What an evolutionary biologist got wrong about cats
What an evolutionary biologist got wrong about cats
Every week on “Make Me Smart” we ask an expert, celebrity, author or other prominent figure: “What’s something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about?” It’s called the Make Me Smart question.
Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist and author of “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa,” tells us what he got wrong about our furry companions:
I used to think that cats meow to each other to communicate, and so that when my cat meowed to me, I took it as a great honor that I was being treated as a fellow cat. But I now know that’s wrong. Scientists have shown that cats rarely meow to each other. They do make other sounds to communicate. They hiss and they growl, but they don’t meow. Rather, what happened is that during the process of domestication, cats evolved the behavior of meowing so that they could tell us what they want, so that we could attend to their every wish and desire.
You can share your answer to the Make Me Smart question by leaving us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email a voice memo to makemesmart@marketplace.org.
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