Why has nothing evolved to not need sleep?

Zeuzzz said:
Clearly you are unable to understand what is being said, you just see a post by me you cant resist arguing, can you?
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You misquoted me - you moved my response to make it look like it was responding to something else - and then tried to mock me for your own lie. This was obviously intentional, since you must have done it by hand and made a point of ridiculing your (false) version of my response.

Misquoting is

a) unethical
b) really, really stupid, since the original post is right there, and
c) probably a violation of the forum rules.

Here's the actual post:
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Zeuzzz said:
Well that doesn't make any sense.

Why do you think that our ancestors went to the bother of climbing up trees when they slept? or why animals dig burrows to sleep?
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To make themselves safe.

Zeuzzz said:
If they didn't need sleep, they wouldn't need to do these things, and could spend more time feeding and being aware of predators. Surely?
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That's been addressed by nearly every post in this thread. Are you sleep-posting?

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And here is your misquote:

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Zeuzzz said:
Well that doesn't make any sense.

Why do you think that our ancestors went to the bother of climbing up trees when they slept? or why animals dig burrows to sleep?
sol invictus said:
That's been addressed by nearly every post in this thread. Are you sleep-posting?
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Marquis de Carabas said:
Being awake is expensive. If one could get away with it, the best option would be more sleep with limited waking time to eat and shtup.
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Like house cats and lions, among others.

jmercer said:
The first thing is... evolution is a random process. What works continues, and what doesn't tends to disappear. (Depending on how negative the impact is of the failed traits.)

Since it's a random process, while any trait might emerge, there's no guarantee that every possible one will.
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I'm quoting this because it addresses what seems to be a common misconception.

Although, as as been mentioned previously, cetaceans have evolved out of the need for deep sleep. If they slept like land animals do they would drown.

For some speculation about this topic, see the Nancy Kress novel Beggars in Spain. It's about humans who are genetically engineered not to need sleep. Like most Nancy Kress novels, it's only OK.
 
Zeuzzz said:
So if you are an animal with predators around, it is a disadvantage to sleep. Thus why I was wondering why no animals have evolved to lessen the sleep they need, or exclude it completely, as this would serve as a major advantage. This however depends on whether an animal could evolve to do the job sleep does when they are in an awake state, or they would just suffer all the usual sleep deprivation signs. This seems to be why this has not happened, animals seem not able to do the job sleep does while fully awake.
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True. More of an issue is that not sleeping is less efficient than just breeding faster. The selection pressure to not sleeping is not strong enough to bypass the inherent ineffectiveness of wasting energy with a fully awake brain. As already mentioned, many sea based animals have an ability to shut down part of their brain and many animals such as grazing animals are fully capable of listening for noises even when asleep.

Mammals are believed to have developed as a niche creature. During the dino era, most dinos are believed to be day hunters, leaving the night to mammals. Mammals had a lot of energy and could function in the cold night, however, they were stuck in the daytime since bigger predators would eat them. The most efficient thing for a mammal was to hibernate in the day time.

However, as has been speculated above, it's possible that such a mutation HAS occurred, and turned out to NOT be adaptive, in which case it quickly disappeared from the gene pool again.
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Good point. The evolutionary benefit of sleeping likely overwhelms to benefit of not and it was likely maladaptive to most selection pressures.
 
CFLarsen said:
Careful now. One example is valid, the other isn't.

While lions have evolved in nature, house cats are very much designed by us. A kind of intelligent design, if you like.
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Why did we design those little furry things to be so cute and fuzzy, yet so evil and vain? Not very intelligent of us, I say.
 
Has anyone heard this cat joke?

A dog looks at its master and says, "My master feeds me, grooms me and walks me. He must be God"
A cat looks at its master and says, "My master feeds me, grooms me and plays with me. I must be God."
 
paximperium said:
Mammals are believed to have developed as a niche creature. During the dino era, most dinos are believed to be day hunters, leaving the night to mammals. Mammals had a lot of energy and could function in the cold night, however, they were stuck in the daytime since bigger predators would eat them. The most efficient thing for a mammal was to hibernate in the day time.
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You've been watching "Evolve" on the History channel too, huh?
 
