Biological Levels Of Analysis Research Articles

Sex diversity in the 21st century: Concepts, frameworks, and approaches for the future of neuroendocrinology

Sex is ubiquitous and variable throughout the animal kingdom. Historically, scientists have used reductionist methodologies that rely on a priori sex categorizations, in which two discrete sexes are inextricably linked with gamete type. However, this binarized operationalization does not adequately reflect the diversity of sex observed in nature. This is due, in part, to the fact that sex exists across many levels of biological analysis, including genetic, molecular, cellular, morphological, behavioral, and population levels. Furthermore, the biological mechanisms governing sex are embedded in complex networks that dynamically interact with other systems. To produce the most accurate and scientifically rigorous work examining sex in neuroendocrinology and to capture the full range of sex variability and diversity present in animal systems, we must critically assess the frameworks, experimental designs, and analytical methods used in our research. In this perspective piece, we first propose a new conceptual framework to guide the integrative study of sex. Then, we provide practical guidance on research approaches for studying sex-associated variables, including factors to consider in study design, selection of model organisms, experimental methodologies, and statistical analyses. We invite fellow scientists to conscientiously apply these modernized approaches to advance our biological understanding of sex and to encourage academically and socially responsible outcomes of our work. By expanding our conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to the study of sex, we will gain insight into the unique ways that sex exists across levels of biological organization to produce the vast array of variability and diversity observed in nature.

Novel sources of (co)variation in nestling begging behavior and hunger at different biological levels of analysis

Abstract Biological hypotheses predicting patterns of offspring begging typically concern the covariance with hunger and/or development at specific hierarchical levels. For example, hunger drives within-individual patterns of begging, but begging also drives food intake among individuals within broods, and begging and food intake can covary positively or negatively among genotypes or broods. Testing biological phenomena that occur at multiple levels, therefore, requires the partitioning of covariance between traits of interest to ensure that each level-specific relationship is appropriately assessed. We performed a partial cross-fostering study on a wild population of great tits (Parus major), then used multivariate mixed models to partition variation and covariation in nestling begging effort and two metrics of nestling hunger within versus among individual nestlings and broods. At the within-individual level, we found that nestlings begged more intensely when hungrier (positive correlation between begging and hunger). However, among individuals, nestlings that were fed more frequently also begged more intensely on average (negative correlation between begging and hunger). Variation in nestling mass did not give rise to the negative correlation between begging and hunger among nestlings, but we did find that lighter nestlings begged more intensely than their heavier biological siblings, suggesting that this effect may be driven by a genetic component linked to offspring size. Our study illustrates how patterns of covariance can differ across biological levels of analysis and addresses biological mechanisms that could produce these previously obscured patterns.

Trauma across generations and paths to adaptation and resilience.

There is a growing literature on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, representing approaches across psychodynamic, family systems, epidemiological, sociological, and biological levels of analysis. Embitterment has been proposed as a response to severe, but normative, stressful events, different from the life-threatening trauma that precedes posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This article reviews the potential applicability of the construct of embitterment to trauma and intergenerational effects through (a) a historical review of the intergenerational transmission of trauma literature, (b) a discussion of embitterment versus PTSD, (c) a brief review of theories of mechanisms of transmission, and (d) a discussion of biological findings and their interpretation. Mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of trauma, which may include psychodynamic processes, vicarious trauma, learning and modeling, parenting and family environment, and biological influences, are reviewed. Survivor coping and resilience, and specifically the presence of PTSD, has emerged as an important moderator of parental trauma effects on the second generation. A table comparing posttraumatic embitterment disorder and PTSD is provided. The discussion emphasizes the importance of construing biological findings as flexible adaptations to stressors rather than deterministic indicators of damage, the relevance of context in interpreting such findings, and the role of community-level processes for healing. (PsycINFO Database Record

NSF Advanced Training Program in Antarctica for Early Career Scientists: Biological Adaptations to Environmental Change

The U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored course will be held in Antarctica at Palmer Station (Antarctic Peninsula) in July 2016. The course is designed to train scientists who are interested in the study of extreme environments and the biology of Antarctic organisms. Applications are invited from graduate students currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program and researchers who have an earned Ph.D. within the past five years. This is an international course, open to all nationalities. Partial scholarships are available to cover the cost of travel from home institution and full support is provided for room/board and science activities while in Antarctica. The emphasis of the Antarctic Biology Course is on integrative biology, with laboratory- and field-based projects focused on adaptations in an extreme polar environment. This program will also provide opportunities to understand and appreciate the complexities and logistical challenges of undertaking successful science in Antarctica. A diverse teaching faculty will offer students the opportunity to study a wide range of Antarctic organisms (bacteria, algae, invertebrates, and fish), using several different levels of biological analysis (molecular biology, physiological ecology, species diversity, and evolution). Deadline for receipt of completed applications is 25 January 2016. For more information and the on-line application see https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/antarctic-biology-training-program and http://goo.gl/forms/aoNP63pRhF.

