While Goodall accurately documented chimp behavior, the values she assigned to it after the fact are her own and have nothing to do with reality.

I have been privileged to know many cutting edge scientists. A few were brilliant in any field they cared to look into. Most were lost outside their own fields.

I don't think we can discredit the early work Goodall did. She's just trying to make sense of it now and, lacking the proper tools and getting sidetracked, failing.

She had no degree at all until after she began her research under Leakey's auspices. He sent her to Cambridge where she got her PhD without ever earning a Bachelor's degree.

So Goodall really has no complete advanced education. She went directly to her major field of interest without the background that most PhDs get with their undergraduate educations. While she is very knowledgeable in her specialty she has little structured knowledge in any other field.

I admire her greatly, but only for her field research and ability to keep at it for so long.

Even at our most brilliant.

and get out of their areas of expertise.

Susan Greenfield is an extreme example.

Also while this may be ageist, and certainly doesn't apply to everyone over 80, it may be that Goodall is less cognitively able than she once was.

In any case, I don't think this affects Goodall's credibility in her own field. Just another example of how scientists, just like artists, musicians, novelists, etc. are not necessarily wise about everything. We don't assume that a musician who spouts some nonsense about something outside of music thereby becomes a bad musician; the same is true IMO of scientists.

Two of my most admired scientists as scientists were the ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. But neither was exactly perfect outside their field. Tinbergen wrote some serious rubbish about autism, which probably contributed to the development of 'holding therapy'; and as for Lorenz, he was actually a Nazi before and during WW2.

Like this guy.

#1165: Lee Spetner

By virtue of being a physicist, one would think that creationist Lee Spetner would have some aptitude for aligning his beliefs on science to the evidence. No such luck. Spetner spent years in Israel attempting to search for evidence which “contradicted evolution” and favored his religious views. His conclusion was, remarkable, the one he had from the beginning: there was 365 originally created species of “beasts” and 365 birds, as detailed in his book Not by Chance, Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, which even by its title reveals a profound lack of understanding of evolution. In the book he also says that mutations do not create new information, which is needed to drive evolution, and that mutations are not beneficial as they lead to a loss of information. He also rejects archaeopteryx as a fraud – indeed, Spetner and Fred Hoyle were the creationist critics that really set the stage for later creationist dismissals of the fossil. Of course, Spetner and Hoyle based their objections on complete misunderstandings of an unfamiliarity with the data and relevant processes, tactfully concluding that the real scientists were not only mistaken, but frauds. The incidence, described here, should really have undermined all aspirations of credibility Spetner might once have entertained, but the creationists apparently never noticed.

http://americanloons.blogspot.ca/2014/09/1165-lee-spetner.html

And they make mistakes like we all do. We put these people on pedestals and "worship" them in a secular way. Then when they fail us in some manner we're bitter or angry.

The world, the human race and individual human beings are neither perfect, nor perfectible, IMLHO.