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A fascinating idea. For your hypothesis to work, and I think this is what you mean by the article supporting it, sleep would have had to evolve very early. Bec
by twhb 5y ago
A fascinating idea.
For your hypothesis to work, and I think this is what you mean by the article supporting it, sleep would have had to evolve very early. Because being awake activates a great deal of a modern organism’s complexity, and that complexity wouldn’t have evolved in an always-sleeping organism that doesn’t benefit from it. So either the predecessors were awake, or sleep came before all the complexity that is now activated only when awake.
For the first wakers, then, being awake was little more than a period of increased activity. A boost mode. And indeed we’ve already seen the utility of boost modes across a variety of technology, from CPUs to cars to high output flashlights.
But does that make the predecessors really asleep? To use a very HN analogy, were pre-boost CPUs always idling?
- gibspaulding 5y agoIt doesn't seem like too far of a stretch to guess that the earliest life forms would have been pretty passive, absorbing nutrients directly from their "primordial soup" and somehow replicating whenever they've stored up enough. I imagine "life" would have gone on for quite some time before "waking up" and evolving the ability respond to their environment by doing things like relocating to a more nutrient rich area or away from danger.
- coliveira 5y ago> But does that make the predecessors really asleep? Well, not directly, but we can certainly talk about the appearance a distinct state, which would now be called awake state in comparison to previous organisms that had a single state. After this appearance it makes sense to talk about previous life forms as "sleeping".