Nocturnal bottleneck
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
In return for saving civilization, we're now persecuted by people who think 8 a.m. is a good time to start school.
My sleep shifts about an hour later every week, so that last week or so before it flips back is pretty tough, especially during the winter. Waking up at like 4 or 5 pm is definitely not good. I still need light!
A 2017 study of an indigenous hunter-gatherer group found that there was virtually always at least one person awake in the group, around the clock. The longest contiguous time the whole group was asleep simultaneously was just 1 minute! Here's one article about it: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chronotypes-ev...
I don't have any memory of it, but I must have seen or heard that study mentioned somewhere. Thanks for pointing it out and saving me future embarrassment!
dinosaurs pressured the mammals to stay small, hide in burrows, and roam at night.
dinosaurs, and a lot of other things came to an abrupt end, the basal mammals survived in thier bunkers with hoards of seed, and were relieved of selective pressure, thus diversified in thier traits this is when mammalian diurnalism made a big comeback so they could now compete among fellow mammals radiate and expand niche into the estate of the late dinosaurs
There's lots and lots of adaptations that repair damage to DNA and that deal with damaged cells. So there must have been lots of evolutionary pressure to keep them in place and keep them working.
Animals in the wild probably don't typically die of cancer, because those adaptations are in place.
But you are right, that even mammals active during the daytime have not (re)gained that specific photolyase DNA mechanism that their ancestors lost.
I wrote "global heating" first but it still feels weird to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... says that the best available studies foresee global GDP dropping between 0% - 20% from climate change (compared to no climate change).
Given that this happens against a backdrop of normal, regular economic growth, people in the future will still be richer than people today.
And approximately everyone today who can afford aircon (and needs it) gets aircon, rather than turning nocturnal.
It also means that analysis is not a good one to quote without qualifiers about 'controlled climate change'
Lots of land in Canada and Siberia is going to become a lot more habitable.
"average elevation" is a bit of a strange metric for a continent.
Several large American cities are above 1600m and just looking at a map of the land below the ice of Antartica, there is plenty of low-lying land.
And we need not exaggerate the actual expected warming. The beyond-worst-case doomers don't need that much attention.
People are going to move away from coasts because the sea will make a new coastline. Agricultural zones will move north and around because of changes to weather patterns.
Pretty cold places will become less cold and new cities will pop up further north. Canada will do pretty well and grow a lot.
Perhaps- but it's also warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, which makes adaptation even more challenging.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-percentage-impacts-o... suggests it could be lot more than 1% too.
It seems like a decent word to stretch a little into this use of the idea that members of a species may have different familial, social, or individual circadian activity. I hesitate to do that though, because I'm unaware of it being used that way to date and it seems it could be difficult in such a context to differentiate it from established meanings of the word.
(Note that by "intelligence" I'm not referring to human intelligence, just the basic form of using mental processing power to facilitate survival. Which is not specific to mammals, nor necessarily strong in all mammals.)
When times are lean, you can leave a little less food for the gods and do a little more praying.
Not sure they had a nocturnal bottleneck in their evolution? So that is probably not required.
Looking at plenty of relatively dumb mammals, I don't think the nocturnal bottleneck is sufficient either.
Of course, it might be a more complicated correlation than just sufficiency / necessity.
i guess we're lucky that dinosaurs didn't evolve IR vision (not that it wasn't impossible given that snakes did get IR sense).
And archosaurs were at least partly warm blooded.
this is all a tale of the fossil record and the principle of superposition
(Some mammals survived, definitely, the evidence for that is that we are here.)
Not that scientific but maybe a little on topic, I'm just reading a book about the memoirs of past Soviets leaders, and at some point Khrushchev is complaining how Stalin had an almost all nocturnal life, how for him 2AM was still "an early hour". Afaik Churchill was also a very nocturnal man. I'm wondering what other past leaders were in the same category as Stalin and Churchill when it comes to their night life.
In a past life where I was a lead of a larger team, I would have a fair chunk of my work day devoted to mentoring and meetings, and spent a few hours late in the evening doing actual programming work.
A major reason for the number of hours worked is that it was a consultancy / agency type company. The types of contacts we worked varied, but we were building for clients. I couldn't bring myself to let our clients get sub-par work just because I didn't feel like taking the time to mentor juniors or rushed my own output.
I eventually left for a variety of reasons, only in part because we were paid below market, the company was terrified of raising rates, and struggled to be profitable. It is a shame, as the variety of work- everything from quick two month marketing sites to years long projects for three-letter government agencies- was fantastic, and there was no better place to get rapid exposure to many types of problems and solutions.
I still find myself working some evenings, but that's because I'm at a company with a small team that is fine with very flexible working hours. Being able to pop out to the store in the middle of the day or taking an extra long lunch without anyone caring is a perk I no longer want to do without.