Jane Goodall — "Chimpanzees are so like us, they have a very human-like capacity for evil."
Chimpanzees are so like us, they have a very human-like capacity for evil.
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About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — are not simply innocent creatures of nature. They conduct deliberate raids on rival groups, commit infanticide, and display calculated cruelty toward each other. By highlighting their capacity for evil, Goodall argues that behaviors we consider distinctly human moral failures are actually rooted in shared evolutionary biology, unsettling the comfortable belief that cruelty and malice are uniquely human traits.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall's decades at Gombe Stream culminated in documenting the Four Year War (1974–78), a systematic campaign where one chimp community hunted and killed every member of a rival group. This discovery devastated her personally — she had believed chimps were gentler than humans. Her honesty in publishing this violence, despite how it complicated her conservation work, reflects her commitment to scientific truth over comfortable narratives.
The era
Goodall began fieldwork in 1960, when Cold War tensions and the shadow of WWII atrocities prompted deep public questioning of human nature. The sociobiology debates of the 1970s made chimp aggression politically charged — conservatives cited animal violence to justify hierarchy while progressives resisted biological explanations for human cruelty. Goodall's findings landed directly in this cultural minefield, forcing scientists and ethicists to reckon with what evolution actually reveals about morality.
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