and partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden. He was previously a professor of biology at Harvard and a curator at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He has won awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the American Society of Naturalists.
Losos applied the "Page 99 Test" to his most recent book, The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Cat’s Meow is a discussion of hybridization between domestic cats (Felis catus) and their ancestor, the wildcat (Felis silvestris). It starts with a discussion of whether the domestic cat should really be classified as Felis silvestris catus given their ability to interbreed with wildcats (note that “wildcat” is the name of a specific species, not a generic term for any non-domesticated feline). I concluded:Visit Jonathan B. Losos's website.You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe. Whether we call domestic cats Felis catus or Felis silvestris catus doesn’t really matter—the scientific reality is that the domestic cat and the wildcat are members of the same biological species: they interbreed readily and their hybrid offspring can be hard to distinguish from non-hybrid members of either species. This lack of differentiation highlights how little the domestication process has moved cats from their wildcat roots.From that, I segue to the point that this is more than a semantic issue: the fact that domestic cats and wildcats interbreed makes it hard to study the evolution of the domestic cat. The reason is that we assume that the only traits that have evolved during domestication are those that differ between the two. But if the two interbreed, then changes that evolved in the domestic cat may be passed back to the wildcat. In other words, despite the great similarity of the domestic cat to the wildcat, the domestic cat may have evolved a lot during domestication, but most of those changes may now occur in the wildcat as well.
Page 99 is a very good representation of what The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa is all about. In a nutshell, the book considers the past, present and future of the domestic cat: where cats came from, why they do what they do, and what the future may hold. And, critically, it discusses how we know what we know, how the latest tools in science are combined with old-fashioned observations of cats going about their business to understand the lives of our household friends.
An important message of the book is that science is messy. On the one hand, we have amazing new tools—DNA sequencing, GPS tracking, isotopic analysis—that provide unprecedented precision and detail about the lives of animals. On the other hand, science is not a panacea. It’s not only hard work, but oftentimes the results are ambiguous. And sometimes nature confounds us. Understanding what happened in the past is particularly challenging. Until we invent time travel machines, our knowledge of the past is mostly based on inferences. History is like a murder mystery, trying to deduce what happened in the past, and sometimes there’s no smoking gun.
On the other hand, sometimes there are great discoveries. Who would have guessed that embedded in the purr of a hungry cat is the sound of a human baby crying? That’s right, cats are manipulating us—no surprise there—by tapping into our innate sensitivity to that particular sound. And did you know that researchers have been able to extract DNA from ancient cat mummies buried in temple catacombs deep underground, and that this DNA has shed light on the spread of cats through the world?
And, finally, there’s the cat of the future. Will we be able to find a way to cure cat allergies, a scourge that afflicts 15-20% of the world’s population? Gene editing might be the answer, or a vaccine shot given to cats, or maybe just a special dry kibble. And what about the feral cats now living on their own on every continent but Antarctica—will they eventually evolve into different species? But the question I’d really like the answer to is: why isn’t there a sabertoothed housecat?
--Marshal Zeringue
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