It's not clear that catnip's nepetalactone has anything to do with sexual functions (that's not very solid speculation by researchers, and less well founded tha

It's not clear that catnip's nepetalactone has anything to do with sexual functions (that's not very solid speculation by researchers, and less well founded than for, say, valerian); it doesn't seem to correlate with gender or neuter status; even if it did, it doesn't exist in the wild in order to affect cat populations in the first place (catnip grows wild in only a tiny fraction of domestic cat or the original wildcat ranges and varies dramatically across _Felidae_ anyway); and even if it did affect sex in the wild, wildcats are not particularly social creatures in the first place and the rare 'cat colony' is largely a human creation; and even if it did affect cat colony, 'group selection' like that of species requires unusual and very delicate conditions, otherwise it just collapses into individual selection on 'selfish genes'.