On Thursday, March 6, 2014 1:45:11 AM UTC, Liz R wrote: > > Another suggestion, which I would say is (more or less) discredited by the > existence of animals that switch brain hemispheres to stay awake, was the > idea that it's simply *safer *to spend some of your time inactive, > especially for a prey animal. > IMHO it's a really good point and not necessarily discredited by instances of animals that switch hemisphere because there are feasibly (I don't know) questions around that phenomenon. For example, how well understood/observed it actually is. Also, if only a small subset of species evolve to be awake most or all of the time, given the advantage of doing so is reasonably on a wider scale, the reason it doesn't happen on a wider scale could suggest major play-offs are involved in going down that route, in terms also of the brain. The argument for that would just be, why isn't a solution like that more widespread? Given that, for any competitive niche, the species that becomes 24 hour would have some sort of new advantage, if there were no costs involved for going that way. What I would come back to is (a) sleep is ubiquitous or near so (b) not sleeping has ubiquitous value or near so But how to navigate the complexity productively looks to be a methodological type problem. I'm replying to JohnM's post with a personal idea about that FWIW (which ain't much admittedly)
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