Tag: Jane Goodall

• The little things

  Tungsten diboride (WB₂) is extraordinarily stiff and resistant to deformation and scientists have long suspected it could be a superhard material, meaning it scores at least 40 gigapascal (GPa) on a hardness test. This is important because diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, scores 70-100 GPa but because it is so expensive, industries often turn to cubic boron nitride (45-60 GPa) as a substitute in tools to cut metals and ceramics. Another superhard material in the repertoire could be a good thing. The problem is WB₂ is also brittle: like glass, it is hard to scratch but easy to shatter. This is because its atoms are so strongly bonded to each other that the bulk crystal would sooner fracture than a few bonds yield. So Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, researchers doped WB₂ with rhenium, a rare metal that has one more electron than the tungsten atom. This electron changes the way atoms pack together inside a crystal, coaxing the tungsten and rhenium atoms into leaving behind vacancies in the grid of atoms in a specific, repeating pattern. These vacancies were arranged in ordered pairs along particular planes inside the crystal that allowed the atoms to ‘glide’ past each other when they were stressed, effectively allowing the crystal to bend a little to absorb pressure rather than bottle it up and break catastrophically later. The team measured this version of WB₂ to have a hardness of 40 GPa and for added measure the rhenium also increased the temperature at which the crystal rusted by 700° C.

  By removing a few atoms the scientists effectively made the material a lot less brittle and better able to withstand heat. Little things like this are a reminder that what we know to be true at one scale or context does not necessarily hold true at all scales and contexts. And this is as true as an allegory as it is a scientific fact. Social media platforms as well as TV news in India are rife these days with unfounded speculation and unsubstantiated claims, many of which extrapolate from small pools of information without a modicum of good faith or introspection as to whether what we already know may not suffice to describe or explain the things happening around us. I am for people using AI models in some enterprises but, as with cryptocurrencies, most of their more visible users have pressed them in the service of newfangled Ponzi schemes and scams and, curiously, to mouth off about ‘revitalising’ physics research, so to speak, without stopping to think about what they do not know and, perhaps more importantly, the possibility that, to combine two famous lines associated with Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson, there is always more room in all directions and more — as Philip Warren Anderson wrote in 1972 — is different. The BS is often manifest as accounts on X.com purporting to have ‘solved’ quantum gravity or resolving open questions in particle physics, which may be a scam as well insofar as they come off as efforts to privatise such research and have it enter the hype cycles of venture capitalists.

  On a less dismaying note, new forms of organisation do not emerge because the fundamental laws of nature change but because, as with superhard tungsten diboride, groups of things can act together in ways that their individual members do not or because they have been exposed to new environments we have yet to encounter them in. There are other possibilities, too. For instance, these days I am regularly surprised by what scientists are finding out about things animals are capable of. Jane Goodall found chimpanzees use tools, and now it seems so can some fish, birds, and cows. I also understand that there are forms of emergence to be found in the study of societies, religions, history, and art. While it is obvious that the source of surprise always seems to be us not knowing enough while going in thinking we do, the prescient words of Anderson from that 1972 essay come to mind (let it be known that I will never tire of quoting him at length):

  The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.

  The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y.

  …

  The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron said “the rest is chemistry”), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to “only” chemistry, from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.

  In closing, I offer two examples from economics of what I hope to have said. Marx said that quantitative differences become qualitative ones, but a dialogue in Paris in the 1920’s sums it up even more clearly:

  FITZGERALD: The rich are different from us.

  HEMINGWAY: Yes, they have more money.

  2026.03.14

• On Jane Goodall

  Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as conservation experts writing on social media platforms have since her passing on October 1 called attention to the ways in which Goodall problematised conservation, not least by entrenching colonial ideas and attitudes and by defying empirical and ethnographic norms that, while they served her well, weren’t always in the interests of research as a collaborative enterprise.

