Sleep helps to repair damaged DNA in neurons, scientists find

Re:Sleep helps to repair damaged DNA in neurons, scientists ... by Protostome on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:25AM (#19317237)

I agree with your statement - that doesn't mean that there isn't a way around sleep. If we imagine the fitness vs. evolutionary traits as multi-dimensional landscape, it could be that we're stuck on a very deep local minimum. It doesn't mean that there's not a deeper local minimum few blocks away :-)

It just means that sampling evolutionary traits that lead us out of that local minima, is very expensive from a fitness perspective.

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Re:Sleep helps to repair damaged DNA in neurons, scientists ... by gnode on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @11:00AM (#19319875)

> it could be that we're stuck on a very deep local minimum

I think that's likely.

Also, in cases where being able to be awake continually (e.g. high predation or flying over water) animals have evolved unihemispheric sleep, which is likely a shorter evolutionary path and largely satisfies the selective pressure, making it less likely for sleep to be entirely evolved away.

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