Slashdot Mirror
New Research Suggests Evolution Might Favor 'Survival of the Laziest' (phys.org)
Zorro shares a report from Phys.org: If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not. A new large-data study of fossil and extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of species. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a research team based at the University of Kansas. Looking at a period of roughly 5 million years from the mid-Pliocene to the present, the researchers analyzed 299 species' metabolic rates -- or, the amount of energy the organisms need to live their daily lives -- and found higher metabolic rates were a reliable predictor of extinction likelihood. "We wondered, 'Could you look at the probability of extinction of a species based on energy uptake by an organism?'" said Luke Strotz, postdoctoral researcher at KU's Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and lead author of the paper. "We found a difference for mollusk species that have gone extinct over the past 5 million years and ones that are still around today. Those that have gone extinct tend to have higher metabolic rates than those that are still living. Those that have lower energy maintenance requirements seem more likely to survive than those organisms with higher metabolic rates."
Strotz' co-author Bruce Lieberman added: "Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish -- the lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive. Instead of 'survival of the fittest,' maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish.'"
Strotz' co-author Bruce Lieberman added: "Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish -- the lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive. Instead of 'survival of the fittest,' maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish.'"
Xi Jinping? Welcome to /.
maybe they should just have studied how long those animals can stay alive without feeding.
and are the high metabolism(warm blooded animals) just evolving more quickly to combat it, thus going "extinct" as well at a higher rate, thus doing _everything_ at a higher rate ?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So the laziest unemployed will survive? That actually makes sense â" they are the best at they do :)
Up to certain point, laziness may be a survival feature, but when too lazy to procreate, this will harm survival.
maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish
BOW DOWN TO YOUR KING. And bring me another bag of Cheetos and a Coke, would you?
No, literally. I'm looking at a 2-Liter and a bag of Cheetos, Doritos, and Fritos -- all within reach right now. But the ice and chunky picante sauce is all gone, meh. This second though I'm eating some chocolate striped cookies for variation. Want some? Come closer and lick you monitor for a magical taste you just won't forget.
Even better, I just won my first game of PubG!! Playing on an Android phone. All against Bots. (And almost lost at that, but We refuse to acknowledge that.)
I'd played Fortnite before and even placed in the top 20 my first time playing!! That was because I traveled to the far side of the island where half of the people had died before I even touched the ground, and half of THAT died before I finished searching the first building. That gave me a nice inflated score by accident, so now I immediately die if I even start the game. (I'm no good, I admit; but it's matched me with people that can find the ANY key. I'm still figuring out how to build and how to swap guns while they're literally dancing all around me. Plebeians.)
I usually don't play multiplayer games because I don't want people to know how BAD I am. The computer doesn't care if I reload the game 20 times before accidentally winning. NetHack is my usual style, and I've never won at that -- over 20 years. Raiding a previous incantation of you grave IS pretty neat, though. But how come I'm so hard to kill after I'm dead?!!?
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not.
I'm not speaking from experience or anything here, but such a person seems unlikely to reproduce, so survival of the basement dweller species seems unlikely. Fortunately, the basement dweller species is replenished with each new generation of human so our glorious parasite race will live on long into the future!
It's not "instead of fittest". Sluggishness might be the best adaptation to an environment, so it could literally be what is meant by "survival of the fittest" in that environment. "Fittest" does not mean the most jacked.
We're creating our own Extinction Event.
Go die in the rat race today!
Captcha: verified
So now we are associating lower metabolic rates with laziness in a species? fucking really? adapting to your environment with a lower metabolism is the very fucking definition of "survival of the fittest", perhaps the writers of this article need to actually understand what that means.
And in the context of this article, the idiots who post this are clearly putting forth too much effort.
They're not only stupid trolls.
They're also an evolutionary dead end.
I think when a high number of mutations are thrown out to see what sticks, there can be multiple winners. Chaste + promiscuous, rich + handy, etc.
In terms of efficency being lazy helps a lot. You use less energy, thus require less food, so you want an efficient but lazy hunter/gatherer. How was this not an obvious outcome to these researchers? How much of our taxes went into this?
We killed it with science. All of us (including myself) that are still alive when nature would have had a dead before breading have totally stuffed things.
I believe it was the philosopher Epicurus who said, "The early bird may get the worm; but the second mouse gets the cheese."
This space unintentionally left blank.
