Love in Animals
It's easy to make the case for animal emotions. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is bad biology to argue that humans are the only emotional beings. Emotions serve as a "social glue" to bond individuals with one another and to catalyse and regulate their social encounters. They also permit individuals to behave flexibly in a wide variety of situations. Humans are not the only animals that need to do these things. There is every reason to believe that emotions would have evolved in numerous other species. Charles Darwin himself advocated evolutionary continuity - that differences among species are differences in degree rather than kind.
"Wow, what does she see in him?" Recent research by Lee Dugatkin, a biologist at the University of Louisville and author of The imitation factor, has uncovered a phenomenon called "mate copying" in guppies that helps to answer this question and also seems to explain patterns of attractiveness in humans.
What does it mean to say someone's "attractive" or "beautiful?" How much control do we have over our assessments of beauty? These questions are receiving lots of attention from biologists and psychologists.
Animal love means different things to different people. Some people even believe animals don't truly feel love for one another. But, it's unlikely that love appeared in humans with no evolutionary precursors - no animal lovers.
