Fifty million years of beetle evolution along the Antarctic Polar Front

Global cooling and glacial–interglacial cycles since Antarctica’s isolation have been responsible for the diversification of the region’s marine fauna. By contrast, these same Earth system processes are thought to have played little role terrestrially, other than driving widespread extinctions. Here, we show that on islands along the Antarctic Polar Front, paleoclimatic processes have been key to diversification of one of the world’s most geographically isolated and unique groups of herbivorous beetles—Ectemnorhinini weevils. Combining phylogenomic, phylogenetic, and phylogeographic approaches, we demonstrate that these weevils colonized the sub-Antarctic islands from Africa at least 50 Ma ago and repeatedly dispersed among them. As the climate cooled from the mid-Miocene, diversification of the beetles accelerated, resulting in two species-rich clades. One of these clades specialized to feed on cryptogams, typical of the polar habitats that came to prevail under Miocene conditions yet remarkable as a food source for any beetle. This clade’s most unusual representative is a marine weevil currently undergoing further speciation. The other clade retained the more common weevil habit of feeding on angiosperms, which likely survived glaciation in isolated refugia. Diversification of Ectemnorhinini weevils occurred in synchrony with many other Antarctic radiations, including penguins and notothenioid fishes, and coincided with major environmental changes. Our results thus indicate that geo-climatically driven diversification has progressed similarly for Antarctic marine and terrestrial organisms since the Miocene, potentially constituting a general biodiversity paradigm that should be sought broadly for the region’s taxa.

Parabelbella (Paradyobelba) elchacoensis subgen. nov., sp. nov. (Acari, Oribatida, Damaeidae), an unusual representative of the genus from Ecuador

A new oribatid mite subgenus, Parabelbella (Paradyobelba) subgen. nov. (Oribatida, Damaeidae), characterized by unusual tubercular anterior propodolateral apophyse PA in combination with tubercular apophyses P, Sa and Sp, with type species Parabelbella (Paradyobelba) elchacoensis sp. nov., is proposed and described from Ecuador. The relations between genera Parabelbella and Dyobelba are discussed on the background of two major lineages within Dameidae. Parabelbella dimidiaspina Xie, Yan & Yang, 2013 is recombined in Dyobelba.

Katharina von Bora: peculiarities of the protestant marriage at the early 16th century

In the article the author explores some peculiarities of the protestant marriage, its foundations developed by the reform movement at the early 16th century. Marriage occupied a special place in the Luther’s doctrine due to the critique of the Catholic ideal of celibacy and asceticism. The author tries to show the new type of marriage through the prism of the biography of Katharina Luther (maiden name von Bora), an unusual representative of her epoch. Another significant question is how gender roles described in works by Luther, applied to his own family. The research is based on various sources of information: the evidences of the contemporaries, collected in the “Table Talk”, on the private cor-respondence of Luther and his wife with their companions. The author explains a role of a woman as wife and as mother and em-phasizes her opportunities and rights in the new Reformed socie-ty. Therefore, the article evaluates how the marriage alliance be-tween the leader of the Reformation and his wife, which became a role model of marital relationship, influenced the future devel-opment of the institute of family.

One Day–Fifty Years Later

November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.