The early bird catches the worm, but the early worm gets eaten.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is still survival of the fittest.
This post is the product of an AI trained using conversations from Xbox Live.
That is what lazy researchers don't get: There is a difference between saving as much effort as you can (efficiency), and saving even more, so that it harms you again (laziness)!
It's obvious, that it's efficiency that is favored. Duh.
i disagree. besides GNAA, what troll has lasted that long? in fact, what tradition has lasted as long around here?
the only thing that is more durable is the lack of support for unicode chars
So they can tell a bivalve's metabolic rate from fossils. That's pretty neat and I'll take it at face value coz, you know, science... But concluding that laziness is a long term survival strategy for any species is a tab brash.
Being more efficient at whatever you need for survival sounds like quite an important advantage for long-term survival.
As you guzzle down your Starbucks(tm) coffee, rush out the door, and race off to some job where you do irrelevant stuff at high speed so management feels important enough to justify a COLA increase.
Alternative Right.
My observation suggests "yes."
Not the laziest.
A lazy slob on the basement wastes resources by binding others that need to take care of him. Not the best premise for survival. In fact a society ready to ditch lazy slobs might actually be more likely to survive.
However, if I'm lazy and at the same time manage to survive or even be attractive by being effektive where it counts, that is an essential skill. Especially in environments that don't charge to rapidly over a long time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He who makes other people work for him, so that he does not have to work himself lives longer. He who does not need to care about how to earn the next pay check does not need to stress about it or exert himself.
Yes. Of course. That's not rocket science.
That's why statistics say that members of high-income households are more healthy --- even in countries with universal health care where access to health care is not a question of wealth.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Strotz' co-author Bruce Lieberman added: "Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish -- the lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive. Instead of 'survival of the fittest,' maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish.'"
This is a false assessment of the data. Clearly the evidence shows that organisms whom live an efficienct lifestyle are the ones who teens to survive when resources are low. Nice bate though boomer.
Yep. Those panda guys are real go-getters. No-wonder so many of them burn out. Live fast, die young, eh?
Actually the real issue is a bit more complex than some comments suggest. Anyone who has owned a greyhound will tell you how little exercise they need. 10 minutes of going bonkers a day is fine. Cheetahs can run fast but will do nothing for hours if the don't need to. If you can go into low power mode, then you don't have to go hunting as often, with all the risks,
...Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Darwinian fitness "Survives to produce offspring that then survives to produce offspring."
The 30 year old living in the parents basement aint fitter until he's fathered three kids.
The stay on her back crack whore aint fitter until she's squeezed three puppies that were adopted.
You'll also notice the children of parents that teach only abstinence have more kids...
It's been told here before, but it seems Idiocracy might have been more than just a movie!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Mike Judge's documentary "Idiocracy" stated this years ago. This just supports the facts.
Those who have studied Perl will know that laziness is a virtue. It means you do the bare minimum necessary to achieve your goal. Who but a fool would do more, unnecessary, work?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
women out survive men.
But I couldn't be bothered to read the article.
Because there's more to life than decreasing its speed.
I come here for the love
http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-...
So this would explain why my cat sleeps 16 hours a day...
Sure, conserving energy when food is a scarce resource is a survival strategy. That's why prey animals like deer and rabbits will not necessarily run away as soon as they spot a predator, they will keep an eye on it until it gets too close. No need to waste energy running if the snake is going the other way.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I am bot lazy. I am efficient with my energy.
If you see waiters. Some are good and some are bad. A good one will look around so he does not need to walk rwice. A bad ome thinks that if he does not look, he will work less as he did not see it, resulting in walking twice, as it needs to be done anyway.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Fit-ness
Fit: to fit into something, like an environment that you inhabit. different kinds strengths are always available to living creatures, being physically powerful is only one of those strengths physically powerful. endurance is a strength as well, and in these situations exhibits the required fitness for survival on a very (talking eons) long term trajectory.
by framing a form of fitness as laziness as this article does is a cleverness that falls flat.
Not surprised given the source. Healthy people have a good periodic metabolism. Unhealthy people have high blood pressure and a bad metabolism, same for other mammals.
Wait wouldn't this mean that all the good programmers should have girlfriends??
But seriously, I have a whole collection of books on idleness and how enjoying that time is actually productive.
I can see that laziness means one has resources, but is there another side to it? Some people are attracted to those who would rather get a lot or of life in different ways than money and resources....?
