Jane Goodall is the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, having closely observed their behavior for the past quarter century in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Africa, living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence.
Her observations and discoveries are intemationally heralded. Her research and writing have made, and are making, revolutionary inroads into scientific thinking regarding the evolutions of humans.
Dr. Goodall received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1965. She has been the Scientific Director of the Gombe Stream Research Center since 1967. In 1984, Jane Goodall received the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize for "helping millions of people understand the importance of wildlife conservation to life on this planet." Her other awards and international recognitions fill pages.
Her scientific articles have appeared in many issues of National Geographic. She has written scores of papers for internationally known scientific journals. Dr. Goodall has also written two books, Wild Chimpanzees and In The Shadow of Man. She pleads to thousands of people throughout the world on behalf of her career-long sponsor, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation.
Some primatologists have suggested flaws in Goodall's methodology which may call into question the validity of her observations. Goodall used unconventional practices in her study, for example, naming individuals instead of numbering them. At the time numbering was used to prevent emotional attachment and loss of objectivity. Claiming to see individuality and emotion in chimpanzees, she was accused of "that worst of ethological sins".
Many standard methods are aimed at helping observers to avoid interference and the use of feeding stations to attract Gombe chimpanzees is, in particular, thought by some to have altered normal foraging and feeding patterns as well as social relationships; this argument is the focus of a book published by Margaret Power in 1991. It has been suggested that higher levels of aggression and conflict with other chimpanzee groups in the area were consequences of the feeding, which could have created the "wars" between chimpanzee social groups described by Goodall, aspects of which she did not witness in the years before artificial feeding began at Gombe. Thus, some regard Goodall's observations as distortions of normal chimpanzee behavior. Goodall herself acknowledged that feeding contributed to aggression within and between groups but maintained that the effect was limited to alteration of the intensity and not the nature of chimpanzee conflict, and further that feeding was necessary for the study to be effective at all. Craig Stanford of the Jane Goodall Research Institute at the University of Southern California asserts that researchers undergoing studies with no artificial provisioning have a difficult time viewing any social behaviors of chimpanzees at all, especially any related to intergroup conflict.
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