A2s: What did I miss today? 13 November

Hi Greenies; There were quite a few of you away today what with Choir, Prefect duties and various other things so here's what we did. We were studying Ecological Theories of Sleep. I showed a couple of smartboard screens which I can either print off for you or you could simply copy up the activities from a friend. I then gave the class all sorts of chopped up bits from an essay which they sorted into AO1 and AO2 relating to the 2 main theories. We had lots of discussion about implications of Meddis' rather oversimplified idea that the main function of sleep is to keep you still so you can't be spotted by predators and started to look at animals which do and don't support this idea, i.e prey animals which spend lots of time asleep. Logically it might also make sense for prey animals to remain vigilant as much of the time as possible to avoid predation. We discussed that this fact makes the theory unfalsifiable and therefore not great as a scientific theory! As far as the evidence goes it appears that prey animals are more likely to sleep for short amounts of time and that predators sleep for longer periods, primarily because they can! This is evidence against Meddis' theory.

We will continue with this discussion on Friday but don't forget you have you mock during period 3 (see previous post). If you were away I advise you to read over Meddis and Webb's evolutionary theories of sleep in your textbooks and make notes in order to catch up. I have also started a nice wall display of this information in 3014.