The reproductive techniques of potential use to goat breeders have been developed in other species, notably the sheep, and have been applied to goats with only minor modifications necessitated by species differences. The Angora industry, and to a lesser extent the cashmere industry, have lent themselves readily to the relatively widespread use of reproductive techniques because of three major f...

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The divergent genital morphology observed among closely related animal species has long been posited as a mechanism of reproductive isolation. Despite the intuitive appeal that rapidly evolving genitalia might cause speciation, evidence for its importance-or even its potential-in reproductive isolation is mixed. Most tests of genital structural isolation between species often fail to find convi...

Despite its role in homogenizing populations, hybridization has also been proposed as a means to generate new species. The conceptual basis for this idea is that hybridization can result in novel phenotypes through recombination between the parental genomes, allowing a hybrid population to occupy ecological niches unavailable to parental species. Here we present an alternative model of the evol...

This has implications for the autonomy of these governments to make independent policy decisions. Taking advantage of the financial crisis faced by poor debtor countries, the World Bank and other international funders use the need for loans to impose conditionalities, including the adoption of various health sector reforms, even when these are not the best options for the particular country con...

BACKGROUND Despite increased recognition of the important influences of women's status and empowerment on social and health outcomes for women and their families, there are few investigations that examine the extent to which any gains in women's empowerment may be transmitted intergenerationally, that is, between mothers and their daughters. METHODS This study seeks to address this gap by usi...

We describe reproductive isolation caused by a gene transposition. In certain Drosophila melanogaster-D. simulans hybrids, hybrid male sterility is caused by the lack of a single-copy gene essential for male fertility, JYAlpha. This gene is located on the fourth chromosome of D. melanogaster but on the third chromosome of D. simulans. Genomic and molecular analyses show that JYAlpha transposed ...

In many species, increased mating frequency reduces maternal survival and reproduction. In order to understand the evolution of mating frequency, we need to determine the consequences of increased mating frequency for offspring. We conducted an experiment in Drosophila melanogaster in which we manipulated the mating frequency of mothers and examined the survival and fecundity of the mothers and...

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDS) span two current areas of sexual selection theory, namely the roles of multiple mating in determining individual reproductive success, and of parasites in mate choice, yet have been relatively neglected in the ecological literature. I reviewed the occurrence of STDS in populations of commercially kept birds and found widespread evidence for the existence of ...

This study in north east Scotland has shown that Marfan syndrome has a minimal birth incidence of 1:9802 live births, a minimal prevalence of 1:14217, and that 8/30 (26.7%) of cases in our series are new mutations. The calculated mutation rate is 15 +/- 6.7 x 10(-6) and there is evidence of reduced reproductive fitness.