"When Jane Goodall arrived at Tanzania's Gombe Stream in 1960, she carried neither a doctoral degree nor conventional scientific training. What she possessed was something more useful: the willingness to see intelligence where others saw only instinct, to recognize personhood where convention saw specimens, and to understand that the boundaries we draw around cognition say more about our limitations than nature's possibilities."
"But Goodall's insight went deeper. Over decades at Gombe Stream National Park, she documented that chimpanzees possessed emotional intelligence, social intelligence, practical intelligence, and ecological intelligence. She discovered that chimps wage war and make peace, grieve their dead and celebrate reunions, form political alliances and solve complex problems. Each of these capacities represents a distinct form of intelligence, and none mapped neatly onto the narrow definitions that dominated twentieth-century science."
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream in 1960 without a doctoral degree or conventional scientific training but with a willingness to see intelligence where others saw instinct and to recognize personhood beyond specimens. Early observation of David Greybeard making tools overturned the belief that toolmaking was uniquely human. Decades of study documented chimpanzees' emotional, social, practical, and ecological intelligences, including warfare, reconciliation, grief, celebration, political alliances, and problem-solving. For centuries Western thought ranked intelligence hierarchically in a Great Chain of Being that justified exploitation. Goodall's findings dismantled that hierarchy and suggest that intelligence is multifaceted and that recognizing its plurality should inform relationships with both natural and artificial minds.
Read at Psychology Today
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