  I’m writing this post to collect my own issues with her and her work in one place, for my reference; if it helps you too — great. (Note that I’ve already published an article in The Hindu alongside my colleague Radhika Santhanam on the specific ways in which Goodall pushed the boundaries of scientific research and their consequences.)

  Goodall’s work in Africa began in 1960, a time of British colonial influence and her narrative — rather the narrative of her — often fit the “White saviour” archetype, centring a White researcher as the sole protector of a “pristine” African wilderness. This narrative overlooked the contributions and knowledge of local communities. The media, but especially National Geographic, helped sharpen this image of a lone White woman braving the African jungle. While this was a popular framing, it downplayed the role of the Tanzanians who worked alongside her. Men like Rashidi Kikwale and Eslom Mpongo were vital to her project’s success, tracking the chimpanzees and gathering data, yet they received little public recognition.

  This oversight also perpetuated a colonialist trope that overlooked the role of local expertise in scientific discoveries — and one that arguably helped to sustain similar patterns of (mis)acknowledgement in this and other domains, including “parachute science” and “parachute journalism”.

  Goodall’s public statements on African population growth are somewhat relevant here: she suggested that a smaller human population would solve many environmental problems, a view with immutable racist undertones. It placed a disproportionate amount of blame on population growth in economically developing and under-developed nations while ignoring the much larger per-capita environmental impact of economically developed countries. Goodall also campaigned against bushmeat, a vital source of food for many communities, but not against the hunting of similar meat in Europe, which was referred to by the more prestigious and less stigmatised term of “game”.

  (Aside: Whataboutery, or tu-quoque, doesn’t generally make for a good argument because it attempts to distract from a particular point by qualifying its validity on a different and perhaps unrelated one. Here, however, the double standard is important. I’m not saying “don’t criticise bushmeat because you have game” but that “the principles used to criticise bushmeat are not being applied consistently to game hunting in Europe”, and that this inconsistency reveals a cultural and economic bias. In fact the very words are loaded with prejudice: “bushmeat” often carries connotations of being primitive, illicit, unsanitary, and desperate, and is associated with poverty and the unregulated hunting of endangered species like primates, while “game” suggests tradition, sport, and nobility, evoking images of managed estates, recreational hunting by the wealthy, and fine dining. Goodall’s language itself thus preframed the debate.)

  Her early inspiration from the fictitious character ‘Tarzan’, a White man who dominated the African jungle, has also been noted by critics as reinforcing a colonial mindset, propping up a romanticised view of an Africa devoid of complex human societies.

  In 1975, Goodall married Derek Bryceson, a powerful figure in Tanzania given he was the director of the country’s national parks as well as a member of parliament. She has said that without his political influence, Gombe National Park might not exist today. This implies what she left unsaid, that without Bryceson her own work may not have been possible, which in turn raises discomfiting questions about what privileges her marital union with Bryceson afforded her that were deprived to others.

  Bryceson also protected Gombe through high-level political interventions, which may have set a precedent for a conservation effort that banked on powerful individuals rather than on community-based initiatives. While Goodall’s later work did emphasise community involvement, it remains that the initial survival of her research site was tied to her marriage to a government official.

  Goodall’s fame also gave her a platform to speak on many issues. She has been an advocate for animal welfare and environmental protection — but she has also commented on topics far from her area of expertise. One of the most significant controversies surrounds her views on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Goodall has been a vocal opponent of crop biotechnology. Many scientists have criticised her for this stance stating that her claims are not supported by scientific evidence. I know her 2013 book ‘Seeds of Hope’ also contains factual errors as well as passages plagiarised from anti-GMO websites. But her celebrity status conferred undue weight to her opinions even when they contradicted the scientific consensus on GMO safety. The tragic irony is that GMO technology stands to benefit economically developing countries as well as endangered species the most. Goodall even expressed openness to the existence of creatures like “Bigfoot”.

