Evolution Of Other Aspects Research Articles

Maintaining High Quality Dosimetry Education in Radiation Oncology Medical Residency Amid and Post-COVID-19 Pandemic: A Reimagined Training Rotation

Maintaining High Quality Dosimetry Education in Radiation Oncology Medical Residency Amid and Post-COVID-19 Pandemic: A Reimagined Training Rotation

Paediatric cardiac surgical education: which are the important elements?

Pediatric cardiac surgical education and the associated requirements for certification vary considerably from one country to another. Evolution and standardization for pediatric cardiac surgical education may not have kept pace with the evolution of other aspects of the specialty. Restriction of work hours and disqualification of foreign training experience constitute potential threats to our specialty. A global strategy for qualification and certification may help to address some of these difficult issues.

SWS2 visual pigment evolution as a test of historically contingent patterns of plumage color evolution in warblers.

Distantly related clades that occupy similar environments may differ due to the lasting imprint of their ancestors-historical contingency. The New World warblers (Parulidae) and Old World warblers (Phylloscopidae) are ecologically similar clades that differ strikingly in plumage coloration. We studied genetic and functional evolution of the short-wavelength-sensitive visual pigments (SWS2 and SWS1) to ask if altered color perception could contribute to the plumage color differences between clades. We show SWS2 is short-wavelength shifted in birds that occupy open environments, such as finches, compared to those in closed environments, including warblers. Phylogenetic reconstructions indicate New World warblers were derived from a finch-like form that colonized from the Old World 15-20 Ma. During this process, the SWS2 gene accumulated six substitutions in branches leading to New World warblers, inviting the hypothesis that passage through a finch-like ancestor resulted in SWS2 evolution. In fact, we show spectral tuning remained similar across warblers as well as the finch ancestor. Results reject the hypothesis of historical contingency based on opsin spectral tuning, but point to evolution of other aspects of visual pigment function. Using the approach outlined here, historical contingency becomes a generally testable theory in systems where genotype and phenotype can be connected.

Evolution of behavioural phenotypes: influences of ancestry and expression

Behavioural phenotypes are invariably plastic to some degree and are among the most labile of phenotypes. Some are acquired over the course of development in a particular environment (developmental plasticity), but most are elicited by an environmental trigger and are expressed only briefly, but often repeatedly, in the life of an organism (activational plasticity). Thus, individuals can possess the ability to perform a behaviour, but in the absence of the appropriate environmental stimulus, can fail to do so over the course of a lifetime. Rarely is the evolution of behavioural phenotypes explored in the larger context of the evolution of phenotypically plastic traits. Here I argue that the evolution of behavioural phenotypes, regardless of the nature of the plasticity expressed, can be examined in the same way as the evolution of other plastic traits. I first provide a conceptual review of the factors that can influence the evolution of plastic phenotypes and of the ways in which behavioural plasticity can influence the evolution of other aspects of phenotype. Many of the most compelling questions involve contrasting ancestral patterns of plasticity with those in derived populations or species, a particularly challenging problem in the case of phenotypic plasticity. I therefore provide an overview of the ways in which the influence of plasticity upon evolution can be addressed and then provide a review of examples from the literature that offer initial insights into the role of behavioural plasticity in evolution. The questions are exciting, the data limited, and, as I argue in closing, we need creative insights into the ways in which behavioural plasticity has evolved and has in turn influenced the evolution of other aspects of phenotype.

Bank presence in firm equity: A diversification based approach

This study analyses the possible reasons for banks deciding to invest in firm equity, based on the fundamentals of the strategic diversification literature. Those fundamentals suggest that it may be in response to the negative evolution of other aspects of banking business, namely, credit business, fixed interest business and services, as well as the bank's level of efficiency. The results confirm the hypotheses that the decision to hold equity in other firms is related to the evolution of the bank's other businesses. However, the results for savings banks differed from those for banks.

The Town Planning Movement and the Late Victorian City

British town planning grew out of the issues concerned with late Victorian capitalism and the urban problems of the turn of the century. The contributory factors in a complex situation related particularly to the influences of the housing, social and land reform movements. Other influences included the garden city, innovations in residential architecture, the tradition of model estates built by philanthropic industrialists, and the attraction of German town expansion plans. British town planning finally took on a recognizable form in the context of tackling the problem of housing the working classes, with the statutory provisions of the 1909 Act which permitted a measure of land-use control of suburban areas. There was no town planning movement worthy of the name until a sufficient body of people was convinced that town planning could make a unique and necessary contribution to the happiness, welfare and prosperity, particularly of townspeople, but ultimately of the whole nation. The principal origin of the movement must be sought in the slow creation of that belief.' THIS account, by Ashworth, of the genesis of British town planning rested primarily on two observations: first, that town planning was rooted in the economic and social conditions of its time, and secondly, that its formulation was a stage in a gradual process of evolution. This thesis was an important corrective to an 'art history' approach to the understanding of town planning, typified by Hiorns2 and a sequence of writers in the same tradition, of which Burke3 is a recent example. This school looks at successive phases of town formation and the contributions to urban design; it sees town building and its progressive developments from antiquity onward, and places contemporary town planning as an enlightened adjustment to the environmental neglect of the nineteenth century. Passing regard is paid to economic and social contexts but the precise relationship between them and the design response is never properly drawn. In a period of vigorous growth in the social sciences we would expect the Ashworth line of approach to be the more meaningful, and this has proved to be the case. But Ashworth's own thesis needs further development: an economic and social context accounts in general terms for town planning as a public response, but does not necessarily explain the actual factors in its emergence at one point in time. Moreover, it is no longer satisfactory to see the contemporary origins of town planning as simply a phase in a natural and logical evolution of other aspects of environmental control. We need to account rather more carefully for the origins of town planning at the turn of the century, not only in Britain, but throughout western Europe and the U.S.A. In 1974 I observed that the twentieth-century development of British planning was 'essentially a political, social, cultural, professional and technical response to a blend of circumstances which marked the years at the turn of the century'.4 But what was this blend? What was it in the late Victorian city that threw up the particular conditions for a town planning movement? What were the precise trigger mechanisms that changed a century-long process of