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Biology What, biologically, is a cat?

Skorpio said:
A question borne out of lazieness, but do you know the ballpark similarity between human and cat DNA?
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i'm afraid i don't, they have more chromosomes than us so the naive ANI calculations would fall apart. they can't even cope very well with genomes from the same species where one has a long-ish insertion.

i guess we'd need to calculate some sort of evolutionary distance. not sure if any of the phylogeny software i use can cope with mammalian genomes but i might see if i can calculate this at work tomorrow, will try it for humans and related apes first cos we understand those relationships quite well. its possible that a genomic perspective is too coarse grained for this. would probably need to go via orthologous genes. if we have decent transcripts for a feline it should be possible to get some per gene difference stats. i could probably look this up but, am lazy.

Skorpio said:
Also I think the slight philosophical component of this question is important. What signifies a cat? Are we going by a srict biological definition (cat=feline) or are we going by an ideal concept of a cat (say a fully mature housecat). Considering where this question came from, I think this is a worthwhile lens.

Is a dead cat a cat? If so for how long? Is a fossil of a cat a cat?
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i think a dead cat is not a cat, stops being one as soon as its dead, whch is murky from what i understand. a fossil is not a cat either. they are both sort of within the wider concept of cat though.

i get confused about the normativity of meaning (if you want to get very annoyed one day look up saul kripkes reading of wittgenstein plus vs quus omg it nearly killed me).

is the set of all mature house cats the definition of cat? this sounds stupid but this is how they tried to approach definitions in logic. doesn't work mind.

i guess there is some relationship between the biological definition of a cat and the ideal concept, cos the ideal should surely encompass the biological. but cos a lot of the biological stuff we don't bring to mind when idealising a cat, that is a broader concept than the ideal. this makes sense in my head but i'm having trouble expressing it.

eta: did a quick google and found this:

www.theatlantic.com

One More Thing We Have in Common With Cats

Feline genomes are surprisingly similar to humans’, and could help us treat disease in both species.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

need to find the references
 
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mal3volent said:
ok so if two "outlying cats" produce a brand new species very similar to cats, does that make it inferior in such a way that you could theoretically exterminate it before its born? Just curious. Seems like calling it anything other than a cat would just be a technicality that wouldn't change the rationale at all.
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If evolution occurs and if distinct species are admitted, it follows that any emergent species must begin somewhere, in some specimen. This is largely hypothetical since it is often impossible and irrelevant to determine an exact delineation.

In practice it is a gradual process, but in the low-resolution game of semantics we must allow the corresponding transition by acknowledging some theoretical limit.

This is the age-old hen/egg question. The answer is, trivially, egg. Sure, it's impossible to determine where the species began, but every hen was an egg first... So whichever one was first, it was an egg before it was a hen. (Totally discounting the rooster now as always)
 
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I think some form of mouse, I've never went this far nor with anyone else by an external force but biological has to be first of all a dinosaur but i think some of a mutt like dog/mouse species. You'd say how similar a meerkat is to a squirrel or viceversa, so I do think a mouse.

meerkats imo are one of the most "ground" complex animals, we actually don't know shit all about meerkats other than we've edgy failed to sent some meerkat robots to spy ahaha and they saw it wasn't one of them! but again.. we don't know mostly anything and yet

EGGS DONT RAISE COLESTEROL just stop science pls lemme enjoy my boiled egg
 
chinup said:
the question is, at which point, during the gestation of a cat, does it become a cat. your definition of pregnancy from the other thread implies implantation is where you think a life starts, so prior to that, however, things can be implanted that have no chance, ever, of becoming a member of any species. so i think that is a bad place to put the line, because we'd have to include the precursors to placental cells (which can be implanted, and will give a positive pregnancy cells) with none of the cells that eventually develop into a fetus, as a cat. so i think it is at some point after implantation but before birth.
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It's tricky because there's not a single imaginary line to be crossed at which thing A turns into thing B, instead it's a gradual process. A cat zygote is not a cat foetus, a cat foetus is is not a kitten but is in the process of becoming one. So all you have at that stage is a potential cat.

I'd say however if one wants to draw a distinction it would be reasonable to draw it at brain formation. Without a central nervous system all any creature is is animate meat.
 