  This problem is tied closely with Goodall’s attitudes towards her research methods, which were unconventional from the start. She lacked a formal university degree when she began her research and she developed her own techniques. One of her most famous, and controversial, practices was to name the chimpanzees she studied. At the time, scientific convention demanded that researchers use numbers to avoid emotional attachment and maintain objectivity. Naming the chimpanzees helped to portray them as individuals with personalities and emotions. This was a significant departure from the view of animals as unthinking subjects and was instrumental in changing the public perception of chimpanzees and other animals. Many scientists now acknowledge the existence of animal personalities, a shift that Goodall helped to pioneer.

  However, her methods also had a downside. Goodall’s close interactions with the chimpanzees, including feeding them, likely altered their natural behaviour. Some researchers have suggested that the “Gombe Chimpanzee War”, a period of intense intergroup violence that Goodall documented, may have been exacerbated by her provisioning of food. That is, the artificial food source could have increased competition and aggression among the chimpanzee groups. While her deep empathy for the chimpanzees was a strength in many ways, attributing human-like motivations and emotions to animals can sometimes lead researchers to misinterpret their behaviour. Her approach thus brought the inner lives of chimpanzees to the forefront but also raised valid questions about the rigour of her early work.

  Attributing complex human emotions and intentions to animals is a fraught enterprise. While both scientists and many non-scientists’ attitudes towards animal personality have changed in the years since Goodall’s first observations, with many experts now studying this aspect of the animal kingdom more actively, her early work sometimes lacked objective, behavioural descriptions and relied too heavily on subjective interpretation.

  Standardised methods exist for a reason — to provide a common framework within which scientists can compare each other’s notes and data — and defying them risks isolating findings and stunting progress. Science is also not static; its methods are in a state of (progressive) flux. Contrary to what Goodall did, however, change shouldn’t happen as outright defiance but in the form of a structured, evidence-based, and consultative process. Methodological innovation needs to be integrated in a way that maintains the comparability and integrity of scientific knowledge and keeps the door open to researchers’ attempts to reproduce each other’s work.

  A related question concerns researchers’ ability to generalise Goodall’s findings from Gombe to all chimpanzees. The population in Gombe is a single, small, and isolated group. The behaviour of these chimpanzees, but especially those influenced by artificial feeding and intense human observation, may not be typical for the species as a whole. Studies of other chimpanzee groups in different environments have also revealed variations in tool use, social structure, and levels of aggression.

  Goodall’s close interaction with the chimpanzees also created a significant risk of zoonotic disease transmission, from humans to chimps and vice versa. Humans and chimpanzees are genetically similar and thus susceptible to many of the same illnesses. There have been many polio and respiratory disease outbreaks at Gombe and park administrators have suspected humans to have been the source. This is why contemporary primatology enforces strict distancing protocols today.

  2025.10.18

• The billionaire’s solution to climate change

  On May 3, Bloomberg published a profile of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s 1t.org project to plant or conserve one trillion trees around the world in order to sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon every year. The idea reportedly came to Benioff from Thomas Crowther’s infamous September 2015 paper in Nature that claimed restoring trees was the world’s best way to ‘solve’ climate change.

  Following pointed criticism of the paper’s attitude and conclusions, they were revised to a significant extent in October 2019 to tamper predictions about the carbon sequestration potential of the world’s trees and to withdraw its assertion that no other solution could work better than planting and/or restoring trees.

  According to Bloomberg’s profile, Benioff’s 1t.org initiative seems to be faltering as well, with unreliable accounting of the pledges companies submitted to 1t.org and, unsurprisingly, many of these companies engaging in shady carbon-credit transactions. This is also why Jane Goodall’s comment in the article is disagreeable: it isn’t better for these companies to do something vis-à-vis trees than nothing at all because the companies are only furthering an illusion of climate action — claiming to do something while doing nothing at all — and perpetuating the currency of counterproductive ideas like carbon-trading.

