EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATIONS

E, F, P, M, S, Z, A
A01
Energy conservation
Warm blooded animals (mammals) e.g. humans use a lot
of energy to maintain a constant body temperature. This
is problematic for small animals as they have high
metabolic rates and use up more energy. So, sleep
provides the purpose of inactivity (therefore using less
energy) e.g. hibernation as it is harder for animals to
conserve energy to maintain a stable body temperature
during climate change

Food requirements
All animals must eat to survive therefore our sleep has
evolved around this. Herbivores e.g. cows spend more
time eating plants because it is relatively poor in
nutrients. As a result, they must spend more time eating
and consequently cannot aff ord to spend time sleeping.
Carnivores e.g. dogs eat food high in nutrients, therefore
they can aff ord to rest most of the time

Predator avoidance
Predators can sleep longer due to less risk of being eaten
or killed while prey species would have less time sleeping
due to vulnerability during sleep. Therefore, sleep must
be a vital function as if not natural selection would have
evolved it.

Meddis waste of time hypothesis

Suggested that sleep helps animals to stay out of the way
of predators during parts of the day when they are most
vulnerable. For most animals this means sleeping during
the hours of darkness. It also means sleeping in places
where they will be hidden.

A02
Siegel et al suggested that sleep enables both energy
conservation and avoiding dangers. An example is the
little brown bat, as this bat is only awake for a few hours
a day only to feed before going back to sleep. This
supports the evolutionary theory for suggesting sleep aids
in survival and energy conservation. However if this is the
case that animals should only be awake to feed and
reproduce, this should be universal to all animals however
this is not the case. Therefore such studies into sleep are
a reductionist in oversimplifying sleep as an adaptive
process when clearly sleep is more complex and diff ers
across species. The study of a bat may lack external
validity to other animals due to diff erent environmental
pressures resulting in diff erent adaptive behaviours. Also,
it may lack internal validity as sleeping patterns of bats
may be diff erent between species.
Zepelin et al found that smaller animals with higher
metabolic rates sleep more than larger animals,
supporting the energy conservation theory. However,
there are many exceptions e.g. sloths sleep for 20 hours a
day which goes against the energy conservation theory.
Allison et al found species that were at risk of predators
slept less. However, animals such as rabbits slept as long
as moles with lower danger rating, this goes against the
predator avoidance theory. Suggesting sleep may not be
evolutionary but more biological highlighting the role of
nature rather than being evolved through nurture.
{Capellini et al suggested that the energy conservation
hypothesis may be wrong, whereas foraging and predator
avoidance are right. They found that previous research
was fl awed because the methods used to collect data on
sleep was not standardised and comparison between
species were meaningless and had low internal validity. }
Research into explanations of sleep in animals may not
generalise well to humans as it is possible sleep serves
diff erent purposes between species. For example, humans
have no natural predators therefore predator avoidance

and food requirements explanation is not necessary

highlighting sleep may be biological rather than
evolutionary. Therefore many animal studies have low
external validity when extrapolating to humans.
Evolutionary explanations can be argued to be
deterministic as they see sleep behaviour is caused by
our past environment without free will playing a part.