Evolutionary Conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Queller ◽  
Joan E. Strassmann
Keyword(s):  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Evolutionary Conflict ◽  
Accelerated Evolution ◽  
Selective Forces ◽  
The Way

Evolutionary conflict occurs when two parties can each affect a joint phenotype, but they gain from pushing it in opposite directions. Conflicts occur across many biological levels and domains but share many features. They are a major source of biological maladaptation. They affect biological diversity, often increasing it, at almost every level. Because opponents create selection that can be strong, persistent, and malevolent, conflict often leads to accelerated evolution and arms races. Conflicts might even drive the majority of adaptation, with pathogens leading the way as selective forces. The evolution of conflicts is complex, with outcomes determined partly by the relative evolvability of each party and partly by the kinds of power that each evolves. Power is a central issue in biology. In addition to physical strength and weapons, it includes strength from numbers and complexity; abilities to bind and block; advantageous timing; and abilities to acquire, use, and distort information.

scholarly journals Family quarrels in seeds and rapid adaptive evolution in Arabidopsis

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (19) ◽  
pp. 9463-9468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine S. Geist ◽  
Joan E. Strassmann ◽  
David C. Queller
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Evolution ◽  
Kin Selection ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Flowering Plant ◽  
Rapid Adaptation ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
Evolutionary Conflict ◽  
Alternative Hypotheses

Evolutionary conflict can drive rapid adaptive evolution, sometimes called an arms race, because each party needs to respond continually to the adaptations of the other. Evidence for such arms races can sometimes be seen in morphology, in behavior, or in the genes underlying sexual interactions of host−pathogen interactions, but is rarely predicted a priori. Kin selection theory predicts that conflicts of interest should usually be reduced but not eliminated among genetic relatives, but there is little evidence as to whether conflict within families can drive rapid adaptation. Here we test multiple predictions about how conflict over the amount of resources an offspring receives from its parent would drive rapid molecular evolution in seed tissues of the flowering plant Arabidopsis. As predicted, there is more adaptive evolution in genes expressed in Arabidopsis seeds than in other specialized organs, more in endosperms and maternal tissues than in embryos, and more in the specific subtissues involved in nutrient transfer. In the absence of credible alternative hypotheses, these results suggest that kin selection and conflict are important in plants, that the conflict includes not just the mother and offspring but also the triploid endosperm, and that, despite the conflict-reducing role of kinship, family members can engage in slow but steady tortoise-like arms races.

Use of ICT in Teaching Vocational Subjects

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 803-813
Author(s):  
Deepak Chakravarty, Dr. Mahima Gupta, Prof. Banhi Jha
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Information And Communication Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
New Information ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Way

In today’s modern world, globalization has completely changed the way of working. The way we live, learn, work, and even define work has changed due to new information and communication technologies—Hence, it can stated that human capital fuel up the modern economy. In reality, the information and communication technology revolution has turned intelligence into a valuable commodity. In today's economy, economic growth is based on mental intelligence rather than physical strength, and its worth is generated by recruiting knowledgeable workers and continuing to learn. Incorporating information and communication technology (ICT) into vocational and technical education and the educational system in general has a vast range of consequences on teaching and learning.

scholarly journals Evaluating the progress and needs of taxonomy since the Convention on Biological Diversity: going beyond the rate of species description

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Tancoigne ◽  
Guillaume Ollivier
Keyword(s):  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Species Description ◽  
Convention On Biological Diversity ◽  
Small Scales ◽  
Quantitative Indicators ◽  
Quantitative Evaluations ◽  
The Way