  A smattering of Benioff’s comments to Bloomberg are presented throughout the profile, as a result of which he might come across like a sage figure — but take them together, in one go, and he sounds actually like a child.

  “I think that there’s a lot of people who are attacking nature and hate nature. I’m somebody who loves nature and supports nature.”

  This comment follows one by “the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists”, Rachel Cleetus, that trees “should not be seen as a substitute for the core task at hand here, which is getting off fossil fuels.” But in Bloomberg’s telling, Cleetus is a [checks notes] ‘nature hater’. Similarly, the following thoughtful comment is Benioff’s view of other scientists who criticised the Crowther et al. paper:

  “I view it as nonsense.”

  Moving on…

  “I was in third grade. I learned about photosynthesis and I got it right away.”

  This amazing quote appears as the last line of a paragraph; the rest of it goes thus: “Slashing fossil fuel consumption is critical to slowing warming, but scientists say we also need to pull carbon that’s already in the air back out of it. Trees are really good at that, drawing in CO₂ and then releasing oxygen.” Then Benioff’s third-grade quote appears. It’s just comedy.

  His other statements make for an important reminder of the oft-understated purpose of scientific communication. Aside from being published by a ‘prestige’ journal — Nature — the Crowther et al. paper presented an easy and straightforward solution to reducing the concentration of atmospheric carbon: to fix lots and lots of trees. Even without knowing the specific details of the study’s merits, any environmental scientist in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, i.e. the “Global South”, would have said this is a terrible idea.

  “I said, ‘What? One trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who’s working on this?’”

  “Everybody agreed on tree diplomacy. I was in shock.”

  “The greatest, most scalable technology we have today to sequester carbon is the tree.”

  The countries in these regions have become sites of aggressive afforestation that provide carbon credits for the “Global North” to encash as licenses to keep emitting carbon. But the flip sides of these exercises are: (i) only some areas are naturally amenable to hosting trees, and it’s not feasible to plant them willy-nilly through ecosystems that don’t naturally support them; (ii) unless those in charge plant native species, afforestation will only precipitate local ecosystem decline, which will further lower the sequestration potential; (iii) unafforested land runs the risk of being perceived as ‘waste land’, sidelining the ecosystem services provided by wetlands, deserts, grasslands, etc.; and (iv) many of these countries need to be able to emit more carbon before being expected to reach net-zero, in order to pull their populations out of poverty and become economically developed — the same right the “Global North” countries had in the 19th and 20th centuries.

  Scientists have known all this from well before the Crowther et al. paper turned up. Yet Benioff leapt for it the moment it appeared, and was keen on seeing it to its not-so-logical end. It’s impossible to miss the fact that his being worth $10 billion didn’t encourage him to use all that wealth and his clout to tackle the more complex actions in the soup of all actions that make up humankind’s response to climate change. Instead, he used his wealth to go for an easy way out, while dismissing informed criticism of it as “nonsense”

  In fact, a similar sort of ‘ease-seeking’ is visible in the Crowther et al. paper as well, as brought out in a comment published by Veldman et al. In response to this, Crowther et al. wrote in October 2019 that their first paper simply presented value-neutral knowledge and that it shouldn’t be blamed for how it’s been construed:

  Veldman et al. (4) criticize our results in dryland biomes, stating that many of these areas simply should not be considered suitable for tree restoration. Generally, we must highlight that our analysis does not ever address whether any actions “should” or “should not” take place. Our analysis simply estimated the biophysical limits of global forest growth by highlighting where trees “can” exist.

  In fact, the October 2019 correction to Crowther et al., in which the authors walked back on the “trees are the best way” claim, was particularly important because it has come to mirror the challenges Benioff has found himself facing through 1t.org: it isn’t just that there are other ways to improve climate mitigation and adaptation, it’s that those ways are required, and giving up on them for any reason could never be short of a moral hazard, if not an existential one.

  Featured image credit: Dawid Zawiła/Unsplash.

  2024.05.10