When Jane Goodall arrived at Cambridge University to complete her PhD, she had already spent years in the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, doing work no one had done before.
Her committee told her she had done it wrong.
You can't name them, they said. Name them David Greybeard and Goliath and Fifi and you create bias. You'll anthropomorphize. You'll stop seeing them as subjects and start seeing them as individuals. That's not science.
Goodall pushed back. She had grown up with a dog named Rusty, she said, and Rusty had a personality — patience, mischief, love, stubbornness. She'd known it was true before she knew the word for it. No one had convinced her otherwise.
She kept the names. She kept watching. She kept forming what her committee called "unscientific" relationships with her subjects.
And then David Greybeard — gentle, quiet, the first chimp who ever trusted her — stuck a blade of grass into a termite mound, waited, and pulled it out covered in termites. He made a tool.
Goodall telegraphed her mentor Louis Leakey. His response became one of the most famous lines in science: "Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human."
She was right. Her committee was wrong. Her insistence on seeing them as individuals — on breaking the rules — was precisely what allowed her to see what no one had seen before.
The rules of a field are written by the people who came before. They don't know what you're about to find.
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