Scientists at Germany’s Ludwig Maximalians University of Munich have found that one gene, called ABCC9, influences sleep duration and could explain why certain people seem able to operate on limited amounts of shut-eye. The researchers studied responses to a sleep survey from more than 4,000 Europeans in seven different countries and also scanned their genomes. They found that people who had two copies of a particular variant of the ABCC9 gene generally reported sleeping for shorter periods than those who had two copies of a different version of the gene.

But Kathryn Doyle has doubts that sleeping less is a genetic advantage: