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Court Jester Hypothesis
The court jester hypothesis is used in reference to the idea that abiotic forces (including climate), rather than biotic competition between species, function as a major driving force behind the processes in evolution which produce speciation. In evolutionary theory, the court-jester hypothesis contrasts the Red Queen hypothesis. The term "Court Jester hypothesis" was coined by Anthony Barnosky in 1999 in allusion to the Red Queen hypothesis. In a 2001 paper on the subject,Anthony Barnosky, "Distinguishing The Effects Of The Red Queen And Court Jester On Miocene Mammal Evolution In The Northern Rocky Mountains" Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 21(1):172–185, March 2001 http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/miomap/RESULTS-MIOMAP/barnoskyjvp2001.pdf Barnosky uses the term without citation, suggesting that he is the one who coined it. Westfall and Millar attribute the term to him (citing the 2001 paper) in a paper of their own from 2004.Robert D. Westfall and Constance I. Millar, "G ...
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Abiotic
In biology and ecology, abiotic components or abiotic factors are non-living chemical and physical parts of the environment that affect living organisms and the functioning of ecosystems. Abiotic factors and the phenomena associated with them underpin biology as a whole. They affect a plethora of species, in all forms of environmental conditions, such as marine or land animals. Humans can make or change abiotic factors in a species' environment. For instance, fertilizers can affect a snail's habitat, or the greenhouse gases which humans utilize can change marine pH levels. Abiotic components include physical conditions and non-living resources that affect living organisms in terms of growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Resources are distinguished as substances or objects in the environment required by one organism and consumed or otherwise made unavailable for use by other organisms. Component degradation of a substance occurs by chemical or physical processes, e.g. hydrolysi ...
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Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard. Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972.Eldredge, Niles, and S. J. Gould (1972)"Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism."In T.J.M. Schopf, ed., ''Models in Paleobiology''. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company, pp. 82–115. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stabili ...
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Meteor
A meteoroid () is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are defined as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than this are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars. When a meteoroid, comet, or asteroid enters Earth's atmosphere at a speed typically in excess of , aerodynamic heating of that object produces a streak of light, both from the glowing object and the trail of glowing particles that it leaves in its wake. This phenomenon is called a meteor or "shooting star". Meteors typically become visible when they are about 100 km above sea level. A series of many meteors appearing seconds or minutes apart and appearing to originate from the same fixed point in the sky is called a meteor shower. A meteorite is the remains of a mete ...
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Through The Looking Glass
''Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'' (also known as ''Alice Through the Looking-Glass'' or simply ''Through the Looking-Glass'') is a novel published on 27 December 1871 (though indicated as 1872) by Lewis Carroll and the sequel to ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865). Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, including logic (for example, running helps one remain stationary, walking away from something brings one towards it, chessmen are alive, nursery rhyme characters exist, and so on). ''Through the Looking-Glass'' includes such verses as "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", and the episode involving Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The mirror above the fireplace that is displayed at Hetton Lawn in Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire (a house that was owned by Alice Liddell's grandparents, and w ...
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Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ''Through the Looking-Glass'' (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ''Jabberwocky'' (1871) and ''The Hunting of the Snark'' (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. Carroll came from a family of high-church Anglicanism, Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, the daughter of Christ Church's dean Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original inspiration for ''Alice in Wonderland'', though Carroll always denied this. An avid puzzler, Carroll created the word ladder puzzle (which he then called "Doublets"), which he published in his weekly column for ''Vanity Fair ( ...
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Leigh Van Valen
Leigh Van Valen (August 12, 1935 – October 16, 2010) was a U.S. evolutionary biologist. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Research and interests Amongst other work, Van Valen's proposed "Law of Extinction", known as Van Valen's law, drew upon the apparent constant probability (as opposed to rate) of extinction in families of related organisms, based on data compiled from existing literature on the duration of tens of thousands of genera throughout the fossil record. Van Valen proposed the Red Queen Hypothesis (1973), as an explanatory tangent to the Law of Extinction. The Red Queen Hypothesis captures the idea that there is a constant 'arms race' between co-evolving species. Its name is a reference to the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's ''Through the Looking-Glass'', in which the chess board moves such that Alice must continue running just to stay in the same place. Van Valen also ...
