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Troublesome science : the misuse of genetics and genomics in understanding race
It is well established that all human beings today, wherever they live, belong to one single species. Yet even many people who claim to abhor racism take for granted that human \"races\" have a biological reality. From pharmacological researchers to the U.S. government, the dubious tradition of classifying people by race lives on. In Troublesome Science, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall provide a lucid and compelling presentation of how the tools of modern biological science have been misused to sustain the belief in the biological basis of racial classification. Troublesome Science argues that taxonomy, the scientific classification of organisms, provides a cure for such misbegotten mischaracterizations. DeSalle and Tattersall explain how taxonomists do their job, in particular the genomic and morphological techniques they use to identify a species and to understand and organize the relationships among different species and the variants within them. They detail the use of genetic data to trace human origins and look at how scientists have attempted to recognize discrete populations within Homo sapiens. DeSalle and Tattersall demonstrate conclusively that these techniques, when applied correctly to the study of human variety, fail to find genuine differences, striking a blow against pseudoscientific chicanery. While the diversity that exists within our species is a real phenomenon, it nevertheless defeats any systematic attempt to recognize discrete units within it. The stark lines that humans insist on drawing between their own groups and others are nothing but a mixture of imagination and ideology.
Book
Analysis of Evolutionary Processes
Quantitative approaches to evolutionary biology traditionally consider evolutionary change in isolation from an important pressure in natural selection: the demography of coevolving populations. InAnalysis of Evolutionary Processes, Fabio Dercole and Sergio Rinaldi have written the first comprehensive book on Adaptive Dynamics (AD), a quantitative modeling approach that explicitly links evolutionary changes to demographic ones. The book shows how the so-called AD canonical equation can answer questions of paramount interest in biology, engineering, and the social sciences, especially economics.
After introducing the basics of evolutionary processes and classifying available modeling approaches, Dercole and Rinaldi give a detailed presentation of the derivation of the AD canonical equation, an ordinary differential equation that focuses on evolutionary processes driven by rare and small innovations. The authors then look at important features of evolutionary dynamics as viewed through the lens of AD. They present their discovery of the first chaotic evolutionary attractor, which calls into question the common view that coevolution produces exquisitely harmonious adaptations between species. And, opening up potential new lines of research by providing the first application of AD to economics, they show how AD can explain the emergence of technological variety.
Analysis of Evolutionary Processeswill interest anyone looking for a self-contained treatment of AD for self-study or teaching, including graduate students and researchers in mathematical and theoretical biology, applied mathematics, and theoretical economics.
eBook
Complex Population Dynamics
Why do organisms become extremely abundant one year and then seem to disappear a few years later? Why do population outbreaks in particular species happen more or less regularly in certain locations, but only irregularly (or never at all) in other locations? Complex population dynamics have fascinated biologists for decades. By bringing together mathematical models, statistical analyses, and field experiments, this book offers a comprehensive new synthesis of the theory of population oscillations.
Peter Turchin first reviews the conceptual tools that ecologists use to investigate population oscillations, introducing population modeling and the statistical analysis of time series data. He then provides an in-depth discussion of several case studies--including the larch budmoth, southern pine beetle, red grouse, voles and lemmings, snowshoe hare, and ungulates--to develop a new analysis of the mechanisms that drive population oscillations in nature. Through such work, the author argues, ecologists can develop general laws of population dynamics that will help turn ecology into a truly quantitative and predictive science.
Complex Population Dynamicsintegrates theoretical and empirical studies into a major new synthesis of current knowledge about population dynamics. It is also a pioneering work that sets the course for ecology's future as a predictive science.
eBook
Consumer-Resource Dynamics (MPB-36)
Despite often violent fluctuations in nature, species extinction is rare. California red scale, a potentially devastating pest of citrus, has been suppressed for fifty years in California to extremely low yet stable densities by its controlling parasitoid. Some larch budmoth populations undergo extreme cycles; others never cycle. In Consumer-Resource Dynamics, William Murdoch, Cherie Briggs, and Roger Nisbet use these and numerous other biological examples to lay the groundwork for a unifying theory applicable to predator-prey, parasitoid-host, and other consumer-resource interactions. Throughout, the focus is on how the properties of real organisms affect population dynamics.
The core of the book synthesizes and extends the authors' own models involving insect parasitoids and their hosts, and explores in depth how consumer species compete for a dynamic resource. The emerging general consumer-resource theory accounts for how consumers respond to differences among individuals in the resource population. From here the authors move to other models of consumer-resource dynamics and population dynamics in general. Consideration of empirical examples, key concepts, and a necessary review of simple models is followed by examination of spatial processes affecting dynamics, and of implications for biological control of pest organisms. The book establishes the coherence and broad applicability of consumer-resource theory and connects it to single-species dynamics. It closes by stressing the theory's value as a hierarchy of models that allows both generality and testability in the field.
eBook
Bayesian Population Analysis Using WinBUGS
Bayesian statistics has exploded into biology and its sub-disciplines, such as ecology, over the past decade.The free software program WinBUGS, and its open-source sister OpenBugs, is currently the only flexible and general-purpose program available with which the average ecologist can conduct standard and non-standard Bayesian statistics.-.
eBook
Population-scale sequencing reveals genetic differentiation due to local adaptation in Atlantic herring
The Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), one of the most abundant marine fishes in the world, has historically been a critical food source in Northern Europe. It is one of the few marine species that can reproduce throughout the brackish salinity gradient of the Baltic Sea. Previous studies based on few genetic markers have revealed a conspicuous lack of genetic differentiation between geographic regions, consistent with huge population sizes and minute genetic drift. Here, we present a cost-effective genome-wide study in a species that lacks a genome sequence. We first assembled a muscle transcriptome and then aligned genomic reads to the transcripts, creating an “exome assembly,” capturing both exons and flanking sequences. We then resequenced pools of fish from a wide geographic range, including the Northeast Atlantic, as well as different regions in the Baltic Sea, aligned the reads to the exome assembly, and identified 440,817 SNPs. The great majority of SNPs showed no appreciable differences in allele frequency among populations; however, several thousand SNPs showed striking differences, some approaching fixation for different alleles. The contrast between low genetic differentiation at most loci and striking differences at others implies that the latter category primarily reflects natural selection. A simulation study confirmed that the distribution of the fixation index F ST deviated significantly from expectation for selectively neutral loci. This study provides insights concerning the population structure of an important marine fish and establishes the Atlantic herring as a model for population genetic studies of adaptation and natural selection.
Journal Article
From invaders to residents: The golden jackal
The golden jackal has rapidly expanded across Europe in recent decades and was one of the first to reappear in Hungary. Using hunting bag data from the National Game Management Database from 1995 to 2021, we examined the spatial expansion of the species and its population dynamics. Our findings reveal an exponential increase in the golden jackal population since the mid-1990s, with an average annual growth rate of 40% in the hunting bag and an occupancy of 86% of the country. The average speed of the range expansion was 536.9 km.sup.2 year.sup.-1 until 2007 and increased to an average of 5,289.1 km.sup.2 year.sup.-1 during the second part of the expansion process. The density of shot golden jackals also shows an increasing trend with a substantial presence of outliers, indicating that nearly 10% of the hunting bag demonstrates exceptionally high numbers, particularly in southwestern Hungary. The spread originated in the southwest and extended towards the northeast and northwest. However, the increase of the hunting bag slowed down and the expansion rate has decreased in the previous two years, leading us to anticipate that the golden jackal population will stabilize soon, as the expansion has reached its maximum in Hungary. This indicates that from the initial settlement to the stabilization of the population, the time span can be two to three decades.
Journal Article