Comment by jjk166
4 days ago
That is also what I am referring to. Energetic activity is required to live and to reproduce, those are the normal activities. An active creature may have evolved a state of dormancy for various reasons, but there was never an organism in a state of pure dormancy.
A seed?
If a seed doesn't stop being a seed, it has no descendants.
Sure, but probalistically some will! So if 99.9% don't lose their dormancy state, that small percent will carry the organism's lineage on. Obviously I'm generalizing, but I think my original point stands!
Sleep isn't pure dormancy, though. Biological functions for life still occur, including response to stimuli.
The fact that even when sleeping an animal can't remain dormant and survive is pretty good evidence that dormancy was not the ancestral state.
Do sponges sleep?
They certainly aren't exclusively inactive, which is all that matters for this discussion.
Presumably. Some jellyfish sleep[1]
But do fungi and Archea sleep?
My guess based on what we read is yes and no.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brai...
Yea, but at some point this is probably gonna strain the colloquial definition of sleep. So I went for one of the oldest and perhaps simplest animals around, to examine the "creature" angle in extrema.
Of course fungi sleep. That's how we can catch them in order to eat them.