Hello everyone! I had a few questions regarding these 2 dotpoints:
- major trends in hominin evolution from the genus Australopithecus to the genus Homo including structural,
functional and cognitive changes and the consequences for cultural evolution. I missed the class where we discussed this dotpoint and my teacher only provided me with the structural changes, but what are the functional and cognitive changes? and what exactly is cultural evolution and it's consequences?
I'm not really sure on functional changes - I didn't really understand this back when I originally learnt about it.
Cognitive changes will just be referring to increased intelligence.
Cultural evolution is just the passing down of knowledge, rather than each individual having to learn for itself it can be taught things, therefore that individual has time to learn completely new things which it can then pass down, rather than just learning the same things its parents did and then dying. Over time this results in lots and lots of accumulated knowledge.
I think what this dot point is getting at is that structural evolution (increased cranium capacity) allowed for bigger brains (potentially this is functional change??) which made them smarter (cognitive change) which allowed them to learn and teach others (cultural evolution)
• the human fossil record as an example of a classification scheme that is open to interpretations that are
contested, refined or replaced when new evidence challenges them or when a new model has greater
explanatory power, including whether Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis interbred and the placement
of the Denisovans into the Homo evolutionary tree. For this one, I was wondering how they would assess this in an exam and what I need to gather from this dotpoint
Thanks so much!!
I think all you'd need to know for this would be about why the human fossil record is incomplete (fossilisation being rare, finding fossils being rare etc.), the theories for the evolution of humans, and evidence that suggests that denisovans interbred (DNA being found in some modern human populations). On our exam last year we got a question about Denisovans, I can't remember what it was about exactly but it might be worth having a look at it.
So, just to confirm:
- transcription factors can bind to the promoter region to facilitate RNA polymerase's role
- or TFs can bind to the operator region and prevent RNA polymerase from binding to promoter
In eukaryotes TF's bind to the promoter region, in prokaryotes they bind to the operator region
Why do we use STR regions for DNA profiling?
They're highly variable regions, so the chances of peoples being the same are low - hence they can be used to create a unique DNA profile (sort of like why we use fingerprints)