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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.
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 believe it was the philosopher Epicurus who said, "The early bird may get the worm; but the second mouse gets the cheese."
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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.
fit (adj.)
"suited to the circumstances, proper,"
Word "Fit" is experiencing a semantic drift to mean something like "athletic" in common vernacular.
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,
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
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.
We're talking biology, not politics. Without shifting the goalposts to include electricity, etc, the shrew has humans beat by leagues.
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.
Kansas. The settlers that didn't even make it to the West coast.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.