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In the Shadow of Man

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Jane Goodall is one of three women field observers hand-picked by Louis Leakey to observe great apes in the wild before they disappear, in the tradition of Linnaeus. Dian Fossey found herself embroiled in the fight to save the mountain gorillas, while Birute Galdikas was put off by the arboreal habits of the reclusive orangutans until techniques of observing from the treetops were invented. Jane turned out to be an apt successor to Banks, Solander and Darwin. The method, perhaps verbalized earliest by Schaller (predecessor of Fossey), is to observe animal society from inside it. Jane and Dian obtained immediate success by pretending to be a non-dominant female of the band. Jane concludes to conscious, intelligent and human-like society by observing the responsive interactions of the apes to each other and (to a lesser degree) to herself. Where other schools deny the validity of subjectivity or the use of the human analogy, Jane presents a pretty credible picture, and also the only epistemologically sound one. She finds, as it were, the essence of the apes, and finds that it is a simpler version of ours.