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Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why
- klyrs 3y agoI spotted the toxoplasmosis carrier! But seriously, don't tell the cats, this will only go to their heads
- 082349872349872 3y agocf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Rat_and_Dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Rat_and_Dragon
- jibbit 3y agoMy cat gets stuck on the roof three times a day, or possibly has trained me to climb a ladder and carry it down three times a day
- ghaff 3y agoI grew up in a house that was built into the side of a hill and it was easy for our cats to get onto the roof from where a roofline was near the ground. They'd regularly wander around and get up on the roof. And they would all quickly discover that the most effective way to get let in during the middle of the night was threatening to destroy the window screens if one of us didn't open a window.
- kagakuninja 3y agoAll my sliding door screens are shredded, because the cat used them to get us to open the door.
- MikusR 3y agoIt's the second one.
- pgeorgi 3y agoHow many skeletons of cats have you seen on roofs or in tree tops?
- smokeydoe 3y agoWouldn’t birds or other animals get to them first? It’s also common that injured animals will crawl somewhere hidden to die if they can. I’m willing to bet many cats have died in trees or falling from them.
- Sharlin 3y agoI'm quite sure that approximately no cat has ever died of thirst, hunger or exposure because it hasn't been able to get down from a high place. They will get over their cautiousness once they get hungry or thirsty enough. At most, a cat might fall badly and then die as a result of injury.
- jibbit 3y agoI’ve left it as long as I’m comfortable with.. about 12 hours in bad conditions. Not sure what else I can do
- timc3 3y agoThat’s not actually long enough. My cat got up a tree, which we couldn’t figure how to get up safely (very high on a slope with ground that was not stabile and nowhere near good access) Took about 20 hours before she came down. Just before the tree surgeon was arriving to help get her down.
- gumby 3y agoAs they decay after death the bones fall and scatter in the process.
- notfed 3y agoA key criteria for being a "perfect" apex predator is to be dumb. Smart apex predators rapidly lead to worldwide extinction events.
- tremon 3y agoNot sure about "rapidly". We've been working on it for thousands of years, at least.
- dylan604 3y agoBut we've rapidly advanced that progress within the last 100 years. All signs indicate that progress is gaining momentum, not losing it.
- beezlewax 3y ago1000s of years is very fast in evolutionary terms
- DangitBobby 3y agoBut we now grow the vast majority of our own prey which I don't think is normal.
- corndoge 3y agoyou can mitigate this by keeping your cat inside
- ajb 3y agoSounds like you need a cat ladder: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2019/12/where-cats-get-their-own-staircases https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2019/12/where-c... Edited to add: or you could just leave your actual ladder in place. All three of my cats have learned to climb a human ladder (albeit only a short one, with 5 steps) - both up and down
- ralferoo 3y agoMy cat was great at climbing ladders, but terrible coming down. She'd usually trip herself up in the third or fourth step coming down and end up hitting all the others on the way. It didn't stop her climbing the ladder to explore the loft every time I left the ladder there for more than a couple of minutes, but it made it so I always had to go up and check for her because she'd never come down by herself after she learned that it hurt.
- ajb 3y agoHmm mine can jump off after three or four steps, so maybe that's the limit
- miriam_catira 3y agoOne of the community cats in our area sleeps under our neighbor's solar panels on their 2-story house during the day, I've watched her walking around and ducking under them. I have no clue how she gets up there. Both that cat and another are regularly on our (1st floor) roof too, so they can sit under the bedroom window and interact with my indoor cat. On the other hand, years ago one of my indoor cats escaped and climbed onto the roof and just sat there mournfully crying until we figured out where he was and got him down. Heck, the indoor cat I have now got herself stuck on the side of a not-steep hill because the ground cover was too loose and I had to climb up and get her. I think it's just life experience, and indoor cats aren't the examples to judge the species by... any more than the avg sedentary human is when compared to people who actually exercise as much as we're all supposed to. ;)
- CommieBobDole 3y agoPerhaps it has taken the term 'apex predator' a bit too literally.
- Iulioh 3y agoBeautiful article, after stumbling in so much IA crap this article is so refreshing. But anyway, i would have loved more talk about the specific adaptation that makes cats perfect, i feel like the author was a little to vague and i was waiting for it ...
- ghaff 3y agoIt was interesting although it's really Felis catus (aka domestic cats) that is most incredibly successful and is basically the same as the European wildcat. Part of this is probably that they're very adaptable--while the article makes the statement that they're famously solitary other than lions--cats can actually be quite social at least when they're not hunting. I agree that the article doesn't really provide a lot of the why though I'm not sure anyone really knows.
