How Selective Breeding Made Pugs and Persian Cats Look Strikingly Similar
The educational channel Pointe of View spoke with biologists Dr. Abby Drake of Cornell University and Dr. Jonathan Losos of Washington University to learn more about their fascinating study that showed how selective breeding led to striking similarities between brachycephalic dogs and short-nosed cats. A convergent evolution without intention.
Their key finding, …is that the skull of a Persian cat is now measurably more similar to the skull of a pug than it is to its own ancestor the African wildcat. The pug, meanwhile, has drifted further from the wolf than toward it. Two species. Fifty million years of separation. One face. This is called convergent evolution…
Through painstaking examination, the pair learned that the skulls of a Pug and a Persian cat are essentially identical, except for one tiny difference.
Dogs and cats have essentially converged. They are skull-wise 95% identical. They are separated at this point mostly by one bone and a different set of teeth.
They attribute these common traits to those of human babies, specifically the cuteness that ensured care.
The reason, it turns out, comes down to babies, specifically, our ancient, hardwired inability to resist a baby face. Big eyes. Tiny nose. Round cheeks. Evolution spent millions of years making sure we’d find that combination irresistible, so we’d take care of our helpless infants. Then breeders spent two hundred years accidentally applying that same instinct to dogs and cats. The result is a pug. And a Persian. And the uncanny, slightly unsettling fact that they are now, in various ways, basically the same animal.
