Today’s felids, Sadie and Zoë, come from two readers of this website: John Danley and Lori Anne Parker. John and Lori Anne live in Nashville, where she is an artist and he a musician (several of John’s public performances are on YouTube). They describe their cats:
At first their relationship was inauspicious and warlike: Sadie—the older of two with greater house tenure—flattened her ears and hissed at Zoë’s every approach. Nonetheless, a discovered mutual interest eventually acted as an unexpected catalyst for Carnivora solidarity. Beyond a shared lineage of Maine Coon alleles, Sadie and Zoë often collude via literary and gastronomic pursuits in an attempt to satiate their appetite for philosophical materialism and reconstituted albacore tuna. Being of militant, neo-secular feline dispositions, no unfalsified argument or abstract concept of a metaphysical metazoan has been able to dissuade their New Felis catusism. This week they are engaged in vigorous discussions of A Natural History of the Senses, Why Evolution is True, and The Joy of Philosophy. Zoë, the more cheerful of the two, brought the third book to Sadie’s attention, reminding her that just because a cat is existential doesn’t mean she has to refrain from long cycles of hearty purr.
Figure 1. Zoë (l.) and Sadie (r.)
Fig. 2. The reading room, ready for kittehs. A selection of philosophy, science, atheism, and tuna is on offer.
Fig. 3. Voracious kitteh reading. (They seem to be ignoring WEIT.)
They’re having trouble digesting pleiotropy.
“They seem to be ignoring WEIT”
Only because mice are not to be disturbed when they are attempting to better themselves. It’s an ethical thing thus, christian cats won’t understand.
Cats will be cats; so let’s hope they don’t wet on WEIT. I had a cat who wet on a rare topographic map that I had used to mark important geologic localities. I had to explain the stain and smell to geologists for years afterwords.
Heh heh, are you a Cat-holic?
That’s cute and cat-e and all. But I’m bemused that they shrimp on their Cat-astrophe theory.
The observation that exponential divergence predicts that no cat-like worldline follows another even in seemingly dog-matic determinism. It is a basic explanation for why the contingency of cats span the world and why they end up being such strange attractors.
For our a-catommodationist readers out there: this also debunks any ideas of dogs ruling anything.
They’re probably ignoring WEIT because, being cats, they already know evolution is true and, being cats, they wouldn’t bother arguing with creationists (for which WEIT is an excellent resource) but would just bat them around as cat toys.