Cats have a special bond with people, especially with women

Jennifer Viegas writes in Discovery News that there is a special bond between people (especially women) and their house cats. The cats attach to humans as social partners, not just as providers of food.

THE GIST

• Relationships between cats and their owners mirror human bonds, especially when the owner is a woman.
• Cats hold some control over when they are fed and handled, functioning very similar to human children in some households.
• While the age, sex and personality of owners affect these relationships, the sex of the cat doesn't seem to matter.

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The bond between cats and their owners turns out to be far more intense than imagined, especially for cat aficionado women and their affection reciprocating felines, suggests a new study.

This theory would seem to suggest that the practice of adopting cats as pets probably was a result of the earlier human association with domesticated wolves. The association with wolves had a very practical effect of making humans better hunters. Cats were less clearly useful, but required that agriculture develop. Only after agriculture developed was the use of cats to protect stored crops from rats important. The adoption of cats, then, would be useful in the female practice of farming and storing the food. This might explain why men tend to be more social with dogs (hunting) while women seem to be more social with cats (farming.)

Cats attach to humans, and particularly women, as social partners, and it's not just for the sake of obtaining food, according to the new research, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Behavioural Processes.

The study is the first to show in detail that the dynamics underlying cat-human relationships are nearly identical to human-only bonds, with cats sometimes even becoming a furry "child" in nurturing homes.

[...]

"Food is often used as a token of affection, and the ways that cats and humans relate to food are similar in nature to the interactions seen between the human caregiver and the pre-verbal infant," co-author Jon Day, a Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition researcher, told Discovery News. "Both cat and human infant are, at least in part, in control of when and what they are fed!"

For the study, led by Kurt Kotrschal of the Konrad Lorenz Research Station and the University of Vienna, the researchers videotaped and later analyzed interactions between 41 cats and their owners over lengthy four-part periods. Each and every behavior of both the cat and owner was noted. Owner and cat personalities were also assessed in a separate test. For the cat assessment, the authors placed a stuffed owl toy with large glass eyes on a floor so the feline would encounter it by surprise.

The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other's behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

[...]

While cats have plenty of male admirers, and vice versa, this study and others reveal that women tend to interact with their cats -- be they male or female felines -- more than men do.

"In response, the cats approach female owners more frequently, and initiate contact more frequently (such as jumping on laps) than they do with male owners," co-author Manuela Wedl of the University of Vienna told Discovery News, adding that "female owners have more intense relationships with their cats than do male owners."

Cats also seem to remember kindness and return the favors later. If owners comply with their feline's wishes to interact, then the cat will often comply with the owner's wishes at other times. The cat may also "have an edge in this negotiation," since owners are usually already motivated to establish social contact. So cats really are social animals and not solitary parasitic denizens in our human households. My old joke that our cat rules the household with an iron paw -- it's true!

For more information on cats, see my earlier blog post Where do cats come from?

See also A History of the Domestic Cat.

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Addendum 11:38 AM CST

An earlier Discovery News article entitled Pets Vital to Human Evolution presents the theory that the evolution of human beings was strongly aided by the unusual practice of humans taking in and adopting animals.

Dogs, cats, cows and other domesticated animals played a key role in human evolution, according to a theory being published by paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University.

The uniquely human habit of taking in and employing animals -- even competitors like wolves -- spurred on human tool-making and language, which have both driven humanity's success, Shipman says.

"Wherever you go in the world, whatever ecosystem, whatever culture, people live with animals," Shipman told Discovery News.

For early humans, taking in and caring for animals would seem like a poor strategy for survival. "On the face of it, you are wasting your resources. So this is a very weird behavior," Shipman said.

But it's not so weird in the context something else humans were doing about 2.6 million years ago: switching from a mostly vegetarian diet to one rich in meat. This happened because humans invented stone hunting tools that enabled them to compete with other top predators. Quite a rapid and bizarre switch for any animal, Shipman said.

"We shortcut the evolutionary process," said Shipman, who published her ideas in the latest issue of Current Anthropology and in an upcoming book. "We don't have the equipment to be carnivores."

So we invented the equipment, learned how to track and kill, and eventually took in animals who also knew how to hunt -- like wolves and other canines. Others, like goats, cows and horses, provided milk, hair and, finally, hides and meat.

