Biased by our imaginings

The others: our biased perspective of eukaryotic genomes

Understanding the origin and evolution of the eukaryotic cell and the full diversity of eukaryotes is relevant to many biological disciplines. However, our current understanding of eukaryotic genomes is extremely biased, leading to a skewed view of eukaryotic biology. We argue that a phylogeny-driven initiative to cover the full eukaryotic diversity is needed to overcome this bias. We encourage...

Advances in our understanding of mammalian sex-biased dispersal.

Sex-biased dispersal is an almost ubiquitous feature of mammalian life history, but the evolutionary causes behind these patterns still require much clarification. A quarter of a century since the publication of seminal papers describing general patterns of sex-biased dispersal in both mammals and birds, we review the advances in our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary causes of sex-b...

Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?

BIASED SOCIAL LEARNING By

This paper examines social learning when only one of the two types of decisions is observable. Because agents arrive randomly over time, and only those who invest are observed, later agents face a more complicated inference problem than in the standard model, as the absence of investment might reflect either a choice not to invest, or a lack of arrivals. We show that, as in the standard model, ...

Anhanguera taxonomy revisited: is our understanding of Santana Group pterosaur diversity biased by poor biological and stratigraphic control?

BACKGROUND Anhanguerids comprise an important clade of pterosaurs, mostly known from dozens of three-dimensionally preserved specimens recovered from the Lower Cretaceous Romualdo Formation (northeastern Brazil). They are remarkably diverse in this sedimentary unit, with eight named species, six of them belonging to the genus Anhanguera. However, such diversity is likely overestimated, as these...