Chimpanzees have an amazing repertoire of calls, and a repertoire of postures and gestures which are remarkably similar to ours.”