Managing all of these animals -- or just tracking them -- requires technology, knowledge and ways to preserves and convey information. So languages had to develop and evolve to meet the challenges.

Tracking game has even been argued to be the origin of scientific inquiry, said Peter Richerson, professor emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

One of the signs that this happened is in petroglyphs and other rock art left by ancient peoples. At first they were abstract, geometric patterns that are impossible to decipher. Then they converge on one subject: animals.

"Think what isn't there: people, landscapes, fruit and edible plants," said Shipman. This implies that animals and information about animals was of great importance."Think what isn't there: people, landscapes, fruit and edible plants," said Shipman. This implies that animals and information about animals was of great importance.

This theory would seem to suggest that the practice of adopting cats as pets probably was a result of the earlier human association with domesticated wolves. The association with wolves had a very practical effect of making humans better hunters. Cats were less clearly useful, but required that agriculture develop. Only after agriculture developed was the use of cats to protect stored crops from rats important. The adoption of cats, then, would be useful in the female practice of farming and storing the food. This might explain why men tend to be more social with dogs (hunting) while women are most social with cats (farming.)

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Addendum 03/11/2011 4:23 PM CST
This is also quite interesting. National Geographic has a video on the development of cats.

I found the video in a link from an AP article on cats. Here is a very interesting part of that AP article:

Dr. Leslie Lyons leads a research team studying the genetics of the domestic cat at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. In the interview excerpted here, she explores the origins and domestication of the house cat:

AP: Feline geneticists say cats "domesticated themselves." What does that mean?

Lyons: We say cats adapted themselves to us rather than the other way around. As humans became farmers, we started a civilization. And civilization has grain stores and refuse piles, two things that draw rodents. Cats started coming closer to households to eat the rodents, filling the niche that humans developed. Cats were the first to come close to humans. We tolerated them because they ate the rodents, and cats tolerated humans because we provided food.

Q: How is this different from the domestication of dogs?

A: Dogs were domesticated much longer ago when we were hunter-gatherers. Unlike cats, we actively domesticated them. Probably we took wolf cubs and tried to tame them, raised them to be companions and to use for protection. Horses are like that too, we had to go out and capture and tame them before we could use them.

I'm not sure that humans actually domesticated wolves. One story I have heard is that wolves began to come close to human encampments in order to eat from the trash found there. Wolves who had a natural tolerance for association with humans came in closer and closer so they ate better and survived better than did those wolves who ran whenever a human came into sight.

That would suggest to me that east Asian wolves became dogs by domesticating themselves, and humans began to care for their puppies. It intrigues me, though, that in both cases the present dogs and cats exist because as humans began farming they created ecological niches for dogs and cats to fill.

I guess I should look at the history of domesticating chickens, goats, cattle, sheep and llamas also.

Were humans evolved to be runners?

The New York Times offers an interesting speculation on the evolution of the human body.

The scientific evidence supports the notion that humans evolved to be runners. In a 2007 paper in the journal Sports Medicine, Daniel E. Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, and Dennis M. Bramble, a biologist at the University of Utah, wrote that several characteristics unique to humans suggested endurance running played an important role in our evolution.

Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.

Why would evolution favor the distance runner? The prevailing theory is that endurance running allowed primitive humans to incorporate meat into their diet. They may have watched the sky for scavenging birds and then run long distances to reach a fresh kill and steal the meat from whatever animal was there first.

Other research suggests that before the development of slingshots or bows, early hunters engaged in persistence hunting, chasing an animal for hours until it overheated, making it easy to kill at close range. A 2006 report in the journal Current Anthropology documents persistence hunting among modern hunter-gatherers, including the Bushmen in Africa.

“Ancient humans exploited the fact that humans are good runners in the heat,” Dr. Bramble said. “We have such a great cooling system” — many sweat glands, little body hair.

There is other evidence that evolution favored endurance running. A study in The Journal of Experimental Biology last February showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running.

“The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest nonrunning relatives,” Dr. Bramble said. “It’s the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe.”

Springlike ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don’t have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles’ worth of glycogen in their muscles.

And the gluteus maximus, the largest muscle in the human body, is primarily engaged only during running. “Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk,” Dr. Lieberman said. “There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running.”

This makes a good case, and it is well-known in medical circles that a human in training can run down a horse given several days. The horse can always sprint away at first, but the human continues to run and catches up when the horse stops to rest. After a day or so, the horse will simply stop running away and the human catches it. The human, if trained, is capable of greater long term endurance than the horse does.