If there are other idlers on slashdot I'd love to hear...
-
She'll be overjoyed!
consume more energy than humans. You fill in the blanks...
I would imagine that having a low metabolic rate helps when food is scarce and you require less to survive. Those with high metabolic rates would require high-calorie diets and would be the first to starve when it's unavailable. So I guess the spare tire around the midsection is nature's way of keeping us alive in case of sudden shortage.
I think the jump to reduced energy consumption to laziness is kinda a big step.
Warmblooded and larger brains, take a lot of energy. Energy uses resources, used resources become scarce. scarce resources = starvation.
However being warmblooded we can adapt to different climates which allow us to move away from areas of scarce resources. A larger brain power allows us to better utilize the resources we have.
However I think we as humans seemed to be crossing a point where we are using too much energy to survive, then the world can manage. The Lazy person with little is less of an impact then someone with a lot of resources, who may be using more then they need.
Lets just say your job requires you to travel around the world just for a 2 hour conversation with someone that you could had just as easily done via Skype. You have used resources which could had fed hundreds of people for days, just to give a 5% better chance on getting that deal, for you to raise you salary even further above what is needed to live.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From the state that brought you the strong push to teach Intelligent Design. Yeah, I know it's an unfair statement to the U of K researches, but it's the first thing that crossed my mind when I read this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/08/AR2005110801211.html
So this is a quibble over the definition of "fit" and whether it means physically fit or more generally fit? Fine. We'll call it survival-of-the-most-able-to-reach-reproducing-age-in-good-health-and-pass-on-genes. Or SOTMATRRAIGHAPOG, for those who like acronyms. That rolls off the tongue much better.
I don't know if these researchers were trying to summarize their research in "layman's" terms to be more readable or not but labeling the research as demonstrating 'survival of the laziest' is pure bullshit. It's 'survival of the most energy efficient' which IS a sort of 'survival of the fittest'...clearly a 1-celled organism with minimal energy needs can survive (and have survived) for a very long time in some very inhospitable (low energy) environments...I wouldn't call them 'lazy'.
And I can't speak for the whole human race but for any task/activity I do I go with the one that has the 'least energy expense' (e.g. 'easiest') for me...I didn't go out & build/buy all the parts for the computer I'm typing this on (at least not down to the last resistor) and that would just stupid (though maybe fun & educational for someone who is an electrical engineer).
Long story short, someone was actually paid to do a study to 'discover' that species and individuals with the lowest energy needs survive the longest...great but seems rather 'self-evident' to me...but 'low energy' is not the only characteristic in rating species...personally I'm quite happy not being a mollusk, I might not live as long but I'll have more fun doing it.
I may neve soar like an Eagle, but I will never get sucked into a jet engine!
Bivalves reproduce by releasing their sperm into the water. Masturbating in your basement, however, is not a good reproductive strategy in humans. In humans, females tend to select the male with the most resources and status, which you need to acquire through competition, intelligence, and brawn. It's why humans build civilizations and bivalves do not.
Weâ(TM)re all doomed, idiocracy has been scientifically proven as the future path of human evolution. We should all petition for it to be reclassified as a documentary
I agree that the summary is misleading and unscientific. A more accurate the first line would read: "If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult bi-value or gastropod still living in the basement, fear not."
This is pretty much the norm for many so called science correspondents. The /. summary and the article misrepresent the paper it pretty much impossible to know where to start.
Evolution is not Anthropomorphic.
Bio efficiency is well documented element of natural selection.
Now let me go back to my nap...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
APK or the Golden girls?
Or are we just too lazy to identify what is going on here?
APK or the Golden girls?
I don't think APK is trolling. He actually believes the crap he says.
Who are you to decide what is needed to live? And wtf wants to live a subsistence level existence anyway? As if the resources spent on the air plane ride would have fed anyone useful anyway. How about all the actually useful people with jobs who works for your plane flyer will be able to keep feeding their families now? Instead of your useless people waiting on handouts?
More clueless socialism to the rescue!
"If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not."
Honestly, this is your first sentence of an article about a science paper?
Let's see: ...unemployed... which 'gender' is usually derided for being unemployed? ...30-year old adult child... which 'gender' is usually derided for being an adult-child? ...living in the basement... which 'gender' is usually described as living in a basement?
