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"Behavior evolution"
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The evolution of parental care
Parental care includes a wide variety of traits that enhance offspring development and survival. It is taxonomically widespread and is central to the maintenance of biodiversity through its close association with other phenomena such as sexual selection, life-history evolution, sex allocation, sociality, cooperation and conflict, growth and development, genetic architecture, and phenotypic plasticity. This novel book provides a fresh perspective on the study of the evolution of parental care based on contributions from some of the top researchers in the field. It provides evidence that the dynamic nature of family interactions, and particularly the potential for co-evolution among family members, has contributed to the great diversity of forms of parental care and life-histories across as well as within taxa.
eBook
Gaining control : how human behavior evolved
'Gaining control' tells the story of how human behavioral capacities evolved from those of other animal species. Exploring what is known about the psychological capacities of other groups of animals, the authors reconstruct a fascinating history of our own mental evolution. In the book, the authors see mental evolution as a series of steps in which new mechanisms for controlling behavior develop in different species - starting with early representatives of this kingdom, and leading to a species - us - that can engage in a large number of different types of behavioral control. Key to their argument is the idea that each of these steps -- from reflexes to instincts, drives, emotions, and cognitive planning - can be seen as a novel type of psychological adaptation in which information is 'inherited' by an animal from its own behavior through new forms of learning - a form of major evolutionary transition. Thus the mechanisms that result from these steps in increasingly complex behavioral control can also be seen as the fundamental building blocks of psychology. Such a perspective on behaviour has a number of implications for practitioners in fields ranging from experimental psychology to public health. Short, provocative, and insightful, this book will be of great interest and use to evolutionary psychologists and biologists, anthropologists and the scientific community as a whole.
Book
Scale- and taxon-dependent patterns of plant diversity in steppes of Khakassia, South Siberia (Russia)
The drivers of plant richness at fine spatial scales in steppe ecosystems are still not sufficiently understood. Our main research questions were: (i) How rich in plant species are the natural steppes of Southern Siberia compared to natural and semi-natural grasslands in other regions of the Palaearctic? (ii) What are the main environmental drivers of the diversity patterns in these steppes? (iii) What are the diversity–environment relationships and do they vary between spatial scales and among different taxonomic groups? We sampled the steppe vegetation (vascular plants, bryophytes and lichens) in Khakassia (Russia) with 39 nested-plot series (0.0001–100-m
2
plot size) and 54 additional 10-m
2
quadrats across the regional range of steppe types and measured various environmental variables. We measured
β
-diversity using
z
-values of power-law species–area relationships. GLM analyses were performed to assess the importance of environmental variables as predictors of species richness and
z
-value. Khakassian steppes showed both high
α
- and
β
-diversity. We found significant scale dependence for the
z
-values, which had their highest values at small spatial scales and then decreased exponentially. Total species richness was controlled predominantly by heat load index, mean annual precipitation, humus content and soil skeleton content. The positive role of soil pH was evident only for vascular plant species richness. Similar to other studies, we found that the importance of environmental factors strongly differed among taxonomic groups and across spatial scales, thus highlighting the need to study more than one taxon and more than one plot size to get a reliable picture.
Journal Article
Supernormal stimuli : how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose
In this book, a Harvard evolutionary psychologist explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Our instincts--for food, sex, or territorial protection--evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons--that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term \"supernormal stimuli\" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. The author applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war.
BOOK
Towards a better understanding of the Ruppia maritima complex (Ruppiaceae)
Ruppia cirrhosa and R. maritima are two widely used names, each applied respectively to a long- and coiled-pedunculate species or a short- and non-coiled pedunculate species of Ruppia. The nomenclatural history of the two names is outlined here. A lectotype for the name R. cirrhosa is designated and the name is shown to be a homotypic synonym of R. maritima. Consequently, R. spiralis has nomenclatural priority over R. cirrhosa for the long- and coiled-pedunculate Ruppia.
Journal Article
Chimpanzees and human evolution
Although chimpanzees and other primates are frequently used as models to reconstruct the behavior of extinct human ancestors, this is rarely done in a consistent or methodologically rigorous fashion. This volume brings together leading scholars to explore how knowledge about chimpanzees can be used to understand both what is unique about our own species, and how these traits evolved. The first part of the book makes the case that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was chimpanzee-like. This inference is based not on an assumption that chimpanzees are a model species, but on morphological, developmental, and genetic data, together with evidence from the hominin fossil record. The second part of the book provides the first detailed record of the similarities and differences between humans and chimpanzees, including those in social system, mating system, diet, social behavior, hunting, tool use, culture, cognition, and communication.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Life history, patchy distribution, and patchy taxonomy in a shallow-water invertebrate (Mollusca: Polyplacophora: Lepidopleurida)
Things without names are difficult to rationalise, and so species that go without names are difficult to conserve or protect. This is a case study in resolving conflicts in historical taxonomy and ‘real’ species (identifiable and evolutionarily relevant groupings) using an approach including population genetics, natural history, and pragmatism. We report the observation that populations of a shallow-water chiton species from Washington and British Columbia demonstrate extremely high site fidelity and patchy distribution. Their limited dispersal potential and isolation could be explained by a brooding life history. This stands in direct contrast with the supposedly wide distribution of this “species”,
Leptochiton rugatus
(Carpenter in Pilsbry, 1892) sensu lato, from the Sea of Japan to Baja California. But this lineage has previously been suggested to comprise several cryptic species. Indeed, a haplotype network analysis using 61 individual sequences of the cytochrome oxidase c subunit I gene for
L. rugatus
s.l. revealed four discrete clusters which correspond to different parts of the geographic range. We infer these to represent four distinct species, at least two of which are likely novel.
Leptochiton rugatus
sensu stricto is herein reinterpreted as restricted to California and Baja California, and the new name
L. cascadiensis
sp. nov. is established for the lineage with a distribution in the Cascadia coastal bioregion from the panhandle of Alaska to Oregon. There are minor morphological differences among these species in the
L. rugatus
species complex, but genetic data or morphological observations alone would not have been sufficient to definitively recognise these groups as species-level lineages. The observation that different species within the complex may have different life history strategies provides important support for interpreting different populations as genuinely separate species.
Journal Article