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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.'"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, it's still going on. We just replaced natural selection with our own. We now select, and for different traits. That's not necessarily better, only different.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Go and die of a heart attack while trying to pursue "happiness".
I found happiness, and it's here in this comfy chair.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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
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.
It's been told here before, but it seems Idiocracy might have been more than just a movie!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
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
Other that that, yeah. Makes sense that the best adaptations to environmental conditions are those that require the least energy to maintain.
Because there's more to life than decreasing its speed.
I come here for the love
http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-...
Being lazy = needing fewer calories = more survival.
One of the reasons modern Homo Sapiens outlived Neanderthals is because our less muscular bodies and smaller brains needed fewer calories (yes, our brains are smaller- although that doesn't mean less cognitive ability).
They also lived in smaller groups so each individual had to do more tasks and was less efficient.
When food became scarce we could live off less food than they needed- they had to work harder just to stay alive. We outsurvived Neanderthals by being the lazier species.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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...
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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 may neve soar like an Eagle, but I will never get sucked into a jet engine!
You are pulling all that out your ass. We have nothing but conjecture as to why we beat them out. It could be for no more than we were smarter and out competed them.
We know a lot more about them than you probably think.
We know a lot about their physical features, we also know their diets; what and how they ate- and what their bodies needed from that we can deduce calorie requirements. They needed 600-700 more calories than a modern human just to survive each day. We can't know for sure their intelligence, but we know they had rituals, which signifies culture and beliefs; they had arts such as art and they probably had music too. We can't say for sure if they had language- we know their voices would have been amusingly (for us) high pitched for their size but physiologically their is no reason they couldn't have had language. They had huge brains- larger than ours.
They weren't too incompatible for lots of mating to occur between the species.
It is unlikely the intelligence between the two species (or subspecies) was vastly different. They did live in smaller groups and were a little less social though so innovation would spread slower. They were less suited for roaming long distances than us- so had different hunting techniques.
Ultimately though, most of the leading theories now come down to they couldn't eat enough; either through hunting pressure from us, or that their higher dietary needs made them starve during hardtimes. It's likely a combination of both... so yes, our more lazy ways and less demanding bodies was almost certainly a factor in their demise and why we out competed them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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!!!
Or are we just too lazy to identify what is going on here?
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.
...for a mollusk.
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.
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...