In cliche-land, certain types of tales we tell somehow became known as "human interest."

As opposed to ...?

Perhaps we should be writing for orangutans, one of my personal favorite non-humans, along with heffalumps, woozles, mooses and dogs, but for the moment, we do tend to be rather human-centric, seeing that Koko the gorilla -- OK, all the great apes are other favorites -- may be able to sign for ball, banana/fruit/snack or friend, and hug Fred Rogers -- yet another of the greatest of apes -- yet cannot, as far as we know, fumble four quarters into our newspaper vending box.

Me, I'd give Koko a subscription, if nothing else, just to let her read the comics, Dear Abby, and sports, like most of us. But times are hard. Cough it up, Koko.

These thoughts are brought to you by another redundancy: human error.

To err is human: That's pretty much the definition of error. Nature, red in tooth and claw, sticky in excresence, frequently ungainly and let's face it, filthy and disgusting, cannot truly err, can it? I mean, whether you believe the star-speckled sky had been laid by the moon like chicken eggs, or whether they only just happened, we homo sapiens remain the only raft-builders and conceptual fools, though we may not, according to leggy Jane Goodall, be the only dreamers of dreams.

Tuesday's Bama Art House movie, "Jane," utilizing lush mostly previously-unseen footage by National Geographic photographers, quietly, gracefully showed that compassion, empathy and folly, in staggeringly unequal measures, are shared by our fellow apes. Her vast heart and patience and immersion are on full display, alongside nearly euphoric sequences of her long tan legs, so lovingly photographed by Baron Hugo van Lawick -- and yes, that is an actual human's name -- that even if you didn't know he later became her husband and father of her only child, you could easily guess the camera had fallen in love with her. She jumps, climbs and sits "like patience on a monument" among the Gombe chimpanzees, until our near-relatives gradually accept the hairless ape's presence. She's ecstatic when one sneaks into camp, to steal bananas. For a few moments, "Jane" becomes Chaplin-esuqe, with villainy straight out of "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp."

Then greed quickly arises, leading to outbursts of noise and aggressive display, themselves precursors to violence. An outbreak of polio among a more southern group devastates the chimps. A war leads to violent deaths.

War. War, huh! Good Goodall y'all, isn't good for chimps, either. Not good so much, but natural.

Which brings us to another thought: Don't jump on a bandwagon simply because it's labeled natural. Poisonous plants, insects and snakes are natural. Lava is natural, as are mosquitoes, poop and fire ants, and I'm not inviting any of those to my picnic. War, it seems, is natural.

The sweet-faced Goodall -- still kicking, at 83 -- lets hurt show, subtly, gradually, beneath her mostly stoic facade. In the film, she notes up front that, when she first went into the field at 26, she had no science background, no degrees. Her studies were later criticized for the way she anthropomorphized the chimps, ascribed to them behaviors and emotions thought of previously as exclusive to humans. She gave them names, somewhat whimsical, possibly stirred by memories of the chimpanzee-like doll named Jubilee, given to her in childhood by her father; it still sits on her dresser in London. Flo, Flint, Fifi, Freud, Frodo -- who attacked "Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson, when he visited Gombe -- David Graybeard, Goblin and so on. Other researchers used numbers. After seeing this flick, you'll remember Flo and Flint, their faces, their characteristics, their eventual fates. Chances are you'd have a bit harder time recalling to mind Casefile B stroke Zed stroke 31Niner.

And the thing is, her interference, her insistence on living among the chimps to study them, did cause or add to perils. Some of the hairiest fights broke out in part because Goodall insisted on piling on the bananas, the better to lure the thieves in closer. While she personally didn't bring the polio to the chimps, some human did. The observer changes the observed, at the Schrodinger theoretical level, but in this case, on literal planes as well.

Still, it's overall good, Ms. Goodall. She used her image -- news stories of the day continually focused on her blonde hair, her English-rose complexion, her legs, almost as obsessively as did the filmmaker-lover-hubby Hugo -- to bring in funding when it threatened to dry up. She sacrificed years with her son to continue field studies. Her marriage cracked in part because she couldn't give up Gombe; Hugo couldn't give up his work either, as one of the world's greatest nature photographers, working largely on the Serengeti plain. You'd think the teaming of passionate naturalists would be a, well, natural, but that just goes to show you, lesson number, what, four now? That don't nobody know nothin' about nobody, when it comes to the nature of the heart.

Goodall wrote and spoke and continues to stump on behalf of the natural world. Her all-too-human error-filled work not only uncovered human-like chimp behaviors, but created a vaster sympathy among we millions who didn't have her patience or drive, who wouldn't sit in the wild on a bet. It's a bit like the dichotomy of zoos: They cage wild animals in unnatural captivity, but by bringing humans into closer connections, create an empathy unlikely from greater distance, a caring that can lead to conversations, and conservations.

When Alexander Pope wrote "To err is human," he meant not to exclude the rest of the awkwardly natural world, but to point out that we're all flawed. The proverb goes on: "To forgive, divine." So to admit to our flaws, and see them in others, and yet persist in trying to understand, to get along, brings us closer to what some mean by god, or love, or grace.

Pope, though, like most writers, stole; in this case, he probably stole from Seneca a Latin phrase, turning it more sunny side up: "Errare (Errasse) humanum est, sed in errare (errore) perseverare diabolicum," which shakes out "To err is human, but to persist in error (out of pride) is diabolical."

My favorite author Unknown said "One definition of insanity is repeating the same errors, while expecting different results." F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1936 Esquire magazine "The Crack-Up," following his, well, crack up: "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

So what we can learn here: Learn. Function even after, or especially because of, mistakes. Alter course from egregious error. That should be of interest, to humans.

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0201.