In organisms that propagate by agametic cloning, the parental body is the reproductive unit and fitness increases with clonal size, so that colonial metazoans, despite lack of experimental data, have been considered potentially immortal. Using asexual propagation rate as a measure of somatic performance, and telomerase activity and relative telomere length as molecular markers of senescence, ol...

Functional specialization, or division of labour (DOL), of parts within organisms and colonies is common in most multi-cellular, colonial and social organisms, but it is far from ubiquitous. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolutionary origins of DOL; the basic feature common to all of them is that functional differences can arise easily. These mechanisms cannot explain the...

The Order Stolidobranchiata comprises the families Pyuridae, Styelidae and Molgulidae. Early molecular data was consistent with monophyly of the Stolidobranchiata and also the Molgulidae. Internal phylogeny and relationships between Styelidae and Pyuridae were inconclusive however. In order to clarify these points we used mitochondrial and nuclear sequences from 31 species of Styelidae and 25 o...

In her article "The Pan-As world literature studies have been been an increasing preoccupation with literary networks the last century, the investigations have been restricted to the colonial world and the postcolonial states of the Western powers. The non Imperial Japan, colonial Korea, semi the margins as just passed over. Park recalibrates "center/periphery" models of world literature and pr...

Body size and temperature are fundamental drivers of ecological processes because they determine metabolic rates at the individual level. Whether these drivers act independently on individual-level metabolic rates remains uncertain. Most studies of intraspecific scaling of unitary organisms must rely on preexisting differences in size to examine its relationship with metabolic rate, thereby pot...

The British colonial state in India was continually forced to grapple with the forms of law and governance appropriate to Indian society. This question of the necessary, possible, and desirable relationship between colonial law and Indian social life produced a plethora of policies and dilemmas. It also created a new political significance for issues demarcated as social, particularly those rel...

This paper examines the origins, spread and practices of professional forestry in Southeast Asia, focusing on key sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Part 1, in an earlier issue of this journal, challenged popular and scholarly accounts of colonial forestry as a set of simplifying practices exported from Europe and applied in the European colonies. We showed th...

In modern linguistics binary distinctions are fundamental and many social and cultural phenomena are based on binary oppositions. Even many stereotypes of culture get formulated on the basis of binary oppositions: “If you are not with me you are against me” (Hawthorn 29) is a cultural imposition of a binary opposition upon variations of attitude. Looking down upon the natives of the Subcontinen...

Colonial nurses were ideal agents of colonial medicine's supposed beneficence: while practising and teaching "hygiene", they also reinforced racial and cultural separation. In some cases, however, the nurses took their role as healers and teachers of local populations much more seriously than was authorized implicitly by their employer. This article analyses the circulation of original life wri...

class familiarity in imperial discourse can be combined to understand the nuances of colonial representations. Revisiting the Malay image, I argue that the medievalist convention of portraying the native as situated in intermediate evolution between savagery and Western civilization was crucial for imperialism. The Malay image shifted from the representation of orientals exhibiting incommensura...