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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's obvious what we must do next. According to every science fiction film or book I've ever read, we must capture them, confine them and study them in an attempt to learn their secrets and duplicate it in everyone else.

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As a bit of a lesson from someone with HN experience to the new HNers downvoted below: your jokes are (a) bad, and (b) off-topic. Parent was off-topic as well, but he was funny.

Just providing feedback for the newer posters beyond a downvote.

I think you're partly right, but I also suspect they may have been downvoted to quell any "piling on". Repeated jokes on the same theme have diminishing returns.

Well said. Not just diminishing returns either, but scrolling past a comment branch full of "It's just a flesh wound!" or some other oblique reference is irritating.

Luckily evolution is already doing the work for us.

How would that work? Non-sleeper's children are more likely to survive?

If not requiring a lot of sleep has an advantage in our society (which presumably it does) then all else being equal, a non-sleeper will produce more offspring. This is just evolution 101.

Just about the only advantage you need to reproduce these days is a willingness to do so.

That's only true for women. And it doesn't mean that there aren't still evolutionary incentives for women. If they are successful because they don't need to sleep, they can probably find a better mate (which will lead to an evolutionary advantage of the no-sleep gene long term).

Assuming that societal advantage results in more offspring. Do the rich have more kids than the poor? I'm not sure that they do.

Even a small differential in reproductive rates would lead to a rapid increase in the prevalence of the trait. Just look at the example of blue eyes -- 15000 years ago nobody had them and now nearly 7% if the world's population do.

Do people with blue eyes reproduce more? I've not heard that before. I thought the ratio of blue to not blue eyes was due to the whole dominant/recessive gene thing (do I mean gene, or maybe allele? a long time since I learned this stuff at school).

Of course the trait was advantageous either in terms of natural selection, or more likely sexual selection. All the blue eyed people on earth can be traced back to a single ancestor living in the black sea region about 10,000 years ago. It is a recessive trait, but allele frequencies don't magically increase just because a trait is recessive. Without selection pressure, the ratio of blue eyed people would not have kept increasing after the emergence of the mutation.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-one-ancestor-h...

Or, like every religious book, we could round them up and stone them to death. I could go with either option, so lead the way!

Name me one religious book with such strange behavior.

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