When interactions with heterospecifics prevent females from identifying conspecific mates, natural selection can promote the evolution of mating behaviours that minimize such interactions. Consequently, mating behaviours may diverge among conspecific populations in sympatry and in allopatry with heterospecifics. This divergence in conspecific mating behaviours-reproductive character displacemen...

SYNOPSIS. The fact that phenotypic evolution can be studied on a character by character basis suggests that the body is composed of locally integrated units. These units can be considered as modular parts of the body which integrate functionally related characters into units of evolutionary transformation. These units may either emerge spontaneously by self-organization, or may be the product o...

I used phylogenetic analyses to reconstruct patterns of directional interspecific transmission during a pseudorabies virus outbreak in Illinois, USA, in 1989. Isolates were recovered from five species: cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and raccoons (Procyon lotor). I generated DNA sequences for 16 isolates of pseudorabies virus at the glycoprotein C gene, from which I constructed phylogenetic trees. ...

A test that can detect the influence of differential lineage sorting on phylogenetic signal in integrated studies with two or more loci is presented. Hitherto unexplored consequences of relationships among gene trees and species trees are made explicit, revealing potential influences of differential lineage sorting on phylogenetic signal. These influences can result in observable consequences, ...

In this lecture, we will be covering models of morphological evolution. These fall into two different classes: those that model morphology in terms of discrete states and those that treat morphology as quantitative characters. Both are applicable to other types of data; for instance, the discrete-state models can be applied to restriction site data and other data of a presence/absence nature, a...

Motivated by the recent observations for the cosmic acceleration and the suitable evolution of the Universe provided an interaction (decay of dark energy to matter) is incorporated in a cosmological model, we study the cosmological evolution of the Interacting Holographic Dark Energy scenario. Critical points are derived and their corresponding cosmological models are presented. The dynamical c...

We use a hydrodynamic minimal streamer model to study negative corona discharge. By reformulating the model in terms of a quantity called a shielding factor, we deduce laws for the evolution in time of both the radius and intensity of the ionization fronts. We also compute the evolution of the front thickness under the conditions for which it diffuses due to the geometry of the problem and show...

The analysis of the evolution of the organizational and institutional framework of the urban mobility systems around the world provides the evidence that in the large majority of cities the division between decisions of strategic, tactical or operational character is quite blurred. Very often we see a considerable overlap between the decision levels and today we have the evidence that this is a...

Adult and juvenile plumage characters were traced onto a well-resolved molecular based phylogeny for Picoides woodpeckers, and a simple phylogenetic test of homology, parallelism, and convergence of plumage characters was performed. Reconstruction of ancestral character states revealed multiple events of independent evolution of derived character states in most characters studied, and a concent...

In Siberia, the bluegrass genus (Poa) comprises 43 species and 61 subspecies in 12 sections. Diverse modes of speciation, including polyploidy and hybridization, have led to reticulate evolution and adaptive radiation. Cladistic methods that ignore hybridization and reticulate evolution may not be appropriate for morphological data. The number of morphological characters suitable for bluegrass ...