CFLarsen said:
Careful now. One example is valid, the other isn't.

While lions have evolved in nature, house cats are very much designed by us. A kind of intelligent design, if you like.
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While domestic cats have certainly undergone selective breeding, they have only been domesticated for 10,000 years or so. That they share a behavior in common with their closest wild relatives is strongly suggestive (though not conclusive) that they retained this behavior from their wild ancestors.
 
Zeuzzz said:
There are three simple things here to understand:

1) Sleeping makes animals less safe and is a disadvantage in this sense, as they are not aware of approaching predators.

2) However lots of animals are safer when they sleep.

3) They are not safer because they are sleeping, but due to the various methods they employ to remain safe while sleeping.
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Let's take #3 first. Posit that the creature had to spend time hiding from predators. when hidden, there's not much it can do -- it has to stay still and quiet. So, a creature that hid and then evolved a way of shutting down, would use less energy than one that simply hid. Providing the hiding place is sufficiently hidden, it seems the one that evolved sleeping would then be at an evolutionary advantage.
 
godless dave said:
You've been watching "Evolve" on the History channel too, huh?
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It's on my DVR. Haven't had the chance to watch them yet. Did they cover that recently?

I did watch it on a Discovery channel documentary on mammals...cute little rat things.
 
On the TV show Life on Earth it was reported that a certain species of bird spends all its adult life, except for nesting, on the wing. It didn't say they didn't sleep, but they do so in the air if they do at all.
 
I knew someone who only slept about 2 hours per day. He was smart and alert, and old, and this was a lifelong thing for him.

I'm not sold on the "sleeping is safe" idea. Hiding and keeping quiet can enhance safety, but sleeping adds nothing to the situation. Awake and alert works best every time. You can always play possum if you're awake, but how do you play alert if you're asleep?

Almost forgot to say, my sister in law sleeps with her eyes open. Creepy. Another friend of mine can sleep standing up. For real, I've seen him in that state.

I almost never remember any dreams. In the last 10 years, maybe one or two. Go to bed, asleep within 5 minutes, wake up usually 5 minutes before the set alarm time. Maybe I'm not normal :)
 
kallsop said:
I'm not sold on the "sleeping is safe" idea. Hiding and keeping quiet can enhance safety, but sleeping adds nothing to the situation. Awake and alert works best every time. You can always play possum if you're awake, but how do you play alert if you're asleep?
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If you're hidden, quiet and therefore relatively safe why not sleep? In that way you can be more alert (and safer) when out and moving around among the bitey predators.
 
kallsop said:
I'm not sold on the "sleeping is safe" idea. Hiding and keeping quiet can enhance safety, but sleeping adds nothing to the situation. Awake and alert works best every time. You can always play possum if you're awake, but how do you play alert if you're asleep?
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Well, you can't think about this as a purely mammal thing, because sleep, or some form of quiescence equivalent to sleep, evolved much earlier. It is easy to posit hiding and keeping quiet in organisms that have more developed nervous systems, but nature didn't initially have that to work with. Sleep has since accrued many more accouterments that enhance survival in other ways, much having to do with mental function/memory in mammals and thermoregulation in other forms.

Playing 'possum is also not a state of ready awareness, so it is not just "hiding and keeping quiet".
 
Some of you seem to have the history backwards.

Being always asleep was the original natural state of all life forms.
It is being awake, that is the evolutionary advantage. At least in the mobile ones.

Being awake, every now and then, allows mobile life forms to gather food, and conduct mating tasks. When survival does not require waking life, we are better off sleeping, according to nature.

Plants don't need a waking life, because they have adapted to meet all of their survival needs planted in one place.
 
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