One prominent theory to explain this cat/dog disparity suggests that it’s the residual wildness of cats that makes them so special. This accounts for their infinite capacity for aloofness. Cats were domesticated rather recently — about 10,000 years ago when humans were busy inventing agriculture. And DNA tells us that the ancestor of all house cats is the African wildcat Felis silvestris lybica, which looks much like a domestic tabby.

We don’t know exactly how the human-cat connection was forged, but it’s likely that the process had input from both sides. Wildcats with genes making them less wary of humans got access to an endless supply of juicy rodents attracted by the food stores produced by agriculture. Our ancestors, in turn, encouraged and rewarded feline rodenticide — and an eternally fraught relationship was born.

It’s appropriate, then, that an evolutionary biologist should write the definitive book on the biology, ecology and evolution of the house cat. That would be Jonathan Losos, who, although best known for his studies of lizards, also owns three cats. Those cats, he found, were every bit as interesting as his lizards but had a marked advantage over the reptiles: Losos didn’t have to leave his home to carry out field work. The result, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa,” is a readable and informed exploration of the wildcat that lurks within Fluffy.

The first sign of a cat-human connection is the skeleton of an eight-month-old cat buried alongside humans in Cyprus about 9,500 years ago. The relationship developed quickly: Cats were fully domesticated in Egypt by 4,000 years ago. Impressively, given the ancient Egyptians’ lack of internet, their cats were even more viral and culturally indispensable than they are today: They were actually deified in the form of cat gods like Bastet and Mafdet. Despite this, being a cat in ancient Egypt had its drawbacks: Millions of them were killed and mummified as sacrifices to the gods. Meanwhile, with the help of humans, cats were spreading rapidly. By 2,000 years ago, presumably accompanying human migrants, they had spread throughout Europe and even reached China. At the same time, Egyptian paintings show cats of diverse colors and patterns far removed from the familiar tabby — the products of artificial selection by breeders craving novelty.

The final phase of selection, by us, on cats was very recent: the creation of recognized breeds — now about 75 — beginning in the 19th century. Hence today’s internetful of cat diversity: fluffy cats, skinny cats, tricolor cats, cats with floppy ears, hairless cats. But this is one area where dogs definitely eclipse cats; artificial selection on their wolf ancestor has, of course, produced a dizzying array of sizes, shapes and behaviors. Think Lhasa apso vs. Great Dane.

So, we come to a question every cat lover has surely pondered: Why are cat breeds so similar to each other while there are such big differences between dog breeds? Even the most outlier cats — Losos points to Persians — really aren’t all that different from other breeds.

The most obvious explanation is that many dog breeds originated as working animals. They have been selected, in both body form and behavior, to retrieve dead ducks, herd sheep, drag badgers from their holes, haul sledges and even deliver brandy to avalanche victims. Cats, on the other hand, can’t be easily trained to do anything at all, save listening for can openers, and tend to be haughtily resentful of any attempt to change that.

This difference is probably a legacy of each species’s wild ancestors. Except for a single species of wildcat — the lion — all the rest are solitary, including the African wildcat, the ancestor of domestic cats. In contrast, nearly all wild dogs, including the gray wolf (the ancestor of domestic dogs) are social, and so had already evolved to cooperate. Watch footage of African wild dogs hunting as a pack and you’ll be impressed by the degree of coordination, communication and division of labor among individuals. Dog breeders have simply capitalized on these preexisting propensities.

Losos imports some of his lizard interests to his cat study, devoting page after page to an analysis of the roaming behavior of cats, something we can now study using GPS tracking devices. The results are not surprising: Pet cats don’t wander far, while feral cats go farther — surely because Fluffy has a secure food supply at home while Macavity the Mystery Cat has to range further afield in pursuit of dinner. At risk of sounding catty, I should add that Losos sometimes gets carried away with the arcane details of these experiments — the professional hazard of scientists enamored with data — but this is just a minor distraction in an otherwise engaging and wide-ranging narrative.

Many mysteries remain. Did meows (emitted only by domestic cats) really evolve, as has been seriously suggested, to resemble the cries of a distressed infant, to convert a hardwired human response — “I must take care of an unhappy baby” — into an ingenious ploy to get tuna? What is the real difference in the average life span between a cat allowed to roam outdoors and one kept inside? The traditional answer is five vs. 17 years respectively, but as Losos notes, “I have not been able to find the basis for this claim, and the discrepancy seems extreme to me.”

And we remain abysmally ignorant about my two most pressing cat questions: why they wiggle their butts right before they pounce on prey, and why they “chatter” when they see birds. All they seem to be doing in each case is alerting their potential meal to its hazardous situation, surely not a good idea. One of the lessons of the book, in fact, is that mysteries abound in cat science. One of the largest is how many times cats were domesticated in the Middle East. Did house cats evolve in a single location, or in several places around the same time? We don’t know, and the genetic data is ambiguous.

Like all good scientists, Losos admits that are many questions that will keep cat research active for years to come. Writing as a confirmed, and long-standing, cat lover, I look forward to an ever-expanding understanding of catness and to luxuriating, in quiet moments, in the joys of an infinite supply of online images, memes and videos of that most charismatic and beguiling of all domestic animals.

Jerry A. Coyne, emeritus professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Why Evolution is True” and “Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.”

How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa