[ExI] Armchair Evolutionary Psychology: Larks vs Night Owls

[Emlyn]

On 15/03/2008, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I tried to think of a good individual selection oriented explanation,
> > came up blank. If you have an imbalance between early people and late
> > people in a group, what is the individual selection pressure that
> > rectifies this, making it an ESS? Anyone got any ideas on this?
> >
> > [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2996364.stm
> > [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12841365
> > [3]
> >
> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/primarysources?wtID=33.3czt.11.3lcx
> > (scroll down for "How you sleep is who you are")
>
> Well according to the article linked to in The Atlantic:
> ------------
> "Social behavior diverges as well: Morning people are more likely to be
> self-controlled and exhibit "upstanding" conduct; they respect
> authority, are more formal, and take greater pains to make a good
> impression. (Earlier research also suggests that they are less likely
> to hold radical political opinions.) Evening people, by contrast, are
> "independent" and "nonconforming," and more reluctant to listen to
> authority—which suggests that teachers may have several reasons to
> prefer those students who wake up in time for class."
> ----------
> Based on this, I would half-jokingly suggest that night owls who were
> up after the alpha male had gone to sleep could have sex without
> getting beaten up for it. And the evolutionary advantage of that is
> self-evident.

Now, there's a start! If we posit the early rising group as the
defacto situation (I'll address that below), we could say that late
risers do this to be slightly out of sync with the early group, avoid
the power structure of the group, and thus, yes, get more (as Brian
said, lmao). That kind of slight tendency in some genes could be self
supporting, and tend toward creating a sub group, the genes from late
group not mixing so much with the early group.

This then begs the question, why is the early group the default? It
seems to me that the early rising times better match the daylight
hours. So straight thinking, logical types would find that the most
useful time to be awake, I guess.

The early risers are the people that attend to the day to day business
of life, absolutely necessary, but hard to think deeply around because
deep thinking looks like idleness. So, the late group attracts the
deep and weird thinkers, who need mental time away from the early
group. It looks like that's where you start to get a weak separation
of genes into Early Riser+Straight Thinker vs Late Riser+Bendy
Thinker.

Not fully coherent, but that's shaping up as something. Anyone got
something more / different?

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com