There is a long tradition of assessing the activity and progress of taxonomy with quantitative indicators, such as, for example, number of taxonomists, species described and species collected. These evaluations play a key role in the context of a worldwide concern over biodiversity and its governance. We have described and analysed these evaluations since 1992, the year in which the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted. We showed that despite the establishment of a dedicated body inside the CBD (the Global Taxonomy Initiative), these quantitative evaluations are mostly sporadic and independent initiatives, performed by non-taxonomists. They do not map the places where most of the taxonomic activities take place, and they are performed on small scales, with scarce and heterogeneous sources of data, making comparisons almost impossible. Most of the indicators they use refer to the activity of species description. We argue that there is a need to rethink the way we evaluate taxonomy today and we discuss why it is urgent to move beyond indicators of species description. We suggest the use of a new set of indicators that would focus on taxonomic resources and dynamics, instead of taxonomic outputs.

scholarly journals Contrasting effects of intralocus sexual conflict on sexually antagonistic coevolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (8) ◽  
pp. E978-E986 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya M. Pennell ◽  
Freek J. H. de Haas ◽  
Edward H. Morrow ◽  
G. Sander van Doorn
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Conflict ◽  
Genetic Model ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
Female Partners ◽  
Intralocus Sexual Conflict ◽  
Antagonistic Coevolution ◽  
Evolutionary Conflict ◽  
Quantitative Genetic Model ◽  
Female Specific ◽  
Evolutionary Consequences

Evolutionary conflict between the sexes can induce arms races in which males evolve traits that are detrimental to the fitness of their female partners, and vice versa. This interlocus sexual conflict (IRSC) has been proposed as a cause of perpetual intersexual antagonistic coevolution with wide-ranging evolutionary consequences. However, theory suggests that the scope for perpetual coevolution is limited, if traits involved in IRSC are subject to pleiotropic constraints. Here, we consider a biologically plausible form of pleiotropy that has hitherto been ignored in treatments of IRSC and arrive at drastically different conclusions. Our analysis is based on a quantitative genetic model of sexual conflict, in which genes controlling IRSC traits have side effects in the other sex, due to incompletely sex-limited gene expression. As a result, the genes are exposed to intralocus sexual conflict (IASC), a tug-of-war between opposing male- and female-specific selection pressures. We find that the interaction between the two forms of sexual conflict has contrasting effects on antagonistic coevolution: Pleiotropic constraints stabilize the dynamics of arms races if the mating traits are close to evolutionary equilibrium but can prevent populations from ever reaching such a state. Instead, the sexes are drawn into a continuous cycle of arms races, causing the buildup of IASC, alternated by phases of IASC resolution that trigger the next arms race. These results encourage an integrative perspective on the biology of sexual conflict and generally caution against relying exclusively on equilibrium stability analysis.

The ‘political’ and the ‘legal’: comments on Professor Tushnet’s paper

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 319-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Sands
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Emergency Powers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This comment responds to a central issue posed by Professor Tushnet as to the way in which democracies control the exercise of emergency powers. Sands believes that ‘law’ and ‘politics’ are not mutually exclusive, and that the relationship between them suggests that a general theory on the interplay of political and legal factors in controlling the exercise of emergency powers remains elusive.

scholarly journals Farmers’ Rights and Digital Sequence Information: Crisis or Opportunity to Reclaim Stewardship Over Agrobiodiversity?

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Wynberg ◽  
Regine Andersen ◽  
Sarah Laird ◽  
Kudzai Kusena ◽  
Christian Prip ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Resources ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Plant Genetic Resources ◽  
Benefit Sharing ◽  
Convention On Biological Diversity ◽  
Sequence Information ◽  
Access And Benefit Sharing ◽  
Food And Agriculture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Contestations about the way in which digital sequence information is used and regulated have created stumbling blocks across multiple international policy processes. Such schisms have profound implications for the way in which we manage and conceptualize agrobiodiversity and its benefits. This paper explores the relationship between farmers’ rights, as recognized in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and the dematerialization of genetic resources. Using concepts of “stewardship” and “ownership” we emphasize the need to move away from viewing agrobiodiversity as a commodity that can be owned, toward a strengthened, proactive and expansive stewardship approach that recognizes plant genetic resources for food and agriculture as a public good which should be governed as such. Through this lens we analyze the relationship between digital sequence information and different elements of farmers’ rights to compare and contrast implications for the governance of digital sequence information. Two possible parallel pathways are presented, the first envisaging an enhanced multilateral system that includes digital sequence information and which promotes and enhances the realization of farmers’ rights; and the second a more radical approach that folds together concepts of stewardship, farmers’ rights, and open source science. Farmers’ rights, we suggest, may well be the linchpin for finding fair and equitable solutions for digital sequence information beyond the bilateral and transactional approach that has come to characterize access and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Existing policy uncertainties could be seized as an unexpected but serendipitous opportunity to chart an alternative and visionary pathway for the rights of farmers and other custodians of plant genetic resources.

