We have argued for the utility of a comparative developmental approach to exploring the relation between language diversity and thought (Lucy and Gaskins 2001). In this chapter, we elaborate the importance of taking a structure-centered approach to such comparative-developmental research (Lucy 1997a). A structure-centered approach begins with an analysis of language structure and then moves to ...

One focus of developmental biology is to understand how genes regulate development, and therefore examining the phenotypic effects of gene mutation is a major emphasis in studies of zebrafish and other model organisms. Genetic change underlies alterations in evolutionary characters, or phenotype, and morphological phylogenies inferred by comparison of these characters. We will utilize both exis...

The establishment and maintenance of plant species in the Chaco, one of the widest continuous areas of forests in the South American with sharp climatic variations, are possibly related to biological features favoring plants with particular defenses. This study assesses the physical and chemical defenses mechanisms against herbivores of vegetative and reproductive organs. Its analyses of 12 spe...

Entomopathogenic nematodes in Steinernema, together with their symbiont bacteria Xenorhabdus, are obligate and lethal parasites of insects that can provide effective biological control of some important lepidopteran, dipteran, and coleopteran pests of commercial crops. Phylogenetic relationships among 21 Steinernema species were estimated using 28S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences and morphologic...

DNA barcoding first came to the attention in 2003 when Paul Hebert’s research group at the University of Guelph published a paper titled ‘Biological identifications through DNA barcodes’. The basic principle behind DNA barcoding is based on the fact that small DNA sequences are capable of identifying different species as well as they are able to differentiate them. This technique deals with a n...

Understanding how a fictional relationship between two characters changes over time (e.g., from best friends to sworn enemies) is a key challenge in digital humanities scholarship. We present a novel unsupervised neural network for this task that incorporates dictionary learning to generate interpretable, accurate relationship trajectories. While previous work on characterizing literary relatio...

Progenesis is defined as the retention of ancestral juvenile characters by adult stages of descendants due to an acceleration of the sexual maturation and thus is often regarded as a fast evolutionary process. Several small, meiofaunal polychaetes, such as Dinophilidae, some "Dorvilleidae" (for example, Parapodrilus), and Protodrilida, exhibit morphological simplicity in that they lack features...

Appropriate and extensive taxon sampling is one of the most important determinants of accurate phylogenetic estimation. In addition, accuracy of inferences about evolutionary processes obtained from phylogenetic analyses is improved significantly by thorough taxon sampling efforts. Many recent efforts to improve phylogenetic estimates have focused instead on increasing sequence length or the nu...

Ecological diversification is a central topic in ecology and evolutionary biology. We undertook the first comprehensive species-level phylogenetic analysis of Emydidae (an ecologically diverse group of turtles), and used the resulting phylogeny to test four general hypotheses about ecological diversification. Phylogenetic analyses were based on data from morphology (237 parsimony-informative ch...