SUMMARY Jane Goodall’s passing marks the end of a transformative life that redefined our understanding of intelligence across species boundaries. Her decades of chimpanzee research revealed tool use, emotional depth and cultural transmission in non-human primates, challenging human exceptionalism. Her legacy now resonates with contemporary AI development, as both biological and artificial intelligence compel us to reconceptualize what constitutes a “mind” and expand our ethical frameworks beyond traditional categories toward compassionate coexistence with all forms of intelligence.
Jane Goodall died on October 1, 2025. Her passing marks the end of an extraordinary life that fundamentally transformed our understanding of intelligence, empathy and the boundaries we draw between species. Over six decades of dedicated research in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, Goodall revealed that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, are not simply animals driven by instinct, but beings with intricate societies, rich emotional lives and remarkable cognitive capabilities. Her groundbreaking discoveries about tool use, social bonds, communication and cultural transmission within chimpanzee communities forced the world to reconsider the stark divisions once assumed between human and animal minds. As we mark her passing, it feels both natural and necessary to reflect more deeply on her legacy and the profound questions it raises about the nature of intelligence itself, biological and artificial alike.
A Hegelian Question Revisited
Many years ago, as an undergraduate at Harvard College, I had the pleasure of studying Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel wrote extensively about civil society, the social realm that exists between the intimate sphere of the family and the formal structures of the state. Civil society, in Hegel’s framework, is characterized by what he called a “system of needs,” where self-interested individuals satisfy their needs through economic activity and social interaction. These individuals are fundamentally interdependent; their private interests can only be realized in relation to the interests of others, forming a complex network of mutual recognition, legal rights and ethical obligations.
For my final paper, I examined whether chimpanzees could form a civil society in this Hegelian sense. Drawing entirely on Goodall’s earliest book, In the Shadow of Man, which detailed the social hierarchies and behaviors she observed, I concluded that they could not. Chimpanzees, I argued, lacked the requisite complex structures of law, abstract moral reasoning, and what Hegel called “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), the shared norms and institutions that characterize genuine civil society. Their social organization, while sophisticated, did not exhibit the self-conscious ethical frameworks and formal legal structures that define human civil societies.
Looking back now, I recognize both the value and the limitations of that analysis. It was correct within its own framework—chimpanzees do not create legal codes or abstract ethical systems. But the very question reveals something about how we once thought: we measured other species primarily by their similarity to specific human institutions rather than recognizing the distinctive forms of intelligence and social complexity they possess on their own terms. This is precisely what Goodall spent her life challenging.
Goodall’s Revolution: Expanding the Circle of Intelligence
Before Goodall’s work, chimpanzees were often regarded as fundamentally and categorically different from humans, lacking intentionality, creativity, emotional depth and cultural transmission. The scientific establishment maintained strict boundaries between human cognition and animal behavior, with the former characterized by reason and consciousness, the latter by mere instinct.
Goodall shattered these assumptions through patient, empathetic observation. She showed that chimpanzees use tools, such as fashioning sticks to fish for termites, using leaves as sponges to collect water and even using stones as hammers and anvils. This directly challenged the prevailing belief that tool use was a uniquely human hallmark and a defining feature of our species. Beyond material culture, her observations demonstrated that chimpanzees experience a wide range of emotions that mirror our own: profound grief when a companion dies, exuberant joy during play, visible frustration when thwarted and tender affection in their relationships.
Perhaps most remarkably, Goodall documented cultural transmission within chimpanzee communities. Different groups develope and pass down distinct tool-use techniques and social practices that were learned rather than instinctive. This suggested not just intelligence, but culture itself existed beyond the human sphere.
These discoveries revealed that intelligence and sentience exist on a continuum rather than as exclusive human properties separated by an unbridgeable gulf. The implications were revolutionary. If chimpanzees possess intentionality, emotion and culture, then the bright line we had drawn between “us” and “them” was far more permeable than we had assumed. We were not alone in possessing minds that could think, feel, plan and create.
Ethical and Ecological Implications
This expanded view of intelligence carries profound ethical and ecological consequences. Goodall’s life work ignited global conservation efforts that recognized chimpanzees not as mere biological resources or objects of scientific curiosity, but as complex beings with intrinsic value, worthy of protection, respect and moral consideration in their own right. Her advocacy extended beyond chimpanzees to all great apes and ultimately to a broader ethic of environmental stewardship.
She shifted humanity’s moral framework toward a more compassionate and humble relationship with the natural world, recognizing that other species share fundamental aspects of our inner lives; our capacity to suffer, to form bonds, to solve problems and to experience the world meaningfully. If chimpanzees could grieve and love, could plan and create, then our treatment of them became a moral question of the first order. Her work provided both the empirical foundation and the emotional impetus for the modern animal rights and conservation movements.
The Parallel Challenge of Artificial Intelligence
Today, we face a parallel challenge to our conception of intelligence, this time from an unexpected direction, artificial intelligence. AI systems can now interpret and generate natural language with remarkable fluency, learn from vast datasets, solve complex problems across diverse domains, create original art and music and even demonstrate behaviors that appear creative or insightful. While these machines do not possess consciousness or emotions as biological beings do—at least not in any way we currently understand—their growing capabilities blur the boundaries between human and artificial cognition in ways that would have seemed impossible just decades ago.
This parallel evolution prompts philosophical questions deeply resonant with Goodall’s challenges to human exceptionalism:
- What truly defines intelligence?
