Is it possible to eliminate sleep through evolution?
4 comments so farI always think about how much more efficient humans could be if we didn’t have to sleep. My understanding is that sleep is very important. Aside from feeling tired by the lack of sleep, I’ve also heard that you can die from not sleeping. What exactly happens when you sleep that effects your body? I always viewed sleep as more of a mental thing. Is sleep just one of those things that will always be necessary, like eating?
I know that I can't stop it. But evolution takes thousands of years. I'm just asking if it is theoretically possible.
It depends on how evolution proceeds. If we’re sleeping fewer hours because of jobs and other responsibilities keeping us awake longer than it should perhaps our brains will evolve to require less sleep in the future, but the downside would probably mean that we’d probably become stupider because sleep helps brain function. It’s the brain’s way of recharging itself.
Another possibility is that we could evolve to need more sleep simple because our brains are being used to store more information than our ancestors. If you go back 200 years in time people didn’t know what car were, or DVD players, or computers, or DNA, or a million other things we know about now so our brains are used to store more information than they were in the past so we could evolve to need more sleep because of that.
Only time will tell and none of us are likely to be alive when the changes happen.
One evolutionary change I predict is that at some point in time every human on earth will be the same race due to interracial relationships which were less likely thousands of years ago. With the internet we’re able to meet people from all over the world and even have romantic relationships with them. There are literally hundreds of intercontinental couples meeting online and getting married. Race is becoming less and less important in relationships and more and more people are getting involved with people outside of their own race… so I bet some day race will be eradicated… so will religion science advances.
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under 7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Responses to “Is it possible to eliminate sleep through evolution?”
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it seems that all mammals, birds, and, i think, reptiles, do it.
my understanding is that it’s associated with memory fixation, among other things.
so, no, you’re not about to eliminate it.
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You sound like my friend Nathan. Only he views sleeping as an absolute waste of time.
It could be possible but it’ll take hundreds of thousands of years.
And I don’t think anybody’s really cracked the code on sleeping, but it must have something to do with us having so many cells and being so complex both physically and mentally.
Just think of it. Have you ever noticed that the less complex an organism is, the less it sleeps?
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Possible, but it would be difficult to see the evolutionary pathway that would support it.
We’d need variation in the need to sleep driven by genetic differences, which it looks like we do have.
We’d also need a selective pressure that those who have less sleep have more offspring and that they then have more offspring and so on. This seems to be the gap in how we’d get there.
Physically we need sleep now, and people do “go mental” when subject to sleep deprivation, ask the CIA about the “enhanced interrogation techniques” practiced at Gitmo for an example. That does not mean that an adaptation is not available that could supplement this, though in may be at the expense of some brain function.
The other assumption is what you mean by efficient. nature just needs us to survive and reproduce, you don’t need so much time for that! that’s why the eat sleep and **** pattern is so prevalent amongst animals. Humans are just odd in that we have developed an artificial society and structures through the use of tools and brain power, but we’ve also changed the selective pressures and reduced the amount of variation present in our species by allowing interaction over long geographical distances. We don’t have populations that are reproductively isolated anymore so are unlikely to see many changes until modern society breaks up or a population migrates from this planet (highly unlikely as where would we go?)
References :
It depends on how evolution proceeds. If we’re sleeping fewer hours because of jobs and other responsibilities keeping us awake longer than it should perhaps our brains will evolve to require less sleep in the future, but the downside would probably mean that we’d probably become stupider because sleep helps brain function. It’s the brain’s way of recharging itself.
Another possibility is that we could evolve to need more sleep simple because our brains are being used to store more information than our ancestors. If you go back 200 years in time people didn’t know what car were, or DVD players, or computers, or DNA, or a million other things we know about now so our brains are used to store more information than they were in the past so we could evolve to need more sleep because of that.
Only time will tell and none of us are likely to be alive when the changes happen.
One evolutionary change I predict is that at some point in time every human on earth will be the same race due to interracial relationships which were less likely thousands of years ago. With the internet we’re able to meet people from all over the world and even have romantic relationships with them. There are literally hundreds of intercontinental couples meeting online and getting married. Race is becoming less and less important in relationships and more and more people are getting involved with people outside of their own race… so I bet some day race will be eradicated… so will religion science advances.
References :