What's the deal with Jane Goodall?

Does she want billions to die? Does she believe in Big Foot? Did she start a chimpanzee turf war on purpose?

HEY FOLKS,

We’ve learned a lot in recent years. For example, it turns out that Noam Chomsky, the world’s most famous Leftist scholar, was working closely with the Pentagon throughout his entire career. In other words, his entire body of scholarly work now needs to be viewed with suspicion.

Indeed, there is now at least one book written by a prominent Leftist which urges the world to reconsider Chomsky’s legacy.

This post isn’t about Noam Chomsky, however. It’s about Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist. As you may or may not be aware, she has been a regular guest at the World Economic Forum for years, possibly because she is the most respected celebrity scientist who is willing to speak about overpopulation.

I don’t know enough about primatology to know whether Jane Goodall is respected in her field, but I did hear on Joe Rogan that she believes that Big Foot is a primate species called Gigantopithecus canadensis. That’s outlandish even by my standards.

I looked it up, and apparently in a 2002 interview on NPR, Jane Goodall said:

"Well, now you'll be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist. I've talked to so many Native Americans who all describe the same sounds, two who have seen them."

Joe Rogan and Jane Goodall both seem confused about the true nature of sasquatches, so let me just ask you this: Why did the Sasquatch cross the road?

You want to know what the answer is? To get to the other sasquatch! Duh! Because that’s what apes do. They go looking around until they find a member of their own species to have sex with, then they have sex with them. So how are sasquatches going to get laid if they’re playing hide-and-go-seek all the time?

What’s my point? Where are the footprints? I’ve roamed Canada from the Yukon to Newfounland, and I’ve never seen any big foot footprints. I’m on Wet’suwet’en territory now, and I’ve never even heard of anyone taking big foot sightings seriously up here. If Jane Goodall knows something that the Wet’suwet’en don’t about giant apes living in the forest, that’s seems a little surprising.

Let me ask you another question: have you ever heard of two sasquatches getting it on?

Neither have I. Maybe that’s why I’ve never seen Big Foot crossing a road. Maybe they’re sexless, like angels. Maybe that’s why they don’t leave footprints. Maybe it’s like, levitation, bro.

Now, I’m not a professional scientist, like Jane Goodall is, but I’m guessing that sasquatches don’t leave skeletal remains. But so what? After all, angels don’t leave skeletal remains, and everyone knows they exist.

Anyway, I thought it might be of interest to someone out there to hear that there are some sketchy things about the overall arc of Jane Goodall’s entire career. Could it be that Jane Goodall was one of those C.I.A.-sponsored academics like Gloria Steinem and Noam Chomsky? If so, she’s certainly managed to keep up appearances well over the years. But I guess if this is really the apocalypse, there’s a lot more still yet to be revealed.

If anyone if wondering why the C.I.A. would sponsor a primatologist, it’s because Jane Goodall’s research portrayed chimpanzees as violent, warlike savages. This contradicted the idealism of the hippie counterculture, which romanticized primitive societies. The implication was that violent chimp behaviour was proof that apes are brutal creatures by nature and that we should therefore get used to living in a cutthroat capitalist world of competition and constant war. One needs to consider the context of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Vietnam Syndrome.

Somehow, chimp research was part of this grand narrative above life in a state of nature being nasty, brutish, and short. Was Jane Goodall’s research meant to serve propaganda purposes? That’s one question. Was she aware of it? That’s another. Margaret Mead was funded by the C.I.A. at one point but I don’t think that we need to throw out everything she ever did. So what’s the deal with Jane Goodall? I feel I’m not able to have a really nuanced take on Jane Goodall because she was a celebrity of my parent’s generation, not mine.

But people are still putting out book after book about how we’re all a bunch of murderous monsters being held back from barbarism by the thin blue line of civilization. The truth, as usual, is very different from what we have led to believe. People don’t automatically start killing each other when there’s an earthquake or a flood. They come together and help each other. A lot of things have to go wrong before you wind up in a situation where violence is the only option. But we’re so used to living in this particularly deranged society that we take it as granted that war is inevitable and that humanity can aspire to nothing better than perpetual war.