Re-envisioning Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary M. Feinman ◽  
Linda M. Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Managerial Control ◽  
Market System ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

Exuberant Spanish accounts of the 16th century Aztec market system have been part of the documentary record for hundreds of years. Yet the significance of markets and marketplace exchanges in the prehispanic Mesoamerican world has consistently been under-theorized until relatively recently. One of the key, but not sole, factors that has forced a shift in our analytical framing is the archaeological evidence that almost all production (craft and agrarian) was situated domestically in prehispanic Mesoamerica, yet many households were producing at least in part for exchange. In consequence, centralized managerial control over production would have been difficult if not impossible to sustain. Although such findings have cast great doubt on long-held visions of Mesoamerican command economies, understanding how power was funded in different prehispanic time/space contexts remains a central issue with a greater analytical focus now shifted to the fiscal foundations of collective action, governance, and power. Despite important shifts in the specific lessons and legacies that we draw from Marx’s historical analysis, intellectual parallels and debts to this materialist frame of thought remain, and these help generate new questions to guide the way forward for studying this region’s past.

Self-Uncertainty as Self-Realization

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Kottman
Keyword(s):  
Social Bonds ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Practical Identity ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
The Way

A central issue in Hamlet is Hamlet’s attempt to live his life as his—his efforts at discerning a course of action that amounts to “leading” a life, rather than just suffering it. Shakespeare’s play addresses Hamlet’s difficulty in doing this, from two sides. First, Hamlet is framed by the breakdown of the social bonds on which the protagonists depend for the meaning and worth of their lives together. The play shows these bonds to be dissolvable. Second, Hamlet’s predicament does not leave us with a desperate nihilism. On the contrary, the play shows how the meaning of a life as individually lived is best gauged by the way it “bears up” under the collapse of traditional, inherited ways of life. Hamlet is what the testing of a new, radically uncertain practical identity looks like. He cultivates an abiding uncertainty about who he might become, as a mode of self-realization.

scholarly journals Retroviral Restriction Factors and Their Viral Targets: Restriction Strategies and Evolutionary Adaptations

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 1965
Author(s):  
Guney Boso ◽  
Christine A. Kozak
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Evolution ◽  
Restriction Factors ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Evolutionary Conflict ◽  
Accelerated Evolution ◽  
Multiple Virus ◽  
Vertebrate Hosts ◽  
Cellular Pathways ◽  
Retroviral Replication ◽  
Viral Antagonists

The evolutionary conflict between retroviruses and their vertebrate hosts over millions of years has led to the emergence of cellular innate immune proteins termed restriction factors as well as their viral antagonists. Evidence accumulated in the last two decades has substantially increased our understanding of the elaborate mechanisms utilized by these restriction factors to inhibit retroviral replication, mechanisms that either directly block viral proteins or interfere with the cellular pathways hijacked by the viruses. Analyses of these complex interactions describe patterns of accelerated evolution for these restriction factors as well as the acquisition and evolution of their virus-encoded antagonists. Evidence is also mounting that many restriction factors identified for their inhibition of specific retroviruses have broader antiviral activity against additional retroviruses as well as against other viruses, and that exposure to these multiple virus challenges has shaped their adaptive evolution. In this review, we provide an overview of the restriction factors that interfere with different steps of the retroviral life cycle, describing their mechanisms of action, adaptive evolution, viral targets and the viral antagonists that evolved to counter these factors.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document