Conference on chimps welcomes Goodall

? Jane Goodall, the world’s best-known observer of chimpanzee behavior, watched the chimps at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday while a crowd of zoo-goers gathered to watch her.

Goodall, 72, is in Chicago for a three-day conference billed as the first scientific meeting on how chimpanzees think – not just how they behave. Goodall, who revolutionized research on primates during the 1960s when she studied them at close range in Tanzania, is scheduled to give a sold-out lecture today at Navy Pier.

At the meeting, which ends today, 30 researchers are presenting their work on chimps’ apparent mental capacity for empathy, cooperative problem-solving and even deception. All the presenters have cited Goodall’s trailblazing work, said conference co-chair Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Fisher Center.

The current “Mind of the Chimpanzee” meeting has drawn 300 of the world’s leading primatologists to the zoo’s Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. It takes place against a backdrop of logging of forest habitat in Africa and growing international pressure to save chimpanzees and other apes, Goodall said.

“When I began in 1960, there must have been at least a million chimpanzees across Africa in 25 countries,” Goodall said. She said there are now only about 150,000 in 21 countries.

Goodall said a similar 1986 Chicago conference and its presentations on habitat destruction, illegal trade in chimpanzees for meat and treatment of chimps in medical research prompted her to switch from research to advocacy.