Interesting, no?

Blue eyes: result of a recent mutation which has been identified

Originally all human beings had brown eyes. Then, sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, there was a mutation to "the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin." Jeanna Bryner at MSNBC reports the story.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism. [Snip]

Eiberg [from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.] and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages. [Snip]

...we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

I find this fascinating.

Now, just to satisfy my curiosity, when will the Chinese geneticists tell us about the history of the epicanthal fold that many people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent have. But that is probably not something that can be pinned down to a single mutation so easily, and I'd guess that it's a little older than the blue-eye mutation. both are a direct result of the migration of human beings north out of Africa, as described in Nicholas Wade's outstanding book Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.

Oh, wait. We don't need to find out those things, because the fundamentalist theological schools have already told us - those things are the results of decisions by the "Intelligent Designer." Such things are much to complicated for us mere human beings to understand, so we make a mistake trying. It is for us to do nothing more than worship the Intelligent Designer, obey the superior church leaders and tithe so that they can buy better cars and bigger mansions. Why would we mere sheep have to know about such things that are so far above our God-given station?

[Makes me want to contribute to some genetics research somewhere, just to spite the Discovery Institute and Mike Huckabee.]

A history of the domestic cat

Nicholas Wade, Science Writer at the New York Times, provides a further history of cats. This time it is focused only on house cats. Like his previous story, this report is also based on DNA analysis. [The previous publication of general history of cats is found at Where did cats come from?.]

June 29, 2007

Study Traces Cat’s Ancestry to Middle East

By NICHOLAS WADE

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village. And from these five matriarchs all the world’s 600 million house cats are descended.

A scientific basis for this scenario has been established by Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and his colleagues. He spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat in places as far apart as Scotland, Israel, Namibia and Mongolia. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats and of many house cats and fancy cats.

Five subspecies of wildcat are distributed across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into five clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues said in a report published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say. The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, a type that is passed down through the female line. Since the oldest archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, which could account for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

Cats are “indicators of human cultural adolescence,” he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering, their way of life for millions of years, to settled communities.

Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. But three years ago a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an 8-month-old cat buried with its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The Mediterranean island was settled by farmers from Turkey who brought their domesticated animals with them, presumably including cats, because there is no evidence of native wildcats in Cyprus.

The date of the burial far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with the new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context, the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East, and probably in the villages of the Fertile Crescent, the belt of land that stretches up through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and down through what is now Iraq.

Dr. Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of the cat family and a co-author of the Science report, described the domestication of the cat as “the beginning of one of the major experiments in biological history” because the number of house cats in the world now exceeds half a billion while most of the 36 other species of cat, and many wildcats, are now threatened with extinction.

So a valuable outcome of the new study is the discovery of genetic markers in the DNA that distinguish native wildcats from the house cats and feral domestic cats with which they often interbreed. In Britain and other countries, true wildcats may be highly protected by law.

David Macdonald of Oxford University, a co-author of the report, has spent 10 years trying to preserve the Scottish wildcat, of which only 400 or so remain. “We can use some of the genetic markers to talk to conservation agencies like the Scottish Natural Heritage,” he said.

I am not sure if Mr. Wade just has a thing about cats or if he gets a journal of research reports that includes such cat research. No matter, I am enjoying his reports.

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If you find this interesting, you will find Nicholas Wade's book Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors about DNA research into how human beings evolved absolutely fascinating. DNA evidence shows that there were two different wave of human exodus out of Africa, first by Homo Erectus about 1.8 million years ago, becoming Homo Erectus and Neanderthal Man. While these groups were tool using, they did not have full speech of the kind demonstrated by Homo Sapiens. Full speech developed in Africa within the last hundred thousand years, and the first Exodus of true humans from Africa to the rest of the world occurred roughly 50,000 years ago.

DNA analysis suggests that they left Africa by a route from what today is the Horn of Africa and moved into what is today Yemen. The analysis also shows the routes taken by various groups from Africa to Australia, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Geology and Climatology show what routes they took. Evolution theory suggests that the two evolutionary pressures that caused the differentiation of the races were climatic uncertainty and (the more important one) the standards of beauty each society developed. Both the Asian race and the Caucasian race developed lighter skin because of the need to get more Vitamin D from the shorter periods of sunlight in the far North. Very interestingly, the DNA results tend to agree with the studies of language development over the same periods of time and in the same places.

