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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Although not mentioned in the article, I've heard that Egyptians developed a thing for orange cats (supposedly they look like the sun) and embarked on an intensive breeding program to make them for temple uses. Subsequently Vikings became intrigued by these orange cats on the basis they are easy to see on the deck of a ship (iron age hi-viz vests), and thereby spread them around everywhere (because Vikings).

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The orange cat coloration (technically "red" or "ginger") is actually due to a sex-linked gene on the X chromosome, not deliberate Egyptian breeding programs. Archaeological evidence doesn't support ancient Egyptian preference for orange cats - their art depicts cats of various colors. Viking-era cat remains show diverse coat colors emerged naturally through genetic drift rather than intentional selection. The spread of orange cats likely occurred through natural genetic distribution alongside human migration patterns.

From my understanding, orange cats are almost exclusively male.

They also have one shared brain cell.

Source: My family is owned by a marmalade tom.

The interwebs say cats have XY sex determination, and that the orange color gene is on the X chromosome and is recessive. So a male cat with an orange X will be orange, but a female cat needs both X's to be orange to be orange (a female cat with one orange X and one non-orange X will likely show as tortoise shell or calico). Assuming equal probability (P) of each X chromosome being orange so we have a chance at modelling, the males will have P chance of being orange, and females would have P * P chance. Assuming cats have evenly distributed sex,

If P is 90%, 90% of males are orange, and 81% of females are orange; and 47% of orange cats are female. If P is 10%, 10% of males are orange, 1% of females are orange, and ~ 91% of orange cats are male, ~ 9% are female.

There was a discussion, here, some time ago, about how the orange gene was isolated.

> They also have one shared brain cell.

Confirmed. Very early cooperative multitasking.

I have an orange cat, and there are definitely days when it's not his turn.

I hear this anytime orange cats come up in conversation and I don't quite get it - I had an orange cat when I was in high school and he was a very clever cat. I now have an orange female cat and she's got a big personality - very take-charge in her demands.

agreed it's a confirmation bias, I've had many cats orange and not and they're all different, there's nothing uniquely quirky about orange ones.

I wouldn't call it "confirmation bias," more like loving humor.

Cats, in general, are less intelligent than dogs, but they are loaded with instincts, so they can act both smart and stupid, at the same time.

I'd be interested to see how that is measured... dogs and cats are significantly different, but I'm not sure I'd call cats less intelligent. Case in point with mine - she figured out how to weaponize my electronic stand-up desk as a way to get me to stand up so that she could steal my chair. Another figured out how to open doors so he could go wherever he wanted in the house. No, they don't go around sniffing out mines or earthquake victims - they instead have convinced people to give them a total life of leisure.

There's another part to their intelligence I wish we could study... multiple times I've had cats show up on my front porch as though they somehow know my house is safe. Example: several years ago a cat knocked on my door and by the time we got things detangled we understood that it lived several blocks away and likely had been in a really abusive situation. Somehow that cat understood that if came to my house it would be safe, whereas my neighbors on either side would have at best ignored it. I've now had this happen multiple time such that there is some kind of pattern - pheromones?

Did you ensure that this cat didn't try elsewhere, first?

Hypothesis: you have (or had) at least a cat at home, while your neighbors didn't, and a cat showing up on your front porch may think "better here because at least a cat can live here, even if it triggers a territorial conflict".

Yeah I guess that's part of my curiosity and how one might set up a test case - did they come to my house because they detected the cat hormones at my house?

I think it's a wash personally, cats are far better problem solvers and have better comprehension of temporal and spatial displacement, but dogs are far more socially intelligent, intuit disposition and intent of even other species very quickly.

That said they must be fairly well matched intellectually or we wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.

> orange cats are almost exclusively male

This is also equally true for black cats as the genetics works the same for them too.

However, it's more that "female cats can be tortoiseshell" and thus the ratios will get somewhere around a 2:1 ratio of male orange cats to female orange cats.

Assume that you've got 50% tortie females, 25% orange female, and 25% black female... and 50% orange male and 50% black male. You can run Montecarlo simulations on that but it will always be the case that orange (and black) cats are predominantly male because of the smaller number of options.

There's also the increased visibility of the "trouble puffs" on a male orange cat (compared to black male) and so conformation bias of "yep, that's an orange male cat."

> They also have one shared brain cell.

You will appreciate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/

I had an orange female cat. It was on Bali. I think they are quite common there.

Only about 80% are male. This is as opposed to torties and calicos, which always by necessity have two X chromosomes (as the patchy pattern results from X-inactivation [1]). The very rare male torties are XXYs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

You've got probably thousands of years between these two events, which undoubtedly contains a lot of feline history.

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