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Science Advances
''Science Advances'' is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary open-access scientific journal established in early 2015 and published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The journal's scope includes all areas of science, including life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, computer sciences, and environmental sciences. History The journal was announced in February 2014, and the first articles were published in early 2015. In 2019, ''Science Advances'' surpassed ''Science magazine'' in the number of monthly submissions, becoming the largest member in the Science family of journals. It is the only member of that family where all papers are gold open access. Editorial structure Editorial decisions are made by the editorial board. The board is divided into editorial groups, each of which is led by a deputy editor and composed of a group of associate editors.
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Species Composition
Species richness is the number of different species represented in an ecological community, landscape or region. Species richness is simply a count of species, and it does not take into account the abundances of the species or their relative abundance distributions. Species richness is sometimes considered synonymous with species diversity, but the formal metric species diversity takes into account both species richness and species evenness. Sampling considerations Depending on the purposes of quantifying species richness, the individuals can be selected in different ways. They can be, for example, trees found in an inventory plot, birds observed from a monitoring point, or beetles collected in a pitfall trap. Once the set of individuals has been defined, its species richness can be exactly quantified, provided the species-level taxonomy of the organisms of interest is well enough known. Applying different species delimitations will lead to different species richness values ...
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Punctuated Equilibrium
In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a theory that proposes that once a species appears in the fossil record, the population will become stable, showing little evolutionary change for most of its geological history. : ''Reprinted in'' * * This state of little or no morphological change is called ''stasis''. When significant evolutionary change occurs, the theory proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation called cladogenesis. Cladogenesis is the process by which a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually transforming into another. Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted with phyletic gradualism, the idea that evolution generally occurs uniformly by the steady and gradual transformation of whole lineages ( anagenesis). In 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published a landmark paper developing ...
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Climate
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude/ longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents. Climates can be classified according to the average and typical variables, most commonly temperature and precipitation. The most widely used classification scheme was the Köppen climate classification. The Thornthwaite system, in use since 1948, incorporates evapotranspiration along ...
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Constance I
Constance may refer to: Places *Konstanz, Germany, sometimes written as Constance in English * Constance Bay, Ottawa, Canada * Constance, Kentucky * Constance, Minnesota * Constance (Portugal) * Mount Constance, Washington State People * Constance (given name), female given name, also includes list of people with the name *Andrew Constance (born 1973), Australian politician * Angela Constance (born 1970), Scottish politician * Ansley Constance (born 1966), Seychelles politician *Lincoln Constance (1909–2001), American botanist *Nathan Constance (born 1979), English actor Other * ''Constance'' (album), a 2000 album by Southpacific * ''Constance'' (film), a 1998 erotic film directed by Knud Vesterskov * ''Constance'' (magazine), arts and literature magazine based in New Orleans * ''Constance'' (novel), 1982 novel by Lawrence Durrell *Constance Billard School for Girls, a fictional private school in ''Gossip Girl'' * HMS ''Constance'', six ships of the British Royal Navy *, late ...
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Anthony David Barnosky
Anthony David Barnosky is an ecologist, geologist and biologist (paleoecology). He was Professor at the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley until his retirement. His research is concerned with the relationship between climate change and mass extinctions. Life Barnosky graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in geology from Colorado College. This was followed by a master's degree (1980) and a Ph.D. (1983) in Earth Sciences at the University of Washington. He is married to Elizabeth A. Hadly, who works in the same field. Work His work on tipping elements in the Earth System has led Barnosky to work for clearer efforts in climate policy to make possible the two-degree target for increase in average temperature rise. Barnosky stresses that climate change is a major cause of displacement and the cause of the current mass extinction. A key concern is the concept of "tipping point"Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state t ...
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