Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, Kibale National Park, Uganda
unconsciously imitating their gestures. Internal validity—showing that X and only X caused Y—can be laborious to achieve. “To have perfect internal validity is super compelling, and you can go way down a rabbit hole designing that. But then at the end you ask, ‘Okay, but what is that actually saying about the nature of human relationships? What does it say about what children were evolved to do in the world?’” And that’s why it’s instructive to study our closest relatives in the wild. After spending so much time among free-living chimpanzees, Dunphy-Lelii returned from her sabbatical this past January newly ambivalent about working with, or even visiting, chimps in captivity. “In the wild, chimps are never still,” she says. “They travel all day and have extremely rich lives. In captivity, chimps have no place to go. I don’t want to see them like that.” Eager to catch up on the reading and writing she couldn’t pursue in her tent, Dunphy-Lelii took a leave of absence this past spring and settled in Austin. She began to revise her standard courses and develop a new Upper College seminar on wild chimpanzee social cognition, which she expects will attract students from psychology, biol-
ogy, anthropology, philosophy, and the artificial-intelligence branch of computer sciences. Asked if she’d like to return to the field site in Uganda, DunphyLelii is unequivocal. “I’d love to,” she says with a grin. She’d be thrilled by the opportunity to observe chimps day after day, she says, to dive more fully into juveniles’ understanding of third-party relationships, and even to clamber back into her cozy tent. But a short-term visit isn’t what she has in mind. “If I had the opportunity, I wouldn’t wish to go back for fewer than four months,” she says. It takes that long to learn the chimpanzees’ names, of course. “And it takes that long to ease back into the simplicity—and the beauty—of living in the forest.” Elizabeth Royte ’81 is a science journalist who has written for Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, and the New York Times Magazine, among other national publications. She is the author of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash; Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water; and The Tapir’s Morning Bath.
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