Animal and Human Emotions in an Evolutionary Context

He specialises in molecular biology, forensic DNA, and evolution.As a science communicator and blogger, Lents focusses on the effects of evolution on the human mind and body.He has authored two popular science books, the first of which, Not So Different, is reviewed here.Of late several popular science books have been authored that discuss proposed similarities shared by animals and humans.These books, in one way or another, discuss the contentious and interrelated topics of the emotional lives and cognitive capacities of social animals.Although the topic is not new, having been addressed by Darwin in 1872, research is increasingly providing convincing evidence for complex animal cognition, and as Lents argues, for complex social lives that manifest in rather human-like ways, such as compassion in gorillas and chimps, jealous rages in tigers, greed in wolverines, and guilt both in domesticated dogs and wild wolves.The aim of this book is not simply to enumerate these similarities but to hypothesise why they should exist.Perhaps taking a cue from Dobzhansky's (1973) famous essay, Lents contends that the reason is evolution.Not So Different focusses on what Lents proposes are, in brief, shared biological underpinnings encoded by genes, some with deep evolutionary roots, that are