Tim Birkenhead on anthropomorphism and animal emotion

The Chronicle of Higher Education “Do Birds Have Emotions?”

Very interesting animal stories here, so grisly and some inspiring. I never knew about the cooperation between guillemots, but the emotional signs that Birkenhead describes make sense in the context of cooperation: the real purpose of emotions, it seems, is to balance out the costs and benefits of cooperation. This may be why a predator can be highly effective but hardly seems excited by success (or disappointed upon failure): emotions are an unnecessary impediment to direct, unequivocal adaptive behaviors. But in social groups behavioral choices are complex, ever-changing, and do so a new mechanism for weighing the costs and benefits of cooperating had to develop.