Yes, some academies fail. Another subject that should be covered is business studies - real world business studies. Ask a 16 year old why Tesco's is full of food and listen with horror to the answers. "People need food; if they weren't there people would starve" is a favourite from a real Q&A session with a class who had done business studies. Most of them have no concept that profit might be a driving force in the matter. If that's not a hole in education, I don't know what is. Vin
I watched a programme about the stone and bronze ages. Those people created structures which involved a great deal of intelligence and cooperation. They lacked some of the knowledge that we have, but I doubt that they were less intelligent. I know that's only 6000+ years ago....a mere blink of the eye...but you can't say they were less bright than modern people (who after all have only just read up on things). They could cut stone without the use of metal using various methods involving pegs and water! At some point, those uneducated people worked out how to extract metal from rocks and fashion it into tools. Intelligence is not increasing with time...the only difference is the widespread dissemination of knowledge,
If you just thought this up, then you should be writing books! Very interesting (even more so than Harry's autobiography).
I have had dozens of short stories published and have also won a couple of competitions for writing. However, I stopped when I needed to work full time, lost all my contacts and that was the end of that.
The only one I know. You can't pass on learned things to DNA of the next generation. Willing to admit there may have been things discovered since I studied science...the concept of inheritance of mitochondrial DNA only from the female line (meaning you have more DNA from your mother than from your father) was new in the 70s.
Don't know about mitochondria, but it stands to reason that you'd get more DNA from your mother (if you're male, at least), as the Y chromosome is obviously missing part of the X chromosome.
I think that football clubs can be of assistance with education and that the influence of teams should not be overlooked. It is a fascinating topic and the added dimension of having Michael Gove in charge makes this even more interesting. Some clubs do get involved in the community in this respect and I once worked with a colleague whose son was on the books as a youngster with Blackburn Rovers and he spoke highly of how the club assisted with education. I suppose the use of "after school clubs" run by teams would also be beneficial. Education has been a political football for ages and it only seems right that the sport should have a go at education too. Michael Gove is a visionary and the fact that the whole teaching profession is aghast with his suggestions only serves to illustrate how teachers fail to understand the needs of pupils. The clubs should listen to Gove as he is quite correct that it is only through football that our education system can once again attain the high standards of other countries such as Afghanistan and Rwanda. I feel that football clubs would be particularly good with topics such as Business Studies where the experience of clubs like Leeds, Portsmouth and QPR would be invaluable. How could you get better experience than learning from the catalogue of teams who go bust or into administration each year. You would also have to say that footballers provide an exceptional model for today's youth as well as offering some insights in to the criminal law. Granted that the football clubs are well placed with regard to physical education, someone like Robbie Savage would also offer as fantastic opportunity for pupils to study rhetoric. Iain Dowie would surely be able to offer some sound advice on scientific matters whereas Danny Wallbeck has a degree in English Literature (this is true) which sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. I am sure he could speak quite eloquently about the works of Charlotte Bronte. Anyone looking to study accounting would be wise to take the lead of Harry Redknapp and those players selected to take penalties for England must be over-qualified to teach woodwork given the number of times they have hit it. Ryan Giggs would probably be excellent at teaching Classical Studies since he has been around since the times of the ancient Greeks and could draw on first hand experience. I would also nominate David Moyes as an expert in history because that's what Man Utd's success will eventually seem like. Musical students would be extremely pleased to be taught by Mssrs Waddle and Hoddle , especially as John Barnes and Paul Gascoigne could act as relief teachers should they not be available. When it comes to learning foreign languages there could be no better experience than taking lessons with a premiership football club where there would be a great opportunity to study languages from around the globe. Arsenal would probably be selected as being experts in French. Religious Education should be organised by Linvoy Primus whereas there are no greater exponents of geographical knowledge than the Portsmouth supporters as they adjust their Sat-Navs for those important away games in Division Two where most people would struggle to find on a map. I think the case is clear cut. Only Football can save education.
Yes, but every cell has mitochondria and you only inherit from your mother. There are inherited mitochondrial diseases which they are trying to overcome now with mitochondrial donation, so that some babies will have cellular DNA from their father and mother, but mitochondrial DNA from a donor...the 3 parent baby that is in the news at the moment. Interestingly, it is analysis of mitochondrial DNA that has revealed that all white Europeans are descended from only a handful of women who arrived here from Africa.
