Episode 161 - Sleep

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Education, Earth Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2023

⏱️ 143 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We spend a huge portion of our lives sleeping. For us and other animals, it’s clearly a very important behavior. And yet, despite how familiar and commonplace it is, there’s plenty we still don’t understand about sleep: its origins, evolution, and even how to define it in the first place. In this episode, we explore some of the remarkable variation in animal sleeping habits, we discuss some of the ways we study and understand sleep, and we touch upon the crucial – and much debated – question of what sleep even does for us anyway. In the news: early monotremes, chunky dunk, Permian pollinators, and parasitic ant mutations. Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:05:00Main discussion, Part 1: 00:40:00Main discussion, Part 2: 01:20:30Patron question: 02:16:00 Check out our blog for bonus info and pictures:http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content! https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Follow this link for a 30-day free trial to Audible!www.audibletrial.com/CommonDescent Or make a one-time donation via PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/4c68u4hp Find merch at the Common Descent Store! http://zazzle.com/common_descent Join the Common Descent Discord server! https://discord.gg/CwPBxdh9Ev Follow and Support us on:Twitter: https://twitter.com/CommonDescentPCFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/commondescentpodcastInstagram: @commondescentpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePRXHEnZmTGum2r1l2mduwPodBean: https://commondescentpodcast.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-common-descent-podcast/id1207586509?mt=2 You can email us at commondescentpodcast(at)gmail.comOr send us physical mail at:The Common Descent Podcast1735 W State of Franklin Rd. Ste 5 #165Johnson City, TN 37604 The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org. Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, David.
0:20.1	Hello, Will.
0:21.2	And hello listeners out there.
0:23.4	Welcome to episode 161 of the Common Descent podcast.
0:28.1	Today, we are talking about sleep.
0:30.2	I love sleep.
0:31.3	I am getting better with my relationship with sleep.
0:34.4	I could be doing it right now.
0:35.5	Yeah, no, I'm getting there.
0:36.7	I'm getting there.
0:46.4	Sleep is our topic today and what a surprisingly bizarre topic it is. Sleep is very strange.
0:52.2	Yes. And this may not seem intuitive since sleep seems like a fairly mundane thing. We do it.
0:57.0	We do it our whole lives. We do it basically every night for, you know,
1:02.8	those of us with a healthy sleep schedule. Sure. And animals do it in general. Seems like it should be a fairly non-issue topic of discussion. And yet, two hours later, so many issues. There is so much we do not understand and are still trying to fully decipher about sleep.
1:18.8	And the questions of why do animals sleep?
1:22.7	What actual benefits come from sleep?
1:25.7	And why is there so much variety in how organisms sleep?
1:30.8	What's the deal with the evolutionary patterns in sleep?
1:34.6	Yes. It is, this is like entire fields of profession that are still trying to figure out
1:43.5	just single aspects of these questions.
1:45.8	So this episode will be an introduction to the concept of sleep. Yes. So we will go through
	...

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