Eric's Beijing Diary

The coffee bar gave me a VIP ticket to go hear Jane Goodall at the National Library. Tell you one thing, that lady can do better monkey calls than any junior high kid I have heard. Her work, as many of you know has involved the study of chimpanzees for almost fifty years. She talked a lot about the similarities between chimps and humans. But she also talked about the differences. Actually, she focused on one difference: language.

Jane Goodall really got her start when she saved money to go to Africa to visit a friend, and met Louis Leakey. Leakey managed to get her some funding to study chimpanzees for six months. Her objective, in that six months, was to discover something unique that would allow her to secure further funding. She did. She was able to observe a chimpanzee making a tool. Up to that point, it was thought that tool making was uniquely human.

I guess I had not been aware, before, of her association with Louis Leakey. Shows how much I keep up with that whole universe. But when Jane Goodall was talking about the differences between chimps and humans, I was reminded of something his son, Richard Leakey said, about the termites. He was talking about how the termites could build complex dwellings with naturally air-conditioned passages. And then Richard Leakey said, "But the termites cannot choose to build a cathedral instead." This, I think, is the difference between man and beast that is most significant. There is something in the heart of man that longs for God. As Augustine put it, "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts, oh God, are restless, 'till they find their rest in thee."