Jane Goodall — "We are not the only intelligent beings on this planet."
We are not the only intelligent beings on this planet.
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More from Jane Goodall
"The only way to make sure that we don't destroy the future is to make sure that our children are educated in a way that they understand the interconnectedness of all life."
"My life's work has been to try and help people understand that animals are not just things."
"I believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe."
"We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on one another, we torture each other, we use our intellect to manipulate, we kill."
"We can't save the world if we don't save the animals."
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
Humans are not uniquely intelligent among Earth's creatures. Other animals think, solve problems, feel emotions, and form complex social bonds. Intelligence is not a single human trait but a spectrum distributed across species. This challenges centuries of human exceptionalism and invites us to reconsider our moral obligations toward other creatures—and our relationship with the natural world as one species among many capable minds.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent over sixty years studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, Tanzania, beginning in 1960. She documented that chimps use tools—overturning the then-accepted definition of humanity—and recognized individual personalities, emotions, and family bonds in her subjects. Her insistence on naming chimps rather than numbering them was radical, directly challenging scientific norms. Her career became a sustained argument that cognitive complexity exists throughout the animal kingdom, not just in humans.
The era
When Goodall began her research in the 1960s, behaviorism dominated science—animals were treated as stimulus-response machines, not thinking beings. The cognitive revolution was only just beginning. Meanwhile, rapid deforestation was destroying great ape habitats and the animal rights movement was emerging. Her findings arrived as humanity first confronted environmental destruction on a global scale, making her case for animal intelligence both scientifically and ethically urgent.
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