Goodall in Chicago for chimpanzees talk

CHICAGO (AP) -- 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.
"She's very important," one woman told two 6-year-old girls she'd brought to the zoo. "She did a lot of very exciting things."
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.
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