Quote from: KirklandSignature on Mar 09, 2013, 09:26:01 PMThat's true if they're released back into the "wild". If humans just f**ked off, thousands of cats would starve to death after a week or two being trapped indoors.
Thankfully most cats have cat flaps... the average dog can't leave the back garden under its own volition. Also, appropriate prey for dogs isn't so numerous as for cats, so once the various byproducts of human civilisation are taken out of the equation, I think they'd have a tough time.
In any case, the question was about evolution, which
absolutely is still a factor, particularly in dogs. It's not too long ago that dogs were wolves, it's been the domestication by humans, the un-natural selection, which has transformed them into very different creatures. Dogs occupy a
vast array of body types and specialisations, probably more than any other species, and it's all thanks to selective breeding by humans.
Not quite sure I understand your question though Kirkland, on the one hand you're asking if we're preventing evolution in cats and dogs, and on the other hand suggesting they may become sentient. Is the latter under the condition that humans don't interfere? If so, it's worth taking into account that close relatives of dogs and cats, some separated by over ten million years, share massive commonality of behavioural traits and intelligence. The point being that their mental development has been in a similar state for a very long time, so it seems they're as advanced as they need to be in that respect.
If we selectively bred them specifically for intelligence, though... who knows?
In terms of natural selection though, I'd think that if anything else evolved sentience, it would be dolphins or elephants. Both of them have an increased ability to interact with their environment (particularly in the latter case), and are roughly on a par with primates in terms of brainpower. I think one key factor missing might be necessity, we evolved cerebral gigantism as forest habitats dwindled and we became forced to live on the ground out in the open, negating most of simians' normal avantages. Both dolphins and elephants are skilled generalists, and only face difficulty from human pressure.