Foolishness isn't necessarily funny

Cutesiness aside, this is really asinine:

I argued — and I did not invent this idea — that animals like wolves and primates that live in hierarchical social groups need a sense of humor to survive. Wolf pack or newsroom, when the big dog growls, the beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, lambda, mu, nu and omega dogs had better be able to laugh it off, so they can live to reproduce another day. Thus, laugh-it-off genes are preserved. If they were not needed, they would probably be lost.

What does laughing it off have to do with a sense of humor?

Dogs can taste sweet things, as can many other mammals, like rodents. But neither alley cats nor lions have a sweet tooth. They do have sweet receptors. But sometime after cats and dogs diverged, a gene was turned off in cats, so that they no longer make one of the proteins necessary for the receptors to work.

This may be why they seem so independent. The desire for sweets can certainly make people do foolish things.

What does behaving foolishly have to do with a sense of humor?

A colleague and friend who had a dry, slightly wicked sense of humor and who loved and identified with his cats — he was known to meow on occasion — died unexpectedly. I thought, how could he have been enamored of an animal that does not have a sense of humor?

So I began to rethink the issue, and I have concluded that I may have actually been thinking about laughter rather than humor.

So someone with a sense of humor can't love someone who does not?

Laughter is not always about what’s funny.... It is frequently a social behavior unrelated to jokes or wit. It can serve different purposes. It can be friendly or submissive, hostile or dominant. Witness the old distinction between laughing with and laughing at someone.

Finally, he's making a bit of sense. But then,

Perhaps, I thought, this is what dogs and other social creatures have, not a sense of humor, but an "I’m just happy to be part of the pack/team/company" sense of laughter. You know when your dog lies on its back, looking goofy, with the tongue falling out one side of its mouth? Just think of that as laughing.

Yes, they look goofy, but how does he know they're laughing?

Dogs amuse us. Cats, I suspect, amuse themselves, as a creature unconcerned about its place in the corporation might well do. With a mouse, or a ball of yarn, a cat may play and be amused, whether we are watching or not.

Again, amusing oneself is hardly humor. What a piece of foolishness, from someone who seems to think he's a science writer. And no, I don't think he's funny just because he's a fool.