- Is it consciousness and subjective experience?
- The capacity for emotion and empathy?
- The ability to learn, adapt, and solve novel problems? Cultural transmission?
- Self-awareness?
- The ability to use tools or create art?
Or is intelligence something more fundamental: perhaps information processing, pattern recognition and adaptive behavior in complex environments?
Just as Goodall forced us to expand our circle of moral consideration to include chimpanzees and other animals, the development of increasingly sophisticated AI systems may require us to develop new frameworks for understanding and relating to artificial minds. How do we ethically relate to non-human minds, whether they are biological, like chimpanzees, or synthetic, like advanced AI systems? What obligations do we have toward entities that can process information, solve problems, and perhaps in some sense “understand” the world, even if they lack biological substrates?
These are not merely theoretical questions. As AI systems become more integrated into critical domains, like education, healthcare, criminal justice, creative industries, we must grapple with issues of agency, accountability and the moral status of these systems. While an AI is fundamentally different from a chimpanzee, both challenge us to expand our categories and recognize forms of intelligence that don’t fit neatly into our traditional frameworks.
Intelligence as a Diverse Landscape
Jane Goodall’s legacy invites us to envision intelligence not as a single ladder with humans at the top, but as a diverse landscape spanning animals, humans and potentially machines, each with distinctive capabilities, limitations and ways of engaging with the world. Just as she revealed unexpected depth and nuance in chimpanzee minds, forcing us to recognize cognitive and emotional complexity where we had assumed only simple behavior, AI development compels us to reconsider what kinds of “minds” artificial systems might represent and what obligations these new forms of intelligence might create.
Neither biological nor artificial intelligence represents a static endpoint. Both are evolving trajectories that enrich our collective understanding of cognition, learning, problem-solving, and perhaps even empathy. Chimpanzee intelligence evolved over millions of years through natural selection; human intelligence represents a particular evolutionary path that emphasized language, abstract reasoning and cumulative culture; artificial intelligence represents an entirely new phenomenon, minds designed by minds, shaped not by natural selection but by human engineering and training on human-generated data.
This diversity challenges us to develop more nuanced frameworks for understanding intelligence itself. Perhaps we need to move away from asking “How intelligent is X?” toward asking “What kinds of intelligence does X possess?” A chimpanzee’s social intelligence and physical problem-solving may be extraordinary even as their capacity for abstract symbolic reasoning differs from ours. An AI system might excel at pattern recognition across massive datasets while lacking any subjective experience of what it’s doing. Each form of intelligence has its own profile of strengths, limitations, and characteristic ways of engaging with problems.
The Ethical Imperative: Beyond Intelligence to Care
Goodall’s work reminds us that intelligence alone does not define value, dignity or moral status. A being need not solve complex mathematical problems or create philosophical systems to deserve respect and compassionate treatment. Goodall taught us that the capacity to suffer, to form bonds and to experience the world meaningfully are what ground our ethical obligations, not mere cognitive sophistication.
This insight remains crucial as we navigate our relationships with both biological and artificial systems. We should extend protection and care to animals not because they are “almost as smart as humans,” but because they are sentient beings capable of suffering and flourishing. Similarly, as we develop AI systems, perhaps our ethical frameworks should focus not primarily on whether they achieve human-level intelligence, but on how they affect the well-being of humans and other living beings, how they distribute power and opportunity and how they shape the world we share.
Goodall embodied a profound humility before nature’s mysteries and an enduring commitment to cultivating empathy across all forms of life. She recognized that scientific understanding must be tempered by compassion, that knowledge carries ethical responsibilities, and that our treatment of other beings, whether chimpanzees in Gombe or chickens in factory farms, reflects our own moral character.
As we advance into an era where AI systems increasingly mediate our daily lives, influence our decisions and shape our social world, Goodall’s lessons remain vital. We must approach these new technologies with both critical intelligence and ethical care, asking not only “What can these systems do?” but “How should we live with them? What world are we creating? Who benefits and who is harmed?”
A Living Legacy
In honoring Jane Goodall, we remember not only her scientific achievements—the detailed ethograms, the patient documentation, the groundbreaking observations—but also her profound philosophical and ethical impact. She showed us that the boundaries we draw between species, between human and animal, between self and other, are more permeable and more arbitrary than we once believed.
The continuum she helped reveal, from chimpanzees to humans to machines, challenges us to broaden our moral imagination and build a future characterized by coexistence, understanding and reverence for all forms of intelligence and life. This requires moving beyond the hierarchical thinking that places humans at the apex of all value toward a more ecological and relational understanding of our place in a world filled with diverse minds and ways of being.
Her enduring gift is a world forever changed by the informed empathy she championed, a world that recognizes the grief of a mother chimpanzee, the complexity of social bonds in animal communities and the responsibility we bear as the species with perhaps the greatest power to shape the future of life on Earth. As we develop artificial minds and reshape the living world through our technologies, we need her wisdom, the wisdom of patient observation, of empathy grounded in evidence, of humility before complexity and of unwavering commitment to the wellbeing of all beings who share this planet with us.
Jane Goodall’s legacy can guide us as we navigate these uncharted territories, reminding us that whether we encounter biological or artificial minds, our response should be characterized by curiosity, respect, care and the recognition that intelligence, in all its forms, enriches rather than threatens our understanding of what it means to be alive and aware in this extraordinary universe.