WHAT PRIMATES CAN TEACH US ABOUT US
It all started with Snowflake. Not a snowflake, but an albino lowlands gorilla with that name.
Josep Call was a 15-year-old high school student in Spain, and wanted a summer job at the Barcelona Zoo. He had always loved animals, and went to the zoo’s curator to discuss his options for summer work. Back then, he wanted to become a vet and was told by the curator, “Then you will study dogs, cats, and cows.”
“I said, ‘No, I want to study tigers, elephants, and bears.’ If there had been orcas, I would have liked them too. At that point I had no interest in primates because they smelled bad.”
But he changed his mind when given the opportunity to observe Snowflake, then the most famous resident of the Barcelona Zoo. Call spent the summer observing Snowflake’s behavior: that experience and the reading of George Schaller’s book, The Year of the Gorilla, changed his focus. “I really enjoyed it. I was hooked and decided to do this for the rest of my life.”
A Ph.D. and research in four countries later, Call is Professor of Evolutionary Origins of Mind at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and a world expert on the development of cognition in non-human primates . . . and, by extension, also in the psychology of thinking by humans. His work straddles the line between psychology and zoology. A psychologist might wonder…