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The UltimateFixx said:
I'd say however if one wants to draw a distinction it would be reasonable to draw it at brain formation. Without a central nervous system all any creature is is animate meat.
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i think that's fair enough except for by that definition one of my cats is not a cat on account of having no brain.

after the phylogeny conversation with @Skorpio yesterday i did some digging and found this blinding paper:

journals.plos.org

Inferring the mammal tree: Species-level sets of phylogenies for questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation

This study presents a newly robust evolutionary timescale for ~6000 extant species of mammals, aimed at understanding their species-specific rates of diversification and distinct phylogenetic history. Ages and relationships in the tree of life are estimated with probabilistic confidence levels...
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org

i have only read the abstract and stared at figure 1. they do a lot of methods that i don't know anything about so i can't comment methodologically but i'm pretty sure if there was anything massively out in the phylogenetic tree (which they've rolled into a circle) an erratum would have been published. these evolutionary approaches are by definition based on partial information, we don't have DNA for every step in the mammalian evolutionary tree so its always an estimate.

basically things that are close together evolutionarily are close together around the edge of the circle. for the genomic comparison they subsetted homologous genes, i.e. genes that were present in the precursor to all mammals that have retained similarity in both genomically and functionally in all species.

its kind of hilarious to me that they are so blase putting humans in with old world monkeys, and they have dog-like species (bears, seals, otters). anyway. we are pretty far away from a cat evolutionarily, we are closer to bats, pigs, rabbits, and porcupines.

housekeeping note: i am now deleting OT posts, as we have finally managed to get onto scientific discussion. please save me the effort of deleting by keeping posts on topic. yes, its inconsistent, i was too tired to care before my holiday. maybe in a week i'll be too tired again. if my fellow mods disagree with this approach we will discuss in the modthread.
 
chinup said:
i think that's fair enough except for by that definition one of my cats is not a cat on account of having no brain.

after the phylogeny conversation with @Skorpio yesterday i did some digging and found this blinding paper:

journals.plos.org

Inferring the mammal tree: Species-level sets of phylogenies for questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation

This study presents a newly robust evolutionary timescale for ~6000 extant species of mammals, aimed at understanding their species-specific rates of diversification and distinct phylogenetic history. Ages and relationships in the tree of life are estimated with probabilistic confidence levels...
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org

i have only read the abstract and stared at figure 1. they do a lot of methods that i don't know anything about so i can't comment methodologically but i'm pretty sure if there was anything massively out in the phylogenetic tree (which they've rolled into a circle) an erratum would have been published. these evolutionary approaches are by definition based on partial information, we don't have DNA for every step in the mammalian evolutionary tree so its always an estimate.

basically things that are close together evolutionarily are close together around the edge of the circle. for the genomic comparison they subsetted homologous genes, i.e. genes that were present in the precursor to all mammals that have retained similarity in both genomically and functionally in all species.

its kind of hilarious to me that they are so blase putting humans in with old world monkeys, and they have dog-like species (bears, seals, otters). anyway. we are pretty far away from a cat evolutionarily, we are closer to bats, pigs, rabbits, and porcupines.

housekeeping note: i am now deleting OT posts, as we have finally managed to get onto scientific discussion. please save me the effort of deleting by keeping posts on topic. yes, its inconsistent, i was too tired to care before my holiday. maybe in a week i'll be too tired again. if my fellow mods disagree with this approach we will discuss in the modthread.
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That's super interesting seeing the relative distance between cats and humans.

I guess it answers the question if we are cats (no).
 
Felis silvestris :

1r2qXl1.jpg
 
anyone else think cats can sense when you're tripping?

not just your normal animal- on- edge stuff, like when supposedly high- strung ppl get bit more often... they act stranger than cats normally do.

or i was just trippin.
 
Lil'LinaptkSix said:
Oh, what a cat is.
I trust them. They trust me.
Now budah will still slice my fingers open like razors imma knock her ass out and cut her nails.
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I cut the claws of the feline I am a full time slave to when he is relaxed and sleepy or just waking up from a nap. There is a floral printed couch from the early 1970s that he has made into his scratching post.
 
From experience I can say: Cats are not dogs when it comes to long-distance walks

I was about to write the story when my tablet rebooted and I'm not going to start over but I had to carry a cat for 32 km once, so I know what I'm talking about.
 
nepalnt21 said:
anyone else think cats can sense when you're tripping?

not just your normal animal- on- edge stuff, like when supposedly high- strung ppl get bit more often... they act stranger than cats normally do.

or i was just trippin.
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100% definitely, no doubt about that at all

any creature you're close to can I'd say - but cat's are super-aware of it for sure
 
I remember thinking once on a acid hike that all life is just clumps of cells being told what shape to make by DNA. As for the actual spark in that clump of cells that makes it move and live, I've much more pondering to do lol. I do like the theories that call the heart a EM coil of sorts, but it gets a bit far fetched if ya read into it.
 
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