Evolutionary advantage of sleep?

S

Spectrum

Registered Senior Member
Can anyone think of an evolutionary advantage of sleeping? The only couple that I can think of is the inability to see in the dark, or poor eyesight leading to dangerous situations (such as walking off cliffs etc.), and the conservation of energy.
Surely to sleep in the animal kingdom is dangerous! However those animals that have good eyesight, and/or can see in the dark, such as bats, still sleep, except they do it in the day. The fact that we sleep is part of the reason we have eyelids, unless we truly did evolve from water-based animals who have clear eyelids that prevent water from entering the eye, but allow the animal to see underwater. There is also blinking, but I would say sleep is the main reason we have eyelids. Any thoughts anyone?
 
it's a balance of the danger associated with the advantages of having a chance to recoup from hours of effort. How much energy would it take to both work and heal at the same rate 24 hours a day? Is that energy requirement realistic? Is the danger associated with sleeping (and possible predation) worse than the danger of over-exertion?
 
Plants and trees do fine.

The evolutionary advantages of sleep appear to be obvious. What are the advantages of wakefullness? We know that people can get food, move around, etc, while asleep.
 
Haven t there been experiments in trying to stop people feeling sleepy? Feeling fully awake all the time. Or was that just an episode of the X-Files.
 
Sleep might be a way to compensate for having a large brain. Idle curiosity can be exceptionally dangerous in the wild, especially at night and in other non-ideal circumstances, like rainstorms (which also inspire sleep).

A mechanism to force a creature to curl up in a relatively safe place and suspend one's adventures until morning reduces the cumulative time that one is continually casting the die of mortal fate by interacting with new (and hence potentially surprisingly lethal) situations; One is endowed with better odds of living long enough to sexually maturate.

This is a sensible situation throughout vulnerable childhood, and indeed we see that sleep duration is longest at birth, and declines after sexual maturation, and is least in the relatively recent phenomenon of what we now refer to as 'old age'.
 
Nickelodeon said:
Haven t there been experiments in trying to stop people feeling sleepy? Feeling fully awake all the time. Or was that just an episode of the X-Files.
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No, you're correct. The one in particular that I remember ended when the participant became positive his tie drawer was fully of colorful snakes that were trying to eat his face.
 
But sleeping in the animal kingdom must be dangerous!
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Not if you're at the top of the food chain---look at lions in Africa. All they do is sleep. Then they wake up and kill shit.

Haven t there been experiments in trying to stop people feeling sleepy?
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I did read somewhere a geneticist claiming that there was a ``cure'' for sleep. I found this article on the web about a pill:

http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id=241212006

Watch out---theres a shitty pop-up add.
 
Can't humans last longer without food than they can without sleep? It's got to be a brain regeneration thing at least in part.
 
Spectrum said:
Can anyone think of an evolutionary advantage of sleeping?
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Since our brains and those of many other animals seem to need sleep to function, I guess another good question would be "Does the advantage of posessing a brain like ours outweigh the disadvantage of being inactive for a few hours a day?"
 
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