Androgen modulation of social decision-making mechanisms in the brain: an integrative and embodied perspective.

Apart from their role in reproduction androgens also respond to social challenges and this response has been seen as a way to regulate the expression of behavior according to the perceived social environment (Challenge hypothesis, Wingfield et al., 1990). This hypothesis implies that social decision-making mechanisms localized in the central nervous system (CNS) are open to the influence of peripheral hormones that ultimately are under the control of the CNS through the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. Therefore, two puzzling questions emerge at two different levels of biological analysis: (1) Why does the brain, which perceives the social environment and regulates androgen production in the gonad, need feedback information from the gonad to adjust its social decision-making processes? (2) How does the brain regulate gonadal androgen responses to social challenges and how do these feedback into the brain? In this paper, we will address these two questions using the integrative approach proposed by Niko Tinbergen, who proposed that a full understanding of behavior requires its analysis at both proximate (physiology, ontogeny) and ultimate (ecology, evolution) levels.

Common Origins of Diverse Misconceptions: Cognitive Principles and the Development of Biology Thinking

Many ideas in the biological sciences seem especially difficult to understand, learn, and teach successfully. Our goal in this feature is to explore how these difficulties may stem not from the complexity or opacity of the concepts themselves, but from the fact that they may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world that have been studied for decades by psychologists. We give a brief overview of the field of developmental cognitive psychology. Then, in each of the following sections, we present a number of common challenges faced by students in the biological sciences. These may be in the form of misconceptions, biases, or simply concepts that are difficult to learn and teach, and they occur at all levels of biological analysis (molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecosystem). We then introduce the notion of a cognitive construal and discuss specific examples of how these cognitive principles may explain what makes some misconceptions so alluring and some biological concepts so challenging for undergraduates. We will argue that seemingly unrelated misconceptions may have common origins in a single underlying cognitive construal. These ideas emerge from our own ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation, and we think that expanding this conversation to include other biological scientists and educators, as well as other cognitive scientists, could have significant utility in improving biology teaching and learning.

The Mind’s Irreducible Structure

The human mind is one of our most compelling subjects of scientific inquiry—and perhaps our most elusive. Despite impressive biological advances, neuroscience has yet to produce a logical and empirical analysis of the mind that exhibits universal, objective explanatory power of human mental phenomena on both an individual and species level. This article first explores the limitations of the current neuroscientific approach to the human mind and then argues for a reconceptualization of the relationship between human mental phenomena and the brain. Here I introduce a new interpretation of neuroscientific data and argue that this framework has the capacity to causally explain the link between social, psychological and biological levels of analysis.

Are biologists in 'future shock'? Symbiosis integrates biology across domains

The study of symbiosis is quintessential systems biology. It integrates not only all levels of biological analysis--from molecular to ecological--but also the study of the interplay between organisms in the three domains of life. The development of this field is still in its early stages, but so far, the findings promise to revolutionize the way we view the biotic world. This Essay outlines some of the challenges facing the field and the implications of its development for all of biology.

The anatomy of Dolichocebus gaimanensis, a stem platyrrhine monkey from Argentina

Dolichocebus is known from the type skull encased in a concretion, numerous isolated teeth, parts of two mandibles, and a talus. The specimens come from the Trelew Member (early Miocene, Colhuehuapian South American Land Mammal Age) of the Sarmiento Formation near the village of Gaiman, Chubut Province, Argentina, dated to about 20 Ma. We describe all Dolichocebus fossil material using conventional surface anatomy and micro-CT data from the cranium. The new material and newly imaged internal anatomy of the skull demonstrate that anatomical characters hitherto supposed to support a phyletic link between Dolichocebus and either callitrichines (marmosets, tamarins, and Callimico) or Saimiri (squirrel monkeys) are either indeterminate or absent. To more fully explore the phyletic position of Dolichocebus, we undertook a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis. We examined 268 characters of the cranium and dentition of 16 living platyrrhine genera, some late Oligocene and early Miocene platyrrhines, Tarsius, some Eocene and Oligocene stem anthropoids, and several extant catarrhines. These analyses consistently indicate that Dolichocebus is a stem platyrrhine, as are late Oligocene Branisella and early Miocene Tremacebus, Soriacebus, and Carlocebus. Platyrrhine evolution often is conceived of as a single ancient adaptive radiation. Review of all available phyolgenetic data suggests a more layered evolutionary pattern, with several independent extinct clades filling modern platyrrhine niche space, and modern platyrrhine families and subfamilies appearing over a nine-million-year interval in the Miocene. The outcome of these analyses highlights the pervasiveness of homoplasy in dental and cranial characters. Homoplasy is a real evolutionary phenomenon that is present at all levels of biological analysis, from amino-acid sequences to aspects of adult bony morphology, behavior, and adaptation.