You wouldn’t believe how many books with titles like Demonic Males there are out there.

I don’t claim to know the truth about Jane Goodall, and to be honest I’ve never read any of her books. I’m putting this out there because I’m sure someone out there will know more than I do.

Maybe together we’ll be able to get to the bottom of this!

for the Wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

ARE WILD CHIMPANZEES MORE PEACEFUL THAN WE’VE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE?

by Christopher Ryan, Sex At Dawn (2010)

In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania.

In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males.

Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that the chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She “saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals.

These initial impressions of overall primate peace mesh with research published four decades later, in 2002, by primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber, who conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on social behavior in primates. After reviewing more than eighty studies of how various primates spend their waking hours, they found that “in almost all species across the board, from diurnal lemurs—the most primitive primates—to apes … usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.”

Sussman and Garber found that:

“usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1 percent.”

They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.

But Goodall’s impression of relative harmony was to change—not coincidentally, argues Power—precisely when she and her students began giving the chimps hundreds of bananas every day, to entice them to hang around the camp so they could be observed more easily.

In the wild, chimps spread out to search for food individually or in small groups. Because the food is scattered throughout the jungle, competition is unusual. But, as Frans de Waal explains, “as soon as humans start providing food, even in the jungle, the peace is quickly disturbed.”

“The mounds of deliciously smelly fruit locked in reinforced concrete boxes opened only for timed, regular feedings altered the chimps’ behavior dramatically. Goodall’s assistants had to keep rebuilding the boxes, as the frustrated apes found endless ways of prying or smashing them open. Ripe fruit that could not be eaten immediately was a new experience for them—one that left the chimps confused and enraged. Imagine telling a room of unruly three-year-olds on Christmas morning (each with the strength of four adult men) that they’ll have to wait an unspecified amount of time to open the piles of presents they can see right there, under the tree.

Recalling this period a few years later, Goodall wrote:

“The constant feeding was having a marked effect upon the behaviour of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. They were sleeping near camp and arriving in noisy hordes early in the morning. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive. … Not only was there a great deal more fighting than ever before, but many of the chimps were hanging around camp for hours and hours every day.”

Margaret Power’s doubts concerning Goodall’s provisioning of the chimps have been largely left unaddressed by most primatologists, not just Wrangham.

Michael Ghiglieri, for example, went to study the chimps in Kibale Forest in nearby Uganda specifically in response to the notion that the intergroup conflict Goodall’s team had witnessed might have been due to the distorting effects of those banana boxes.

Ghiglieri writes:

“My mission … [was] to find out whether these warlike killings were normal or an artifact of the researchers having provisioned the chimps with food to observe them.”

But somehow Margaret Power’s name doesn’t even appear in the index of Ghiglieri’s book, published eight years after hers.”

[…]

The Spoils of War

Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a limited amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes” and “hanging around.” Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now-famous “warfare” between chimp groups.

Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world.

Applying this same reasoning to human societies, we’re left wondering why immediate-return hunter-gatherers would risk their lives to fight wars. Over what, exactly? Food? That’s spread out in the environment. Societies indigenous to areas where food is concentrated by natural conditions, like the periodic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, tend not to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers.

We’re more likely to find complex, hierarchical societies like the Kwakiutl (discussed later) in such spots. Possessions? Foragers have few possessions of any nonsentimental value. Land? Our ancestors evolved on a planet nearly empty of human beings for the vast majority of our existence as a species. Women? Possibly, but this claim presumes that population growth was important to foragers and that women were commodities to be fought over and traded like the livestock of pastoralists. It’s likely that keeping population stable was more important to foragers than expanding it. As we’ve seen, when a group reaches a certain number of people, it tends to split into smaller groups anyway, and there is no inherent advantage in having more in having more people to feed in band-level societies. We’ve also seen that women and men would have been free to move among different bands in the fission-fusion social system typical of hunter-gatherers, chimps, and bonobos.

