"What do you say to all those biologists who think it's just an evolutionary accident that human beings ever evolved?"

Name three genuine scientists who think that. You can't, because the only supposed "biologists" who think that are strawmen imagined by freakazoids promoting creationism.

Jane Goodall's belief or lack of belief is completely irrelevant to her scientific achievements.

But Steve Paulson's deliberate misrepresentation of evolutionary biology demeans Goodall and shits on her achievements.

Shame on you, Steve Paulson, for spreading anti-science propaganda in an article about a scientist, and shame on Salon's editors for printing it.

Really interesting interview with a woman who's had an amazing life.

It's always nice to find a scientist who believes and experiences spirituality, since it's not a very common trait amongst them.

If she was a trifle too emotionally involved with her subjects, so what? Doesn't make her observations any less valid. Ever worked amongst research scientists, and watched just how emotionally involved they are with their subject, whether it's an amoeba, a fungus or the ion channels on a nerve cell. Science is hugely influenced by all sorts of messy stuff, and the nice neat analytical scientific papers that emerge from the research are contrived to convey the absence of this human input. Just read 'Is the scientific paper a fraud?' by Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel winning scientist.

Jane Goodall is a great and true scientist, regardless of her emotional involvement and lack of qualifications.

I thought she died a while ago...oh wait, that was Fossey (was that her name?) murdered by thugs? If Jane thinks the world sucks now maybe it's good she's old and won't be around much longer...population of Earth by the year 2100 will MEGA-HUGE!

She makes me glad to have eyes & ears. I got involved with animal welfare issues via Peter Singer's book & I feel like Jane has been part of all of my adult life. It's simple really some people believe, some do not - none of us know what happens the moment we take our last breath & step into the great beyond. We do know, however what we can see right in front of use. We have more than enough to deal with us trying to fix that up. She's a wonderful woman - weirdly enough though I once knew a woman who looked exactly like her & spent her life in Papua New Guinea working for wildlife conservation so in some ways I kind of entangle the two of them.

There are not many people I'm in awe of, Jane Goodall is one of them.

Of course, in this article it was. So, um, breathe already.

It's also mentioned that Leakey preferred to work with women, that her methods were against the norm of the time...

You didn't even read this thing before you wrote (or cut and pasted) your rant, did you?

A previous post

"Seldom is it mentioned that she has absolutely no formal training, no degree, only a long history of "observation" under the legendary Louis Leak"

As you mentioned in a later post, she has a PhD. That counts as a degree.

Yeah, that's pretty bad. And it's true, Dillard was thinking of insects and what they do to one another, when she came to that conclusion. But still, what chimps do to their young and to one another is way worse than what MOST human beings do to one another. Not a biology thing--chimps are the same as humans in that if they are not treated sadistically, they don't do this kind of shit. But their "cultures" are about where our more inhumane ones are right now. Progressives--who tend to come from more loving backgrounds--aren't about to run about hacking each other to pieces. They can be all good, all nurturing, in fact. Republicans, right-wingers--who tend to come from more abandoning, more sadistic families--are the ones who tend to go into crazed states, craving secure borders, revenge, and blood. A lot of democrats still didn't have it so good. And the consequences of this fact will explain why they will support someone like Obama not in spite of but BECAUSE OF a leadership "style" which'll seem frighteningly fascist to many of the progressives around here.

For more on a different take on chimp cultures, here's a bit from Lloyd deMause's Childhood and Cultural Evolution (link at signature):

"The primate mother nurses her infant only for the erotic pleasure it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like the New Guinea mother, she has difficulty conceiving that her child is hungry. After the suckling period, primate mothers almost never give any kind of food to their infants. "Even gorilla infants have never been seen being given solid food by their mothers."In fact, primate mothers are often observed to grab food from their offspring, who must get by on "tolerated scrounging" of leftovers. Like New Guinea mothers, chimpanzee mothers are described as losing interest in their children when off the breast, often rejecting and punishing them. The result of this severe maternal rejection is that there is a "weaning crisis" for primates when they abruptly must learn to find food for themselves, a deadly rejection process that kills from one-third to three-fourths of them before they reached adulthood.

Primates parallel human infanticidal mode parents in other ways too. They frequently give away their infants a practice called "alloparenting," which often results in the infant being abused, abandoned or killed. Primates are also infanticidal, cannibalistic and incestuous. Indeed, there appears to be only a relatively small degree of childrearing evolution between our nearest primate ancestors and infanticidal mode parenting such as that in New Guinea. Lovejoy cites the high infant mortality of primates during weaning he places it at around 40 percent as evidence that early hominids estimated at over 50 percent infant mortality had difficulty feeding their children once off the breast, just as New Guinea mothers still do today."

Jane Goodall and Hugo van Lawick's son was officially given the decidedly human name Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, and he was (if I remember correctly) nicknamed Grub because he was a fair-skinned, blonde-haired boy about the same color as a grub worm.

She did raise him at least partially at Gombe, but not "as a chimp." Before his birth, she and her husband went to pretty extensive lengths to secure their house and yard AGAINST the chimps entering for the baby's safety. When she was farther along in pregnancy and in the years when her child was a baby and toddler, she did very little actual fieldwork, leaving the daily hiking and chimp observation to her students and assistants and did more data assessment from the house while taking care of her kid.

I believe that he went to boarding school when he was older. I think he goes by Eric van Lawick now and by all accounts, he turned out pretty normal and decent.