- SoftTalker 3y ago> [domestic cats are] basically the same as the European wildcat. You see this in that cats will revert to a wild, feral nature if they are not acclimated to living with people very early in their lives.
- ghaff 3y agoGrowing up in the country, we had various cats wander in and out of our house over time. Some were very happy to adapt to the warm bed and regular meals thing and others never really did.
- dageshi 3y agoYes, I've seen feral cats that actively self domesticated themselves by sneaking inside our house and sitting on furniture as if they belonged there... they ultimately became house cats. And from the same set of kittens I've seen some that I've still never been able to get near.
- Sharlin 3y ago
- mpalczewski 3y agoThe way they carry themselves it's like they know it.
- ajuc 3y agoHow do we know it's because they are perfect as opposed to less adaptable? Let's say there's a species with better error correction of their genes - they would retain their shape better even if they are suboptimal. Especially given that: > And cats don’t evolve quickly. Compared with other groups, cats are slowly evolving animals.
- jmopp 3y agoWell, the cheetah crossed the Bering strait from North America, through Asia and into Africa, and survived two population bottleneck events in the process. Any other species with a similar lack of genetic diversity as a cheetah would have been driven extinct by that. Kind-of indicates that evolutionarily the cats got something right.
- jjtheblunt 3y agoisn't the inbreeding bottleneck in cheetahs a result of modern era hunting/angry farmers/poaching?
- jmopp 3y agoMolecular clock evidence indicates the population bottlenecks happened 100 000 years ago and 12 000 years ago — prior to modern-era hunting and farming. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5892392/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5892392/
- jjtheblunt 3y agoAwesome link and I didn't know the terminology to use to find it: thank you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ajuc 3y ago
- cogman10 3y agoAfter reading the article, the definition of "perfect" is that cats are all basically the same throughout the various cat species. IDK that I subscribe to that definition of perfect.
- civilitty 3y agoI think TFA meant to spell it purrrfect but the editor autocorrected it all before publication.
- gumby 3y agoIt’s a kind of evolutionary perfection in terms of optimality for an environment, including the loss of expression of unneeded features. Which is an idea of “perfection” that I don’t believe the scientist being interview believes; rather it was just a fun way to express a point.
- Aerroon 3y agoA better way of looking at it is that cats are stuck in a local maxima and can't get out. We know that it's a local maxima because humans exist. Ie cats could do better.
- gumby 3y agoI think her point is that the local maximum dictates size but not shape; the shape is appropriate for the maxima of different ecosystems. I just realised that she forgot purring, which only some cats do (e.g. housecats and snow leopards, yes; lions and panthers, no, but rather roar). Those are adaptations to local maxima.
- taftster 3y agoThis argues that humans are evolutionarily superior to cats. Which might have some sort of bias, given that you are (I would assume) human. That being said, I honestly don't know and so I'm asking; have we homo sapiens lived longer than cats in our current evolutionary form? Or are cats more "stable" and long lived than humans today? Because I think maybe it's possible from an evolutionary point of view, that maybe, the author is right. That cats are a better description of evolutionary success than humans. Cats might indeed be stuck in a local maxima. But maybe humans are too? I'm not seeing a lot of new variation in our species and we aren't really living much longer. Granted, humans populate better (even grossly) compared to cats, but that's maybe not the only marker of success. And we are seemingly heading towards self-destruction as a species, which is definitely not a marker of evolutionary success.
- bitwize 3y agoSo... cats are pretty much land sharks. If they had the encephalization to really process and grok that, I'm sure Obie and Dolley would be chuffed to know it.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoCats are perfect. An evolutionary biologist makes the claim and leaves you wondering. That's only a slight exaggeration. The article says they have adapted to fit a specialized carnivorous niche, which is why they all look so similar across different body sizes, and that nothing else can compete with them in that space although many species try, because it requires commitment. If you were hoping for a mechanistic explanation, that's all the article offers.
- gumby 3y ago> If you were hoping for a mechanistic explanation, that's all the article offers. Because evolution is a very big “just so story” that’s the best you’ll ever get from an evolutionary analysis. I think it came off as an arch conversation to make an interesting but not profound point. Which is entirely appropriate. The interesting corollaries are why there are such a similar niches in different environments, and why monitor lizards might have experienced such similar convergence.
- hinkley 3y agoA cat posing as an evolutionary biologist says it’s so.
- xwdv 3y agoCats are a perfect design really, so much that I expect some form of this type of creature to develop independently on other worlds, along with sharks.
- ghaff 3y agoWell, perfect as a quadruped carnivore. So at least somewhat specialized dietary requirements and no ability to do any complex manipulation of physical objects to the degree that a biped potentially can. But, as a design within those constraints, yes.
