Will the human body eventually evolve to not need sleep?

Question

i was reading about how up till the 1700s, the average person slept 10-11 hours a night, before electricty and alot of stuff to do. but now we sleep much less with busier lives ...will the human condition eventually evolve to need No or very little sleep?"

Answer 1

Probably not.  Your body does a lot of repair work while you sleep, and your brain does a lot of re-organizing (shuffling memories around, analyzing the experiences of the day, etc).

The thing with evolution is that you need some sort of selective pressure to drive it.  In other words, to evolve away sleep, either a) something would have to kill off heavy/long sleepers before they had a chance to have kids or b) allow people who don't sleep much to reproduce more.  

True, DNA tends towards entropy when there aren't any selective factors at all (which is one of the reasons why wisdom teeth are disappearing), but sleep is a very complex activity, and isn't controlled by a single gene.  In other words, it's probably not going to disappear on its own.

Answer 2

yea hmm i see why you think that well i know some people who only sleep like 2-4 hours day (cause that stupid game wow >_<)

but sometimes they take a break from and get enough sleep or they just drink energy drinks

but then most people either get like i say 6-8 hours of sleep then their are some people who get more like 9+ hours of sleep but i read and saw this thing on i like discovery channel that they where saying in the future the hours in the day are going to increase to 36 hours so idk if so they would be cool

but i guess if they earth changes where we need to be up for a long period of tome then i would say that the us humans could adapt but then again Sleep deprivation makes people go crazy

Answer 3

I doubt it.  Your body does a ton of repair work when you sleep.  If you were constantly up and about, this would not happen.  Working out would then be useless because your muscles would not rebuild.  No amount of evolution can bypass the requirement of time.  Cells take a certain amount of time to reproduce, and that time is used during sleep.

Sleep deprivation makes people go crazy, and it's often used as a form of torture.  Going for even a few days with absolutely no sleep can mess up the brain permanently.  I can't see any evolutionary features that can get around mental health either.