Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why | Hacker News Reader

Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why

scientificamerican.com

89 pointsLinuxBender85 comments

> 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.

Cat 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-toge...

Wolves might have co-evolved with humans, but domestic cats outnumber domestic dogs and they’ve barely done any evolving.

Owls are bird hardware with cat software

I've never had a weasel crap in my garden nor a mongoose piss all over the inside of my garage. I imagine those are the things the researcher is talking about.

I think they mean that cats are the apex predator in their respective weight category (small animals, big animals)

To 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.

Cats 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.

> 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.

A cat posing as an evolutionary biologist says it’s so.

My 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

I 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.

All my sliding door screens are shredded, because the cat used them to get us to open the door.

Perhaps it has taken the term 'apex predator' a bit too literally.

One 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. ;)

A key criteria for being a "perfect" apex predator is to be dumb.

Smart apex predators rapidly lead to worldwide extinction events.

Not sure about "rapidly". We've been working on it for thousands of years, at least.

But we've rapidly advanced that progress within the last 100 years. All signs indicate that progress is gaining momentum, not losing it.

But we now grow the vast majority of our own prey which I don't think is normal.

1000s of years is very fast in evolutionary terms

How many skeletons of cats have you seen on roofs or in tree tops?

Wouldn’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.

I'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.

I’ve left it as long as I’m comfortable with.. about 12 hours in bad conditions. Not sure what else I can do

That’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.

As they decay after death the bones fall and scatter in the process.

Sounds like you need a cat ladder: 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

My 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.

Hmm mine can jump off after three or four steps, so maybe that's the limit

It's the second one.

you can mitigate this by keeping your cat inside

Cats can be both solid and liquid, that is for sure close to perfection.

https://youtu.be/yNwLfRpNHhI?feature=shared&t=844

Thank 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...

After 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.

It’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.

A 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.

This 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.

> This argues that humans are evolutionarily superior to cats.

I can't follow this line of argument. From a housecat's PoV humans are a beneficial part of the local environment.

If I believed that "evolutionary superiority" were meaningful it seems cockroaches, which are far more highly evolved than humans (or body lice even more so) as they have undergone millions of more evolutionary iterations than humans (assuming ~300 Ky of humans and the relative lifespans). The comon domestic cockroach is far more adapted to the human environment than humans are!

> 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?

Good question. There are wild cats that look just like domestic cats (I saw some at the San Diego zoo and there was even a sign along the lines of "these look just like your cats at home [they did] but they will attack you the same as a leopard would"). Housecats are adapted to humans, and have done so over the roughly the last 12 Ky, since the development of agriculture. So as far as "form" goes it hasn't changed much for either species, but the cat has definitely evolved more than humans have. The last significant human evolutionary change, AFAIK, was the development of blonde hair around 4 Ky ago. I don't really understand where it came from.

Dogs have definitely evolved significantly since domestication.

BTW "maximum" is singular and "maxima" is the plural.

I 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.

It's like claiming humans are perfect because hobbits, elves, and giants all look more or less the same.

Or it would be if hobbits, elves, and giants actually existed.

Domestic cats are impressive because they're very successful predators who have somehow persuaded the dominant species that they need petting, pampering, feeding, cleaning out, and looking after.

Let's not be too dismissive of that.

As an achievement, it has probably never been equalled in Earth's entire evolutionary history.

I think TFA meant to spell it purrrfect but the editor autocorrected it all before publication.

yeah, that's not perfect, that's just scalable.

I can understand a DB vendor confusing scalability with perfection, but for an evolutionary biologist, there's no excuse.

The way they carry themselves it's like they know it.

Beautiful 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 ...

It 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.

Feral domestic cats form social organizations where adult males have their own territories, and defend them from other males, but territory fringes are neutral zones where cats tend to coexist and mingle more or less peacefully. But more interestingly, feral females and their juvenile offspring tend to form colonies (of typically closely-related individuals) where females share parenting duties and even bring excess kill to nursing, sick or infirm colony members.

I don't think any of the wildcat species has anywhere near this degree of social structure so it's quite likely a result of the (self-)domestication process which has obviously favored more social individuals. Given that kittenhood is the most social phase of the life of almost all felines, the shift of F. catus from a solitary to a more social lifestyle could be understood as a form of neoteny, like many other traits common to domestic animals.

> [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.

However, as I mentioned in a sibling comment, (female) ferals do form colonies, a type of social structure not seen in wild felines.

Growing 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.

Yes, 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.

"IA" ?

AI in romance languages.

Correct, i never get it right

It's pretty strange in mu mind ad IA or IA

So... 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.

I spotted the toxoplasmosis carrier! But seriously, don't tell the cats, this will only go to their heads

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Rat_and_Dragon

And that's not even counting that somehow they got humans to provide for them without being food like other farm animals.

And without having to work like dogs.

Having to put up with the people in the house is experienced as work by most house cats :)

farmers who store grain do appreciate rodent control, but I don't know if cats consider that "work"

The cats do it because they enjoy it. Dogs do things to please their owners and because they are told and trained to.

Similar to carcinization?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

How 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.

Well, 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.

isn't the inbreeding bottleneck in cheetahs a result of modern era hunting/angry farmers/poaching?

Molecular 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/

Awesome link and I didn't know the terminology to use to find it: thank you.

Deleted comment

They don't need to be optimal, they just need to be better than others.

I'm just not persuaded all the random things about cats are necessary and THAT's why they are preserved.

Is the catnip reaction necessary for example? If not - they aren't optimal, they are just good enough - like every other species.

They are not immune to terminal tumors... which I found out several days ago :(

Im absolutely shattered

I'm so sorry for your loss. Losing a cat friend is an awful experience.

https://archive.ph/o4xVy

For God's sake, don't tell the cats this. We'll never hear the end of it.

okay, I like reading and thinking about cat’s evolutionary prowess too but this had little substance to match the title

Cats 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.

Well, 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.

Do you really need any more than that? All you need in life is to move fast, eat, and not get eaten or killed.

purfect?

I think dogs are much smarter than cats.

I read that people often think this because cat intelligence is often measured by tests which better suit dogs

A 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.

> 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.

They both die almost immediately in the wild.

lol

Domesticated cats and dogs I mean.

That animal that needs to be looked after so they don't eat random turds off the ground....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com