Our Checkered Past

Pinus ponderosa: A checkered past obscured four species.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Molecular genetic evidence can help delineate taxa in species complexes that lack diagnostic morphological characters. Pinus ponderosa (Pinaceae; subsection Ponderosae) is recognized as a problematic taxon: plastid phylogenies of exemplars were paraphyletic, and mitochondrial phylogeography suggested at least four subdivisions of P. ponderosa. These patterns have not been e...

Being Aquifex aeolicus: Untangling a Hyperthermophile’s Checkered Past

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is an important factor contributing to the evolution of prokaryotic genomes. The Aquificae are a hyperthermophilic bacterial group whose genes show affiliations to many other lineages, including the hyperthermophilic Thermotogae, the Proteobacteria, and the Archaea. Previous phylogenomic analyses focused on Aquifex aeolicus identified Thermotogae and Aquificae either...

Honoring Our Past, Building Our Future.

Honouring our past and shaping our future.

One of my favourite things to do is to ask Canadians to tell the story of how they came to be in this country. Are your ancestors First Nations or Inuit or Metis, the original people of the land? Did your forebears come here for love? For money? To escape religious persecution? Did they come looking for a better future, not for themselves, but for their children? I was born in Winnipeg, Man, an...

Forgetting Our Personal Past

People often talk to others about their personal past. These discussions are inherently selective. Selective retrieval of memories in the course of a conversation may induce forgetting of unmentioned but related memories for both speakers and listeners (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). Cuc et al. (2007) defined the forgetting on the part of the speaker as within-individual retrieval-induced forgett...