Connect the Dots # 5
This Saturday night episode of Connect the Dots features the life and times of three women who lived in close association with the natural world. This is also the time when BBC is celebrating the stories of 100 women from around the world. If you would like to explore more about the BBC project, you can click on the link given below:
The first dot is about the primatologist Dorothy L. Cheney who worked with the primates and studied the complexity of their thought process and social structures. She passed away recently on November 9. She was a spectacular scientist and the author of the book ‘A Primate’s Memoir’. She has undertaken numerous expeditions to understand how the primates understood the world around them. She discovered that they think in far more sophisticated ways than it was anticipated. She had an empirical approach to her research. She didn’t lock herself up in a laboratory with some caged animals instead she went to the wilderness of Africa and studied gorillas, baboons, vervet monkeys and other animals. She and her team recorded the sounds of the vervet monkeys and played it back to study the reactions of the primates. Dorothy L. Cheney and her team recorded the findings in their first book, “How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species” which was published in the year (1990) Dorothy strongly believed that you cannot study about the primates by looking at their dead bodies or the single animals brought home as pets. To have a deeper understanding of the primates it is essential to study them beyond their physical appearances and observe them patiently, witnessing their social interactions. Born in Boston, Dorothy L. Cheney had spent parts of her childhood in Malaysia, India and Netherlands. Her father was in the foreign service and the family kept moving from one place to another. Her father, Edward Cheney died in a plane crash in the Philippines in 1976. After her marriage to Robert M. Seyfarth who was a Zoologist, her life changed. He had plans to go to South Africa to study the baboons. Dorothy L. Cheney recollects that moment when she decided to take the zoological plunge along with her husband. “I thought, ‘What the hell, this could be fun for a year or two,’ so I decided to put off law school and join him,” she said in an interview. (NYT) She received a PhD in Zoology at Cambridge in 1977. Dr Cheney talked about the animals in a 2007 interview with NPR. “They seem to know a huge amount about each other’s social relationships and each other’s dominance ranks,” she said, “so the social complexity, on the surface anyway, appears to be very similar to that of a very complex human society, and yet they’re not humans. (NYT)
The second dot examines the life and times of Jane Goodall. A regular personality that is featured in the university curriculum in India and abroad. This dot features details from the interview she gave to the Guardian in May 2018. She is 84 years old and she is seated in the office of the Jane Goodall Institute in London, wearing a VR headset watching the special series ‘The Wild Immersion’, a VR project to raise awareness about the natural world. Jane Goodall talks about the ultimate aim of this project is to make the kids interested in the wild. She is also afraid that this VR video will be the only way the children will connect with the wild because most of the animals are on the verge of getting extinct. In the year 1986, she stopped her operations at Gombe and now is a full-time activist attending awareness programmes, giving lectures and being part of the campaigns around the world. She confesses to the fact she has little time to watch movies, but she did watch the Planet of the Apes series because the production house consulted her on the chimp behaviour.
to get their expert opinion and feedback. Her magnum opus took almost a decade to complete.
We stand in awe before these three women who took the road less travelled. What kind of life lessons can we acquire from these three lives?
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