The social evolution of sleep : sex differences, intragenomic conflicts and clinical pathologies
Abstract
Sleep appears to be essential for most animals, including humans. Accordingly, individuals who sacrifice sleep are expected to incur costs and so should only be evolutionarily favoured to do this when these costs are offset by other benefits. For instance, a social group might benefit from having some level of wakefulness during the sleeping period if this guards against possible threats. Alternatively, individuals might sacrifice sleep in order to gain an advantage over mate competitors. Here, we perform a theoretical analysis of the social evolutionary pressures that drive investment into sleep versus wakefulness. Specifically, we: investigate how relatedness between social partners may modulate sleeping strategies, depending upon whether sleep sacrifice is selfish or altruistic; determine the conditions under which the sexes are favoured to adopt different sleeping strategies; identify the potential for intragenomic conflict between maternal-origin versus paternal-origin genes regarding an individual's sleeping behaviour; translate this conflict into novel and readily testable predictions concerning patterns of gene expression; and explore the concomitant effects of different kinds of mutations, epimutations, and uniparental disomies in relation to sleep disorders and other clinical pathologies. Our aim is to provide a theoretical framework for future empirical data and stimulate further research on this neglected topic.
Citation
Faria , G , Varela , S & Gardner , A 2019 , ' The social evolution of sleep : sex differences, intragenomic conflicts and clinical pathologies ' , Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 286 , no. 1894 , 20182188 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2188
Publication
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8452Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2019 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
G.S.F. is supported by a PhD studentship (SFRH/BD/ 109726/2015) from Portuguese National Funds, through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the cE3c Unit funding UID/BIA/00329/2013, S.A.M.V. is supported by a Post-Doctoral Research Grant (PTDC/BIA-ANM/0810/14), and A.G. is supported by a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellowship (grant no. NE/K009524/1) and a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (no. 771387).Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.