Patterns of intraspecific geographic variation of signaling systems provide insight into the microevolutionary processes driving phenotypic divergence. The acoustic calls of bats are sensitive to diverse evolutionary forces, but processes that shape call variation are largely unexplored. In China, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum displays a diverse call frequency and inhabits a heterogeneous landscape...

doctors and clients sometimes experience interactive clashes during hospital meetings in south-western nigerian hospitals because of their divergent culture-constrained orientation to politeness cues. the goal of this paper is to unpack the discursive elements that characterize interactive confluence and divergence in selected consultative encounters in the hospitals. the findings indicate that...

Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to studies of cultural evolution. However, it has been claimed that the large amount of horizontal transmission that sometimes occurs between cultural groups invalidates the use of these methods. Here, we use a natural model of linguistic evolution to simulate borrowing between languages. The results show that tree topologies constructed with Baye...

Introduction: Patient education is influenced by cultural factors. This study aims to find out the role of culture in patient education. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted on 23 Iranian nurses. Inclusion criteria were minimum 5 years of working experience in clinical nursing. Semistructured face to face interviews were used to collect the data. Interviews were taped, transcribed and ana...

The origin and maintenance of intraspecific variation in vocal signals is important for population divergence and speciation. Where vocalizations are transmitted by vertical cultural inheritance, similarity will reflect co-ancestry, and thus vocal divergence should reflect genetic structure. Horseshoe bats are characterized by echolocation calls dominated by a constant frequency component that ...

Quantitative phylogenetic methods have been used to study the evolutionary relationships and divergence times of biological species, and recently, these have also been applied to linguistic data to elucidate the evolutionary history of language families. In biology, the factors driving macroevolutionary processes are assumed to be either mainly biotic (the Red Queen model) or mainly abiotic (th...