The book is highly readable and easy to follow, although there is so much in it you will take your time going through it. This is not the early history you may have read before the year 2002 when the human genome was mapped. Suddenly we have entirely new sources of information to compare against anthropology, geology and linguistics among other disciplines, to the real benefit of all the sciences. We also have Nicholas Wade, a writer who can understand how this all fits together and explains it clearly. It's well worth your reading time.

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Other suggested books are

• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now
  by William H. Calvin
  and
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New Edition
  by Jared Diamond.
• The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
  by Karen Armstrong.

These books, written independently, will provide a relatively coherent story of how current human society came into being. Start with "Before the Dawn" first, though. It puts the other three into a much clearer perspective and should make them more enjoyable to read.

Unfortunately, Cats do not play a prominent role in any of them. If house cats could read, they would demand the attention which everyone and every cat knows they deserve.

What does it mean to be a Human Being? What's unique?

Sharon Begley gives us some recent findings on how Humans evolved into what we are today. It is a rather lengthy article in Newsweek (Mar 19, 2007 edition), and entirely worth reading and rereading.

The title tells what the story is about. What has science found recently, outside new sets of bones and the geology in which they are buried, that provides us now information about the evolution of Homo Sapiens out of the the last creature that we know from DNA that we share as an ancestor with Chimpanzees.

Whatever that creature was, the DNA of both Homo Sapiens and of Chimpanzees have been changing for approximately 5 to 6 million years since then. Humans have learned to walk upright freeing our hands for other tasks, to talk, and for some reason, we have lost our fur. This last is particularly interesting, and the timing, if not the reason, is indicated in the DNA of lice.

It seems that there are two different types of lice which afflict humans. One is the head louse, an affliction we share with our cousin the Chimpanzee, since the environment the head lice live in is the fur or hair on our bodies. Humans, however, are also afflicted by a second type of louse. [No, not my ex-wife or her boyfriends.]The second type is the misnamed body louse.

The environment the so-called body louse lives in is human clothing. DNA shows that only 114,000 years ago the head lice and body lice shared a common ancestor. The body lice appeared when a new environment opened up for them to live in, and that new environment was human clothing (or exo-fur, as I explain to my impatient dogs when I have to put on my clothes and shoes - my exo-fur and paw-covers - before I can take them outside. Need to translate these things into words they might understand, you know.) But that is how louse DNA can point to the time that people began wearing clothes.

Apparently also, there were two waves of human and human-related migrations out of Africa. The first was of Homo Erectus, who left Africa and spread across Eurasia sometime between 1 and 2 million years ago. The second was the wave of Homo Sapiens who left Africa and spread to Eurasia about 66,000 years ago. DNA strongly suggests that Homo Erectus died out and was not an ancestor to Homo Sapiens. See the article for the details.

I'm going to skip writing about the much more complicated human ancestral tree that DNA is suggesting, and skip directly to what fascinates me most.

A curious thing about early Homo species is that they looked quite human early on. "By 600,000 years ago everyone had a big brain, and by 200,000 years ago people in Africa looked like modern humans," says archeologist Richard Klein of Stanford. "But there was no representational art, no figurines, no jewelry until 50,000 years ago. Some kind of cognitive advance was required, probably in language or working memory. But since size hardly changed, the brain change that produced behaviorally modern humans must have been in structure."

The source of such structural changes must come, like every aspect of our physiology, from genes. Combing the genome for genes that emerged just when language, art, culture and other products of higher intelligence did, researchers have found three with the right timing.

The first, called FOXP2, plays a role in human speech and language, but it must do something else in other species, because the decidedly nonverbal mouse has a version of it. Using the standard molecular-clock tactic, Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute estimate that the human version of FOXP2 appeared less than 200,000 years ago—about when anatomically modern humans stepped onto the world stage—and maybe as recently as 50,000. If so, then it is only humans as modern as those in the last diaspora out of Africa who developed advanced, spoken language. Another gene with interesting timing is microcephalin, which affects brain size. It carries a time stamp of 37,000 years ago, again when symbolic thinking was taking hold in our most recent ancestors. The third, called ASPM and also involved in brain size, clocks in at 5,800 years. That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving.

