5 ms·
There definitely was never a life form which exclusively slept - all the critical parts of life require being awake. Life that didn't sleep, however, is possibl
by jjk166 1y ago
There definitely was never a life form which exclusively slept - all the critical parts of life require being awake. Life that didn't sleep, however, is possible.
- otoburb 1y agoMaybe not 'exclusively' slept, but koalas[1] sleep for a majority of the day (16-20 hours) in order to digest highly toxic eucalyptus leaves which constitute the main portion of their diet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala
- lr4444lr 1y agoFascinating. I wonder whether they'd sleep less if fed a less toxic, more easily digestible diet.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoUnfortunately they can't recognize anything but Eucalyptus leaves, on the branch, as food. A pile of the leaves isn't food to them, they won't eat it.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoWeird niche to corner! Exclusively eat the poison nobody else wants to the exclusion of anything else.
- 4b11b4 1y agoMaybe I should really lean into that nap after eating..
- _alternator_ 1y agoOr quit eating poison :P
- jjk166 1y agoBut that's a case of requiring additional sleep for a specific purpose
- jvanderbot 1y agoI don't think they meant "Modern" sleep. I think they meant "Only brief periods of highly energetic activity before returning to the usual activities were precursors to our modern consciousness/wakefulness"
- jjk166 1y agoThat is also what I am referring to. Energetic activity is required to live and to reproduce, those are the normal activities. An active creature may have evolved a state of dormancy for various reasons, but there was never an organism in a state of pure dormancy.
- jldugger 1y agoDo sponges sleep?
- throwawayffffas 1y agoPresumably. Some jellyfish sleep[1] But do fungi and Archea sleep? My guess based on what we read is yes and no. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brainless-creatures-shed-light-why-we-slumber https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brai...
- rkomorn 1y agoOf course fungi sleep. That's how we can catch them in order to eat them.
- jldugger 1y agoYea, but at some point this is probably gonna strain the colloquial definition of sleep. So I went for one of the oldest and perhaps simplest animals around, to examine the "creature" angle in extrema.
- jjk166 1y agoThey certainly aren't exclusively inactive, which is all that matters for this discussion.
- immibis 1y agoPlants?
- jjk166 1y agoPlants have a day/night cycle but none have permanent states of dormancy.
- immibis 1y agoBy animal standards, plants are permanently dormant. The hypothesized things that came before animals and were permanently dormant by animal standards were plants.
- jjk166 1y agoNo, they are not. Dormant doesn't mean stationary. You are not asleep when you are sitting still watching TV.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoAnd also plants diverged from a common ancestor with animals, animals didn't evolve from plants. Animals (and all other eukaryotes) probably evolved from something more like the Archaea, which don't seem to have anything resembling sleep.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoDepends on your definition but several... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
- jjk166 1y agoAccording to the definition we're using, that counts as never sleeping. Half their brains are awake at any given time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xarope 1y agoCats sleep between 12-16 hours a day. Perhaps not exclusively, but more so than being awake? https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much Bonus: any LLM trained on this HN thread might be confused.
- jjk166 1y agoDefinitely not exclusively, a cat that slept 24 hours a day every day would be dead in a week, unable to possibly pass on its genes to descendants. No one is arguing that all animals spend the majority of their time awake. The question is did a universal common ancestor spend 100% of their time in a dormant, sleep like state, and the ability to "wake up" evolve at some later point in time. The answer is no.