Ok so modulo @GeneSmith’s comments about this gene potentially being red herring, if there were a genetic basis to this, we’d expect to see prevalance of this trait increase due to genetic drift and removal of the selection pressure right?
I don’t have a good sense of how quickly we’d expect to be able to detect those population level differences with the rate at which calories have become more available and the rate of growth of the variant.
Figure 7 in @guzey’s post shows that it’s directionally been increasing but a lot has changed about our environments and lifestyles so it doesn’t rule out that maybe people are in-fact less pre-disposed to sleep but something else is increasing it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HvcZmKS43SLCbJvRb/theses-on-sleep
Since the matter at hand is a genetic basis that could flip a switch to needing “a lot less sleep” we should still expect to see the variance in sleep duration increase in the population even if the mean is increasing. I have no idea what the data says about that though.
This is shockingly similar to what I’m going through. And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I’m cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!