As I recall (and don't ask my source) the first ornaments found in a human grave were placed there about 36,000 years ago. Ornaments such as small items of jewelry have no practical purpose. They have to be symbolic. Note the relationship to brain-size above.

Then let's look at what the human race was doing 6,000 years ago. This was the period of the Sumarian civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley where the Sumarians built their cities of Ur, Erich and Kish, created the first writing (Cuneiform script) built the Ziggarats and developed the first law and impressive literature and myths. Karen Armstrong also points out that the major religions all began to develop at this time.

One last thing. If humans learned to speak only after Homo Erectus spread out into Eurasia but before the Homo Sapiens moved out of Africa about 66,000 years ago, then the Humans had a massive advantage over Homo Erectus. They also ate much the same food, so they needed the same lands. It is very likely that they battled over that land, and the social, speaking hominid found it relatively easy to defeat the non-speaking hominid. That would certainly explaian the disappearance of the Homo Erectus. It would be like a modern army with radio communications going up against one without radios.

You will notice that I persist in using the terms "suggests" and "Points to" rather than saying "tells us this was the cause and result." That's because this science is simply associating what the bones tell us, then what the bones associated with the geology tells us, together with what the DNA studies are saying. These associations from different fields of science could each be purely coincidence. But All of them? Are these all just accidental associations that have no common causes? I strongly doubt that.

But I can't prove it on the evidence given - so far.

Sure is fascinating, though, isn't it? What do we get next year? We'll just have to wait and see, won't we.

We are to be saved from the Jewish Pharasee teachings of Evolution!

Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges (R), chairman of the retirement committee in the state house has exposed the conspiracy to teach Evolution as a Jewish plot to destroy Christianity! Josh Marshall has the story.

Oh, and did I mention that the same sect of Jewish Pharasees is also selling the false notion that the Earth revolves and also that the Earth circles the Sun?

"It seems that the actual author or analyst, I guess you might say, was a fellow named Marshall Hall, the husband of Bridges campaign manager, Bonnie Hall. Then they sent it out over Bridges' signature to state legislators in Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And they didn't stop by letting the cat out of the bag on evolution. They also blew the whistle on all this hokum about the earth revolving around the Sun.

Barnes' memo pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Now, it was down in Texas that things started to spin out of control. Warren Chisum (R), House Appropriations Committee Chairman in the Texas state House, took the memo from his friend Bridges and used the House operations system to distribute the memo throughout the legislature. (Here's Chisum's cover letter and the Bridges' memo.)

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape."

These people are elected legislators who are voting on laws to apply to all of us, and they are being driven by an irrational heresy of Christianity. They seriously fear that American society in general is out to destroy their beliefs - and they are correct. Society cannot function when a sizeable number of the members adhere to this insanity.

Where did cats come from?

The NYTimes has a fascinating science article that describes the family tree and prehistoric migrations of cats.

January 6, 2006
DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE

Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species as sea levels rose and fell.

About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.

Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.

Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness. One scheme divided the family into Big Cats and Little Cats. Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.

Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.

Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.

Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.

The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.

Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New.

Chris Wozencraft, an authority on the classification of carnivorous mammals, said the new cat family tree generally agreed with one that he had just published in Mammal Species of the World, a standard reference. Dr. Wozencraft, a taxonomist at Bethel College in Indiana, based his classification on fossil and zoological information, as well as on DNA data already published by Dr. O'Brien's laboratory.

Cat fossils are very hard to tell apart, because they differ mostly just in size, and the DNA data emerging over the last decade has helped bring the field from confusion to consensus, Dr. Wozencraft said.

Despite their evolutionary success, most of the large cats are in peril because their broad hunting ranges have brought them into collision with people. "With the exception of the house cat and a few other small cat species, nearly every one of the 37 species is considered endangered or threatened," Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien write in the current Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

Fewer than 15,000 tigers, cheetahs and snow leopards remain in the wild, they estimate, and pumas and jaguar populations have been reduced to about 50,000 each.

It is especially interesting that the DNA evidence ties back very closely to the limited fossil evidence, and corresponds to the history of the rise and fall of oceans that geologists have determined.

This is a story which could never be told by the anti-evolutionists. Of course, it also confirms my suspicion that house cats are the dominant species on earth. They just let us humans THINK we dominate the world, as we work to provide food and shelter for the cats.