Reduced plant competition among kin can be explained by Jensen's inequality

Reduced plant competition among kin can be explained by Jensen's inequality

Plants often compete with closely related individuals due to limited dispersal, leading to two commonly invoked predictions on competitive outcomes. Kin selection, from evolutionary theory, predicts that competition between relatives will likely be weaker. The niche partitioning hypothesis, from ecological theory, predicts that competition between close relatives will likely be stronger. We tes...

Plant Mitochondrial Genome Evolution Can Be Explained by DNA Repair Mechanisms

Plant mitochondrial genomes are notorious for their large and variable size, nonconserved open reading frames of unknown function, and high rates of rearrangement. Paradoxically, the mutation rates are very low. However, mutation rates can only be measured in sequences that can be aligned--a very small part of plant mitochondrial genomes. Comparison of the complete mitochondrial genome sequence...

The Inequality Puzzle European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality Can Inequality Be Reduced by Building Better Markets?

How much in the Universe can be explained by geometry ?

The paper uses geometrical arguments to derive equations with relevance for cosmology; 5-dimensional spacetime is assumed because it has been shown in other works to provide a setting for significant unification of different areas of physics. Monogenic functions, which zero the vector derivative are shown to effectively model electrodynamics and relativistic dynamics if one allows for space cur...

Can Nomenclature for the Body be Explained by Embodiment Theories?

According to widespread opinion, the meaning of body part terms is determined by salient discontinuities in the visual image; such that hands, feet, arms, and legs, are natural parts. If so, one would expect these parts to have distinct names which correspond in meaning across languages. To test this proposal, we compared three unrelated languages-Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian-and found both ...