Biological Informatics: A Comparison of Biodiversity Informatics and Neuroinformatics, Part 2

This special section of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is devoted to two branches ofbiological informatics that warrant special attention from the information science community: biodiversity informatics and neuroinformatics. Biologists are turning to information technology to produce critically needed efficiencies in their work As explained in the previous issue, bioinformatics has come to mean "information on molecular biology" and in particular gene and protein sequences — thus the need to come up with a new term (biological informatics) to cover the science of information about all levels of biological analysis. Health informatics (medical informatics), neuroinformatics, biodiversity informatics and biomolecular informatics (bioinformatics) all fall under this broader concept. Because of the length of this section it has been split between this issue and previous one. Both biodiversity informatics (BDI) and neuroinformatics (NI) are brought together into one category because, while they differ broadly in other aspects of their social, political and historical context, it has become clear that progress in both fields is dependent on advances in information gathering and access. Both have reached the point of becoming "integrative sciences." Both BDI and NI are marked with a critical need for advancement, an abundance of new research and new sources of information, but a lack of a cultural and technical infrastructure to share and use this abundance of information. As is true in many fields electronic media and the Internet are changing the nature of publishing in BDI and NI. These same forces of scale and integration are also breaking down the culture of "one lab, one data collection." In this issue Bryan Heidorn addresses the promise and perils of this change in "Publishing Digital Flora and Fauna," while Gwen Williams, in the paper "Intellectual Property and Biological Knowledge," discusses how the shift to electronic delivery has made issues of intellectual property in biological science more complicated. Assuming that we can solve all of the above issues, we still have a major problem with the physical communication of biological information. Projects springing up around the world are being designed to use existing information retrieval standards to record, encode and deliver biological information. Chulin Meng covers some of the emerging standards with familiar sounding names but new twists such as "Darwin Core" (tsadev.speciesanalyst.net), Z39.50 (ZBIG), and Open Archives Initiative style treatment of natural history style holdings in "Biological Information Standards." Previous articles in this section appeared in the October/November 2003 issue of the Bulletin (www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-03/index.html) .

Loneliness and pathways to disease

Social isolation predicts morbidity and mortality from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and a host of other causes. The mechanisms by which the social world impacts on health are poorly understood, in part because of lack of specificity in the conceptualization and operationalization of relevant aspects of social relationships and physiological processes. Perceived social isolation, commonly termed loneliness, may represent a link between the epidemiological and biological levels of analysis. Research is presented that investigates loneliness as a social factor of importance in three predisease pathways: health behaviors, excessive stress reactivity, and inadequate or inefficient physiological repair and maintenance processes. Empirical evidence of autonomic, endocrine, and immune functioning suggests that the physiological effects of loneliness unfold over a relatively long time period. For cancer patients, interventions should be aimed at providing instrumental support for the immediate demands of the disease.

Social neuroscience: understanding the pieces fosters understanding the whole and vice versa.

Social science and neuroscience perspectives represent two ends of a continuum of levels of organization studied in psychology. Human behavior as a whole unfolds at social levels of organization, whereas much of the research in psychology has focused on cognitive and biological pieces of this whole. Recent evidence underscores the complementary nature of social, cognitive, and biological levels of analysis and how research integrating these levels can foster more comprehensive theories of the mechanisms underlying complex behavior and the mind. This research underscores the unity of psychology and the importance of retaining multilevel integrative research that spans molar and molecular levels of analysis.

Multilevel integrative analyses of human behavior: social neuroscience and the complementing nature of social and biological approaches.

Social and biological explanations traditionally have been cast as incompatible, but advances in recent years have revealed a new view synthesized from these 2 very different levels of analysis. The authors review evidence underscoring the complementing nature of social and biological levels of analysis and how the 2 together can foster understanding of the mechanisms underlying complex behavior and the mind. Specifically, they review the utility of considering social influences on biological processes that are often viewed as outside the social domain including genetic constitution, gene expression, disease, and autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune activity. This research underscores the unity of psychology and the importance of retaining multilevel integrative research that spans molar and molecular levels of analysis. Especially needed in the coming years is more research on the mechanisms linking social and biological events and processes.