The causal reverberations between social structure (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial), population density, and the likelihood of war is supported by research conducted by sociologist Patrick Nolan, who found, “Warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies.” When he limited his analysis only to hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war.”

“This finding is problematic for the argument that human war is a “5-million-year habit,” given our ancestors’ low population densities until the post-agricultural population explosion began just a few thousand years ago. Recent research looking at changes in mitochondrial DNA confirms that already low prehistoric global human population levels dropped nearly to extinction at several points (due to climatological catastrophes probably triggered by volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, and sudden changes in ocean currents). As mentioned previously, the entire world population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to just a few thousand individuals as recently as 74,000 years ago, when the massive Toba eruption severely disrupted world climate. But even with much of the northern hemisphere covered in ice, the world was anything but crowded for our distant ancestors.

Population demographics have triggered wars in more recent historical times. Ecologist Peter Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev looked at data from English, Chinese, and Roman history, finding strong statistical correlations between increases in population density and warfare. Their research suggests population growth could account for as much as 90 percent of the variation between historical periods of war and peace.

Early agriculture’s stores of harvested grain and herds of placid livestock were like boxes of bananas in the jungle. There was now something worth fighting over: more. More land to cultivate. More women to increase population to work the land, raise armies to defend it, and help with the harvest. More slaves for the hard labor of planting, harvesting, and fighting. Failed crops in one area would lead desperate farmers to raid neighbors, who would retaliate, and so on, over and over.24

Freedom (from war) is just another word for nothing to lose[…]”

“But neo-Hobbesians ignore this rather straightforward analysis and the data supporting it, insisting that war must be an eternal human drive, all too often resorting to desperate rhetorical tactics like Pinker’s to defend their view.

In the fourth chapter of his book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, for example, Robert Edgerton writes, “Social stratification developed in some small-scale societies that lacked not only bureaucracies and priesthoods but cultivation as well.” Okay, but in support of this assertion about social stratification and brutal rule by elites in “small-scale societies,” he offers fifteen pages of vivid descriptions of, in this order (and leaving nothing out):

• the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island (a slave-owning, settled, property-accumulating, potlatch-celebrating, complex, hierarchical society);

• the Aztec Empire (numbering in the millions, with elaborate religious structures, priesthoods, and untold acres of slave-cultivated land around a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time of first contact, featuring sewage systems and lighted streets at night);

• the Zulu Empire (again, numbering well into the millions, with slavery, intensive agriculture, animal domestication, and continent-wide trade networks);

• the Asante Empire of present-day Ghana, which, Edgerton tells us, “was incomparably the greatest military power in West Africa.”

What any of these empires have to do with small-scale societies with no bureaucracies, priesthoods, or cultivation, Edgerton doesn’t say. In fact, he doesn’t mention a single foraging society for the rest of the chapter. This is like declaring that cats are difficult to train, then offering as evidence German shepherds, beagles, greyhounds, and golden retrievers.

In Beyond War, anthropologist Doug Fry rebuts the neo-Hobbesian view of universal war. “The belief that ‘there has always been war,’” Fry writes, “does not correspond with the archaeological facts of the matter.” Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel agrees, writing, “Lack of archaeological evidence for warfare suggests that it was rare or absent for most of human prehistory.” After conducting a comprehensive review of prehistoric skeletal evidence, anthropologist Brian Ferguson concluded that apart from one particular site in modern-day Sudan, “only about a dozen Homo sapiens skeletons 10,000 years old or older, out of hundreds of similar antiquity examined to date, show clear indications of interpersonal violence.” Ferguson continues, “If warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with evidence of warfare. But the signs are not there.”

Our bullshit detectors go off when scholars point to violent chimps and a few cherry-picked horticultural human societies mislabeled as foragers, claiming these as evidence of ancient tendencies toward warfare. Even more troubling, these scholars often remain mute on the distorting effects on chimps of food provisioning, ever-shrinking habitats under siege from armies of hungry soldiers and poachers, reduced living space, food, and genetic vigor. Equally troubling is their silence on the crucial effects of population demographics and the rise of the agricultural state on the likelihood of human conflict.”