Activity around the clock: The evolution of sleep in human and non-human primates

睡眠是灵长类动物生命的一个重要方面，我最近的研究已经证明了睡眠与我们物种的进化史有多么紧密的联系，以及它是如何与许多对现代人类成功很重要的权衡相关联的。睡眠不足会损害人类一些最重要的精神和身体特征：工作记忆、注意力、视觉运动表现和决策能力。然而，现代社会中许多最重要的工作都需要高认知能力和精神敏锐度，而这一切都伴随着低质量的睡眠。例如，飞行员、医生和警察24小时值班，但睡眠机会有限。我们建议的一个中心前提是，许多动物由于生态条件而面临睡眠挑战，进化优化了它们对这些挑战的反应。另一个前提是，我们从灵长类祖先那里继承了睡眠需求，包括睡眠认知限制。这一提议旨在通过研究被囚禁的非人类灵长类动物、人类狩猎采集者的睡眠，并将我们的发现应用于西方人类的睡眠，为睡眠灵活性提供一个全新的视角。我建议运用现代系统发育和统计方法来评估睡眠的变化，并将有助于建立一个与生态和压力有关的灵长类动物睡眠变化的数据库。因此，本提案的目的是通过整合实地，比较和理论项目，在一个研究计划下生成和提供急需的灵长类动物睡眠结构数据，从而推进进化和生态学领域，最终将改变我们对灵长类动物睡眠进化的理解。具体来说，我将测试这样一个假设，即进化通过在典型的24小时昼夜循环中选择特定物种的睡眠时间、深度和时间的灵活性，优化了灵长类动物对生态挑战的反应。我将在权衡框架（即成本效益）下探索睡眠，努力实现三个具体目标：(1)生成长臂猿和大猩猩的原始睡眠数据，并将其与多种人类种群和非人类灵长类动物的现有数据结合起来。(2)为了评估人类是否具有更灵活的睡眠特征，我将建立一个理论模型来生成个体、群体和物种水平睡眠动态的零分布。(3)最后，本研究将有助于建立灵长类动物睡眠变异数据库，从而改变我们对灵长类动物睡眠进化的理解。作为灵长类谱系，人类是独一无二的——在非常短的时间内，我们在全球范围内迁移并适应了一系列栖息地。因此，在一个系统发育框架内，研究睡眠等特征是至关重要的，这些特征有助于人类相对于其他灵长类动物的独特地位和进化成功。

Sleep is a crucial aspect of primate life and my recent research has demonstrated how deeply connected sleep is to our species' evolutionary history and how it is associated with many trade-offs that are important to the success of modern humans. Sleep deprivation impairs some of the most important mental and physical attributes of our species: working memory, attention, visuomotor performance, and decision making. Yet, many of the most important jobs in modern society require high cognitive performance and mental acuity - all while coupled with low-quality sleep. For example, pilots, doctors, and police officers have round-the-clock duties, but limited opportunities to sleep. A central premise of our proposal is that many animals face sleep challenges due to ecological conditions, and evolution has optimized their responses to these challenges. Another premise is that we inherited sleep needs, including sleep-cognition constraints, from our primate ancestors. This proposal aims to provide a fundamentally new perspective on sleep-flexibility by investigating sleep in captive non-human primates, human hunter-gatherers and applying our findings to Western human sleep. I propose to apply modern phylogenetic and statistical methods to assess variation in sleep and will contribute to building a database on primate-sleep variation in relation to ecology and stress. Therefore, the aims of this proposal advance the field of Evolution and Ecology by generating and providing urgently needed primate sleep architecture data by integrating field, comparative, and theoretical projects under one research program that will ultimately transform our understanding of the evolution of primate sleep. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that evolution has optimized primate responses to ecological challenges by selecting for species-specific flexibility of sleep duration, depth, and timing throughout a typical 24-hour day-night cycle. I will explore sleep in a trade-off framework (i.e., cost-benefit) by working towards three specific aims: (1) generating original sleep data in gibbons and gorillas and combine it with existing data on multiple human populations and non-human primates. (2) To assess whether humans are characterized by more flexible sleep, I will develop a theoretical model to generate null distributions of individual, group, and species-level sleep dynamics. (3) Finally, the proposed research will contribute to building a database on primate sleep variation that will transform our understanding of the evolution of primate sleep. As a primate lineage, humans are unique - in a remarkably short period of time we migrated and adapted to an array of habitats at a global scale. Therefore, it is critical to target traits, such as sleep, within a phylogenetic framework that contribute to the unique status and evolutionary success of our species relative to other primates.