The flowering world: a tale of duplications.

A Comparative Study of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Suhrawardī’s Tale of the Western Exile

An important allegory throughout the history of philosophy is Plato’s allegory of the cave. There are remarkable similarities between this allegory and an allegory from Islamic philosophy—that of western exile (al-ghurba al-gharbiyya) proposed by Suhrawardī. This paper seeks to consider fundamental components and issues within the two allegories, including the issue of the soul as the ...

Digital Necrosis: A Hoarder’s Tale

Interacting duplications, fluctuating selection, and convergence: the complex dynamics of flowering time evolution during sunflower domestication.

Changes in flowering time and its regulation by environmental signals have played crucial roles in the evolutionary origin and spread of many cultivated plants. Recent investigations into the genetics of flowering time evolution in the common sunflower, Helianthus annuus, have provided insight into the historical and mechanistic dynamics of this process. Genetic mapping studies have confirmed p...

An Architectural Tale of the Two Cities

A comparative study of the corresponding styles of Western and Iranian modern architecture has hardly ever been carried out in detail. This paper aims to sketch out an outline for such an investigation and to present a summary of empirical evidence accompanied by field observations to elaborate the ongoing trend of relationship between architectural styles in Iran and that of the West. This is ...

Widespread genome duplications throughout the history of flowering plants.

Genomic comparisons provide evidence for ancient genome-wide duplications in a diverse array of animals and plants. We developed a birth-death model to identify evidence for genome duplication in EST data, and applied a mixture model to estimate the age distribution of paralogous pairs identified in EST sets for species representing the basal-most extant flowering plant lineages. We found evide...