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.