Fran This is an interesting observation but I think there is some recent research that is suggestive that the earliest Europeans were much darker than their white counterparts. I've read about an early female ancestor too as this is a topic that fascinates me. What you need to be careful about is that the earliest humans in Europe were not Homo Sapiens even though our species did migrate from Africa too albeit via the Arabian peninsula. From recollection, the earliest Europeans were Homo Erectus and there were five or six human species around at one point. (I think this was even before Neanderthals who are actually relatively modern.) The study of genetics has opened up all sorts of windows into life. I read a book called "The wisdom of birds" a few years back and this effectively argued that advances in genetics in the 1990's radicalised our understanding of life so that common held assumptions regarding links between different species were totally destroyed. Many animals previously deemed to have been related are now understood to be quite different. I think the most identifiable example is the Bullfinch which many people will be familiar with and which is now thought not to be that closely related to our other finches in this country.
The people who came out of Africa would have been darker to protect from the sun. Skins paled over time as dark skin would prevent vitamin D production in poorer sunlight (evolution in action...paler people survived better to breed). Therefore, people get paler as you go North with Finns much whiter than Italians for example. This is why black Britons have a higher risk of rickets than white people. An interesting thing is that sickle cell anaemia would have died out if it wasn't associated with a protective effect against malaria in sub Saharan Africa. Not all traits selected by evolution are advantageous, but may be associated with genes that are.
Err beg to differ but this is adaptation in action not evolution the latter which theorises one species can reproduce at some point a new species and in time a whole new kind of organism eg an ape kind of organism giving birth to a human kind of organism perhaps through minor stages perhaps in huge jumps. There is no direct example proven (yet) of one kind of organism giving birth to a different kind. There are examples that strongly suggest gradual adaptation via mutative reproduction of a species eventually leading to a new species of a similar kind (genus/family) but the jump from one kind to another kind where the speciation tree splits massively or way back? Not proven as fossils evidence is just not prevalent enough. DNA evidence of evolutionary connection is simply an interpretation of a possible mechanism not proof itself. At least that's my understanding and opinion.
You included my quote as Ian's...how did that happen. It is a long time since I studied science so I may be confusing evolution and adaptation...but I was under the impression that adaptation was the mechanism of evolution. Evolution was always about slow changes in species that breed slowly....can only be rapid in species with short life cycles...that is why it is often studied in creatures like fruit flies. My understanding was never that one species suddenly changes to another, but that slow changes produce 'families' that differ from one another...especially if isolated geographically. A mistake people do make is thinking that we are descendants from the modern apes....we share an ancestor, but modern apes and monkeys are as far along their evolutionary tree as we are.
Evolution and adaptation are surely completely different things. Evolution is a series of random, accidental changes in the genetic makeup of a species from one generation to another (genotypes). Depending on the prevailing environmental conditions, one or more of the differences between individuals might lead to some of those individuals having a better chance of survival. More importantly, if two individuals with similar genotypes breed and their offspring have a higher survival rate than their contemporaries, then eventually, over a long period of time, that genotype will become the dominant one. This is natural selection. Adaptation is basically a single generation finding a way of coping with a particular environment. If other individuals in that generation learn the same trick, then survival rates will increase, but it isn't anything to do with evolution or natural selection. Some people seem to think that evolution is a consequence of adaptation, but it simply can't be. Evolution is a purely random process.
The Flynn Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect I'd love to write in depth on this interesting topic but I'm on my phone. Keep the ball rolling.
The small changes (eg slightly paler skin in the example) lead to an increased success in surviving and reproducing. The mechanism by which this happens is natural selection, in this case probably due increased production of vitamin D, although it also possible that there is sexual selection going on or linkage of the genes required for lighter skin to be adjacent to another advantageous gene on the chromosome. Evolution is the result of natural selection, the gradual change over time where a group of individuals change so markedly that they can no longer inter-bread and constitute a new species. Fruit flies are used to study genetics because you don't have to wait so long to see the results! So, returning to the question about whether we will continue to get brighter, it's possible but the timescale to measure the differences would be over tens of thousands of years! As for whether evolution has stopped for man, absolutely not. Any discussion about whether the welfare state might put a brake on that could be easily made redundant by the next widely predicted flu pandemic. Should the worst happen, it could be the Celts who happen to have a natural immunity. Imagines St Marys in 300 years being full of Scots!
