3 ms·

If it were easy, think of the evolutionary advantage: you're never vulnerable to predators and you get twice as much working time per day. The fact that sleep

by api 11y ago

If it were easy, think of the evolutionary advantage: you're never vulnerable to predators and you get twice as much working time per day. The fact that sleep still exists seems to suggest that this is hard and involves some nasty tradeoffs between the "dishwasher mode" and more operational neurological states. It's also likely that more than just this occurs, and that sleep is used to take care of a whole laundry list of housekeeping operations. We have "pausing GC"... heh.

vidarh 11y ago
> you're never vulnerable to predators Except prior to artificial light sources, you would still be forced to stay sheltered or spend your time huddled up with weapons at the ready. > and you get twice as much working time per day. Until our work consisted of something other than hunting and gathering this would likely not have been all that much of a benefit. On evolutionary timescales it would seem most of our evolution has happened in conditions where we were severely constrained with respect to what we could safely do during the night anyway, and so there'd be relatively little benefit to working around whatever the problems of avoiding sleep are. I don't doubt that cutting sleep will pose all kinds of challenges we're not even aware of yet, though.
- themusicgod1 11y ago
  On the evolutionary timescale that modern sleep became available, I don't think we're talking weapons.
agumonkey 11y ago
> We have "pausing GC"... heh. :) The evolutionary argument is nice but maybe we're just stuck in an old 'branch' local minima. Think of axolotl limb regeneration. We only have partial regeneration but somehow nature felt it was more efficient not to regenerate full limbs and try to survive crippled. Long sleep may have been necessary, but maybe that's not the case anymore.

3 ms·

If it were easy, think of the evolutionary advantage: you're never vulnerable to predators and you get twice as much working time per day. The fact that sleep

by api 11y ago

vidarh 11y ago
> you're never vulnerable to predators Except prior to artificial light sources, you would still be forced to stay sheltered or spend your time huddled up with weapons at the ready. > and you get twice as much working time per day. Until our work consisted of something other than hunting and gathering this would likely not have been all that much of a benefit. On evolutionary timescales it would seem most of our evolution has happened in conditions where we were severely constrained with respect to what we could safely do during the night anyway, and so there'd be relatively little benefit to working around whatever the problems of avoiding sleep are. I don't doubt that cutting sleep will pose all kinds of challenges we're not even aware of yet, though.
- themusicgod1 11y ago
  On the evolutionary timescale that modern sleep became available, I don't think we're talking weapons.
agumonkey 11y ago
> We have "pausing GC"... heh. :) The evolutionary argument is nice but maybe we're just stuck in an old 'branch' local minima. Think of axolotl limb regeneration. We only have partial regeneration but somehow nature felt it was more efficient not to regenerate full limbs and try to survive crippled. Long sleep may have been necessary, but maybe that's not the case anymore.