Jonathan B. Losos (Harper Collins UK, out 11 May)
ON THE face of it, as Jonathan B. Losos admits early in his new book, it isn’t obvious why he would write about cats.
Losos, a biologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has spent most of his career studying the evolution of lizards. His research has explored the mechanisms driving this and, by extension, how evolution works in general.
Advertisement
This culminated in his 2017 book Improbable Destinies, which tackled a long-standing biological mystery: is evolution wildly unpredictable, or is it liable to produce the same solutions to the same recurring problems? Losos concluded that it is a bit of both.
All of which is fine, but why follow that up with a book on the biology and evolution of cats? As Losos explains in chapter one, he has loved cats since he was 5, when he and his mother adopted a Siamese called Tammy as a surprise for his father’s birthday. Despite being a budding biologist, it never occurred to him to study cats – they are too secretive, he says. Lizards seemed altogether more manageable.
Nevertheless, in later life, Losos discovered the burgeoning field of cat biology and used it as a hook for an introductory biology course he was teaching. In the process, he ended up going down the cat science rabbit hole, and The Age of Cats: From the savannah to your sofa (published in the US as ) is the result.
The book is a wide-ranging guide to the biology of cats, from their evolutionary origins and partial domestication to their behaviour and genetics. This diversity of material makes for slightly disjointed reading: the book would have benefited from restructuring to give it a better flow. But the individual chapters are all excellent. Losos is an engaging and often funny guide who explains the science clearly and with nuance.
The central premise of The Age of Cats is that domestic cats are something of a paradox. In many ways, they have barely changed from their wild ancestors: Losos describes an encounter on safari with an African wildcat, which he initially mistook for a domestic one. Yet modern cat breeds like Siamese are drastically different from anything found in nature. “How can cat evolution be simultaneously in slow and fast gear?” asks Losos. The answer, he concludes, is that “multiple realms of cats exist”. Pedigree cats, whose breeding is strictly controlled, aren’t the same as ordinary ones that breed with any other cat they please (unless they are neutered).
Along the way, Losos explores the archaeological evidence for when and where cats first started hanging out with humans. He digs into the genetics, which suggests that most domestic cats are only subtly different from wildcats – but these changes may include crucial ones such as a reduced fear response, enabling them to spend more time with us.
He also tackles the science of feline behaviour, including experiments showing that domestic cats meow differently to wildcats – perhaps to make their calls more appealing to humans. I particularly appreciated Losos’s effort, in a footnote, to devise a name for cat biology. Rejecting “felinology”, which combines Greek and Latin, he proposes the all-Greek “ailurology”.
In the final chapters, Losos asks where cat evolution is heading. Clearly, part of the answer is towards an increasing diversity of breeds, as people experiment to see what they can come up with. He suggests, tongue slightly in cheek, that we might breed a domestic variety with massive canine teeth like those of the extinct sabre-toothed cats.
But Losos’s big idea is that we should breed cats that don’t want to hunt. He highlights evidence domestic felines hunt significantly less than feral ones, so their impact on small animal populations has already been reduced.
He argues we could take this further, selectively breeding only the cats that hunt the least. This would reduce the environmental toll of these pets considerably, without the need to keep them indoors (which makes many owners uncomfortable).
Such cats would be totally dependent on their humans for food. This would be a big step towards true domestication, and perhaps the biggest change in cat biology in 10,000 years.
Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, UK
