131–139 of 139 posts
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The fact they electrically signal via chemical analogs fuelled by immersion in nutrient bearing fluid that also accretes waste products, yet is kept separate from the primary loop of the cardiovascular system by the blood-brain barrier?
But why is that fundamentally different from the technobabble description of any other vital organ?
> Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape, and are still arguably the most evolutionarily successful of the primates > humans are weird outliers—we’re the shortest sleeping primates, yet we pack in the most REM sleep relative to this short duration Isn't that sort of the point? Sleep is a detrimental necessity and the more efficient an organism is in needing less…
This is actually quite a conundrum.
Animals as simple as flies have been observed sleeping (diminished brain activity while resting). It is highly conserved, so it must be incredibly important.
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This is a contentious theory with little actual historical backing. Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever.
> Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever. Does that have stronger historical backing?
If historical evidence does not do much to disambiguate this from the alternative hypothesis, then the null hypothesis would be the default presumption.
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Assuming you are not jesting, I am not certain I would qualify that behavior as any indication of being wired for some sort of nighttime patrol duty based on those details alone.
Not jesting! And, point taken. But it made me wonder. It was intentional (within the limits of intentionality for an infant) and repeated.
> Some emerging research suggests Earth’s magnetism matters, as well. Being barefoot on the ground versus 30 stories high in a downtown skyscraper puts you in a completely different magnetic environment. Really? My instinctive reaction to this statement is that it's quackery. Would be very interested to see headlines appear about this if it's true.
I would not jump to such conclusions, I would assume is not fully known and needs to be further understood. on the other side, do you know we have polarized and non-polarized cells? do you know they can be affected by electromagnetism? this two things already establish the existence of a relationship and effects between them. If we then consider that cells mechanism work based on differential of electrical or chemica…
I agree ideas shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
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I believe that how you feel after a night's sleep is mostly due to nutrition (long term, not just the day before).
that might be true unless we can define what nutrition can help with sleep. There's plenty of people who eat well and sleep like crap.
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I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?
You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.
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> Historical texts and recent research suggest an alternative view: that sleep can be naturally segmented into two periods across the 24h cycle – a pattern known as biphasic sleep https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138994572...
I believe that "little actual historical backing" could accurately describe what evidence that publication has provided, don't you?
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Interesting I did not know human urinary tract was suboptimal. Are there examples of "discontinuous" evolution where a chance mutation stumbled upon a much better way to do something that allowed a species to jump the gap? I imagine it would be very rare because chance mutations in a single individual that confer extraordinary survival / mating advantage to offset entire population would be rare like being a superman…
Well, what is suboptimal... One would engineer it differently, it makes a weird, seemingly unnecessary, loop around some other tracts. However, being a biologist I can also imagine that if we'd reroute the thing in someone using surgery, that person suddenly gets more infections because bacteria find their way up the tract more easily (no idea, but could be!). The point is... It's a mess based on some earlier mess, b…
That's often not going to be relevant for evolution, since the distribution covers physically realizable events like adding DNA base pairs.