- xwdv 3y agoDo you really need any more than that? All you need in life is to move fast, eat, and not get eaten or killed.
- yieldcrv 3y agookay, I like reading and thinking about cat’s evolutionary prowess too but this had little substance to match the title
- strangesmells02 3y agoI think dogs are much smarter than cats.
- cja 3y agoI read that people often think this because cat intelligence is often measured by tests which better suit dogs
- quickthrowman 3y agoA domestic cat can easily survive in the wild. A domestic dog cannot. Dogs are better at interacting with human beings and performing tricks, I guess.
- strangesmells02 3y agoThey both die almost immediately in the wild. lol
- strangesmells02 3y agoDomesticated cats and dogs I mean.
- derstander 3y ago> A domestic cat can easily survive in the wild. A domestic dog cannot. This is not a measure of smarts. A juvenile human is also unlikely to survive unaided in the wild. Though, I guess some may actually truly believe that cats are smarter than children.
- seized 3y agoThat animal that needs to be looked after so they don't eat random turds off the ground....
- zabzonk 3y agopurfect?
- Michelangelo11 3y ago> There are lots of things that have tried to be cats—other groups of mammals that have evolutionarily converged on cats. Marsupials have tried to be cats. An extinct group of carnivorans called creodonts have tried to be cats. Weasels have tried to be cats. There’s all kinds of stuff that has tried to be a bit catlike in different ways—mongooses, things like that. But they kind of dip in and dip out of being cats, and they can’t really outcompete cats in their space. They haven’t lasted. All of those things that have tried to be cats, they do other things, too, and those things are fine. But there aren’t a lot of things that are around today that do a very good job of being a cat. Er... okay? And what exactly does this mean? I wish they defined "catness," in this sense, so we knew what it meant for a species to approach it. As it is, the above paragraph essentially tells us nothing.
- dist-epoch 3y agoI think they mean that cats are the apex predator in their respective weight category (small animals, big animals)
- retrac 3y agoTo catness I would add solitary. Without it we might include wolves. (Though some big cats are more social, they still mostly hunt solo.) I would also add (almost) exclusively carnivorous, otherwise we might include bears. It should also like to sit in cardboard boxes.
- slacka 3y agoCat fluff piece. Owl’s are far more “evolved” to their predatory niche. In addition, every land animal of prey are on are on the menu for wolves. Cat’s lack of social evolution greatly limits their choice. So much for perfection. Wolves have taking their social evolution one step further by allowing them to join forces, co-evolving with man. This cat biologist could use a lesson from a human evolutionary biologist.[1] There is a good chance we wouldn't be where we are today, if it weren’t for that perfect combination. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/dogs-humans-evolved-together-study-suggests-1c9924394 https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/dogs-humans-evolved-toge...
- nilslindemann 3y agoCats can be both solid and liquid, that is for sure close to perfection. https://youtu.be/yNwLfRpNHhI?feature=shared&t=844 https://youtu.be/yNwLfRpNHhI?feature=shared&t=844
- someplaceguy 3y agoThank you, that was hilarious! Spoiler warning: "Are cats liquid? I saw this question asked on the Internet. It was based on the common definition that a liquid is a material that can adapt its shape to its container. <Cue photos of cats fitting inside a jar, a basket, a wine glass, etc>. It seems to be the case." This moment at 35m25s was also priceless: "We have two past winners who have been kind enough to join us tonight. First, the 2008 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize was awarded jointly to one team who showed that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide. And that prize was jointly awarded to another team who showed that it's not." On a more serious note, I'm not sure if I will ever understand why many of the Ig Nobel prize winners got funding for their research...
- dist-epoch 3y agoAnd that's not even counting that somehow they got humans to provide for them without being food like other farm animals.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoAnd without having to work like dogs.
- hollerith 3y agoHaving to put up with the people in the house is experienced as work by most house cats :)
- 082349872349872 3y agofarmers who store grain do appreciate rodent control, but I don't know if cats consider that "work"
- kwhitefoot 3y agoThe cats do it because they enjoy it. Dogs do things to please their owners and because they are told and trained to.
- jl6 3y agoSimilar to carcinization? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- Exuma 3y agoThey are not immune to terminal tumors... which I found out several days ago :( Im absolutely shattered
- jonahhorowitz 3y agoI'm so sorry for your loss. Losing a cat friend is an awful experience.
- mitchbob 3y agohttps://archive.ph/o4xVy https://archive.ph/o4xVy
- 10g1k 3y agoFor God's sake, don't tell the cats this. We'll never hear the end of it.