Jane Goodall, 1934-2025: The Natural History, Cultural History, and Biographical History of Primate Politics

Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91.

I have written many posts about her work, which began in 1960 when she arrived at the Gombe Stream Preserve to observe the chimpanzee society there.  The New York Times has a good obituary.

As a high school kid, I had been fascinated--like millions of people around the world--by the National Geographic television documentaries on her work.  Then, in 1986, I was in the Hyde Park neighborhood around the University of Chicago; and I noticed her new book--The Chimpanzees of Gombe--in the display window of the 57th Street Bookstore.  When I read the book, I decided that students of political science--like myself--should read this book because it was about the political history of the chimpanzees at Gombe, and it showed the three levels of political history: the natural history of the species, the cultural history of this political community, and the biographical history of the individuals in that community.  That became a fundamental theme of my attempt to formulate a biopolitical science.

Her book also showed the evolutionary history of warfare because she showed how the chimpanzees at Gombe divided into separate communities that went to war with one another, with one community conquering and destroying the other.  I later saw how people that had worked with Goodall at Gombe--like Richard Wrangham--developed this idea to explain the evolution of human warfare.

In my posts on Trump's chimpanzee politics, I have agreed with Goodall's observation that she saw in Trump "the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he is competing for dominance with another.  They're upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals."

The same year that I read The Chimpanzees of Gombe--1986--I attended the "Understanding Chimpanzees" international conference at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, where Goodall was the keynote speaker and almost all of the major chimpanzee researchers gathered.  She began her speech by shouting out a chimpanzee pant-hoot greeting sound, with many in the audience responding with their own chimpanzee pant-hoots.  It was chilling.

I happened to be in an elevator with Goodall, but I was too shy to speak to her.  If I had spoken to her, I surely would have said something about how much she had taught me about chimpanzee political science.

Those of us who have learned from her will remember her.