It's everywhere people
How dare Phys.org compare "an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement" with "extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean"! The bivalves and gastropods are much more intelligent and ambitious than that. Plus, they don't support Trump nor spread hate speech over the Internet.
Euler-Lagrange equations and the parsimonious nature of well, nature, have been well understood for quite sometime.
We walk upright on two legs because it is more efficient than walking on four legs. The downside is it needs a larger brain to maintain balance. The upside is the larger brain allows a narrow margin of us to work smarter instead of harder.
It really should be "Survival of the Fit." And "Thrival of the Fittest." The phrase "Survival of the Fittest" phrase leads to some pretty muddy thinking.
...for a mollusk.
To hire a private investigator? I will recommend you contact; 'CHARLESCYBERWIZ @ GMAIL.COM' He helped spied on my cheating spouse when i suspected he was cheating, all he requested for was a phone number. He can spy on any phone without physical access. If u need to keep track of your kids,track employees and know what they are doing on their phone/computer or track a cheater or scammer dont hesitate to contact him.You get unrestricted and unnoticeable access to your partner/spouse/anybody's social accounts,email etc.He will never disappoint u. Contact him today! Thank me later!!
Y'all. Darwin has been simplified to the phrase survival of the fittest. Anybody watching a lion take down that trailing gazelle believes this is Darwin in action. But evolutionary survival is a matter of adaptation and not fitness. The lion that needs a gazelle or two every week will be disadvantaged relative to the lion that only needs a couple a month, if gazelles are absent. (whether through anthropomoronism or not.)
When food times are hard, any creatures with slower metabolism will win out because they are well adapted to the no food environment. That's why some people are heavy and lumbering, like me, and some are lean and fit, like all of you. I sense that people like me will be coming into our own in short geological time, when food is harder to come by. Not because I'm fitter, but because I will be more adapted.
And don't even get me started about Social Darwinism Bullshit.
Clearly, trial lawyers have found a way to defeat evolution.
Maybe and ifs articles. The article means nothing. Just say things without any affirmation.
The period the researchers looked at IS OVER. Back then, the top organisms were scavengers and finding the local maximum in energy ingested vs energy burnt finding food. This modern era, us warm-blooded predators (not scavengers) can eat all the mollusks we want. The dominant species in this era is the one best at killing. Our big brains require big energy to run, but the technology from those brains lets us run farms to easily kill the species we use for food, dwell in controlled cities where the predators that can kill our offspring are killed at the borders, and we have specialized killers that defend our clusters of communities (ie countries) from predators of our own species.
Laziness is not a modern winning quality.
You have a point, and you're missing some points. There's a big jump from your lion example to human society. All lions are mostly the same in combat. Humans have a large variety of weapons, a large variety of food interests, and if there's every a collapse of our food supply, some humans will be stealing food from other humans with force, while hopefully other humans will organize to grow their own protected supplies with a defensive perimeter. Neither group is going to want a slow, lumbering fatty on their "team". They're just going to pop you in the head from behind and take your backpack of twinkies and canned potatoes back to their camp to share with the other productive members. Go to a gym so you can feel good about yourself instead of making up fantasy end-of-world scenarios where all the desirable females laud you for your slow metabolism and want to spawn your offspring.
an increased rate of speciation. If a line survives but breaks of four other lines that die, that's not exactly falling harder than the line that survives but didn't speciate at all.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this up. It's precisely on target. Useless, insulting, and WAY more work to do than it was worth.
But clearly the drugs he took were not in vain!
Any conversation is only "just as easily done via Skype" if all parties are very motivated and disciplined. Sadly, that is rarely the case, thus the need for business travel.
I've said for years, I'm not lazy, I'm just super efficient. If I can do the exact same thing, whilst expending the least amount of effort, you're damn right that is a evolutionary trait.
Lazy is just a derogatory way of saying efficiency. So long as the "work" gets done of course.
One could argue that I write scripts to automate trivial tasks because I'm too lazy to do those tasks, or one could argue that I'm more efficient for finding a way to complete those tasks using the least amount of energy I need to do. Although I'll admit I'm a bit OCD about it at times in say running errands or the like, where some might argue that there are many ways to accomplish the same task, while I'll respond that there is only one way (to minimize effort and time). It bothers me to do otherwise. My girlfriend thinks it is weird that I eat each thing individually in order of thermal dissipation (i.e. what gets cold the quickest), whereas I think it is weird not to...