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How do we know it's because they are perfect as opposed to less adaptable?

Let's say there's a species with better error correction of their genes - they would retain their shape better even if they are suboptimal.

Especially given that:

> And cats don’t evolve quickly. Compared with other groups, cats are slowly evolving animals.

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Well, the cheetah crossed the Bering strait from North America, through Asia and into Africa, and survived two population bottleneck events in the process. Any other species with a similar lack of genetic diversity as a cheetah would have been driven extinct by that. Kind-of indicates that evolutionarily the cats got something right.

isn't the inbreeding bottleneck in cheetahs a result of modern era hunting/angry farmers/poaching?

Molecular clock evidence indicates the population bottlenecks happened 100 000 years ago and 12 000 years ago — prior to modern-era hunting and farming. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5892392/

Awesome link and I didn't know the terminology to use to find it: thank you.

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