'Everything Was Interesting' – Duke's Anne Pusey explains how the Gombe archive evolved from long-hand narratives to an abbreviated coding system that scientists are still using.
Goodall Visits her Data at Duke – March 29, 2011
But as the legendary primatologist visited the university’s new research center that houses her 50-year data-collection on chimpanzees, it became evident that the scientist longed to “sit down and dive right in” to the data.
Seeing it again is “bittersweet,” Goodall said during a press conference on March 28 at Duke. “I love to analyze data” and rifling through the files “makes me homesick for that,” she said, noting how much easier the analysis has become since the data is now digitized.
For the past 20 years, primatologist Anne Pusey has worked with colleagues and students to scan and make electronic notes of Goodall’s long-hand narratives, audio transcriptions and grids of abbreviated data called "check-sheets." Pusey rescued the data from Goodall’s home in Dar Es Salaam, Africa in the 1970s.
The data “was just sitting in open shelves,” being chewed by mice, and it was at risk of being destroyed, Pusey said. With Goodall’s consent, Pusey brought the stacks of chimpanzee narratives to the United States and finally to Duke when she joined the faculty as the chair of the university’s evolutionary anthropology program last year.
Goodall arrived in what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania in 1960. Since then she, along with field staff and students, have taken 18,000 days of meticulous notes on one of humans’ closest relatives in the wild. The data fills 22 filing cabinets with daily narratives on the feeding, mating and social behaviors of chimpanzees.
The data provides detailed descriptions of the first evidence of tool-use in animals other than humans. The observations document chimpanzee warfare and the need for males to earn social dominance, behaviors many scientists thought Goodall should not publish.
They thought the observations would be an excuse to say that human war and violence is inevitable, Goodall said. “I do think violence is part of our tendency,” part of human inheritance from chimps’ and humans’ common ancestor, she said. But the data also show true altruism, the willingness to help outsiders.
Seeing altruism in chimps and believing that characteristic is also inherited gives Goodall hope, she said, as do human intelligence, the resilience of nature and the indomitable human spirit. Her hope is for individuals, especially the younger generations, to work every day to help chimpanzees, other animals, each other and the planet.
After meeting Goodall and hearing about her activist program called Roots & Shoots, Dorian Hayes, 9, and Sohmee Kim, 10, were already planning play dates with friends to learn more about what they could do.
They listed examples like trying to get their parents to drive less and asking their teachers if they could start a Roots & Shoots program at their school.
“Jane Goodall is funny. She’s cool. I read about her before this, and now she’s my hero,” Kim said, adding that she was certain she would one day study several breeds of wild cats to see how their environments influenced their behavior.
Hayes said she too wanted to study animals but was not sure what type or in what regions of the world.
Aaron Sandel’s inspiration from Goodall’s visit came from seeing her “academic side,” he said. Sandel, a research associate in Pusey’s lab, along with other students and researchers, gave Goodall a tour of the research center that houses her data.
“You could see the scientist in her. You could see her first love was the chimpanzees and the data,” said Sandel, who graduated from Duke in 2010.
He added that Goodall seemed impressed with the available computer technology, and she was excited to show her colleagues in Tanzania what was being done with the data.
“Seeing that definitely highlighted for her the promise of her research to inspire global and high-tech analysis,” he said. She even seemed “a bit jealous,” because she understands that the data keep coming in, making the “research possibilities almost endless,” Sandel said. “It was a privilege to share and generate research ideas with her.”
Originally published in Duke Research Blog on March 29, 2011 by ay37.