Geographical variations in biological diversity are known to be driven by a number of biotic and abiotic factors. These include environmental gradients (climate and habitat) and the physical characteristics of each site or region (e.g. area, isolation, habitat diversity and topographic and landscape heterogeneity), in addition to regional processes and historical events, which determine the cha...

Ian McWhinney conceptualized and described the philosophical foundation of family medicine in a way that family doctors never fail to recognize.1 At the core of Dr McWhinney’s vision was the belief that the family physician was medicine’s consummate generalist. From the opening paragraphs of A Textbook of Family Medicine2 to early work in the peer-reviewed literature,3-5 the generalist theme is...

Aim The interplay between distribution ranges, species traits and sampling taxonomic biases remains elusive amongst microscopic animals. This ignorance obscures our understanding of the diversity patterns a major component biodiversity. Here, we used marine Halacaridae to explore whether differences provinces can explain their or if differential efforts across regions prevent any macroecologica...

Scholars have observed workers combining multiple work roles to earn a living cope with the vicissitudes of labor market. In studies creative markets, this trend broadening their skills is termed “occupational generalism”. Previous scholarship has focused on structural factors that push and pull into generalizing roles. But we lack an understanding subjective experience as generalist. I introdu...

Resource predictability can influence foraging behavior in many ways. Depending on the predictability of food sources, animals may specialize on a few food types or generalize on many; they may aggressively defend feeding territories or nonaggressively share food with others. However, food defense and diet breadth have generally been studied separately. In this paper, we propose that variation ...

This 2008 Symposium of the Canadian Association of University Surgeons (CAUS) brought together surgeons from a number of jurisdictions to discuss generalism in general surgery and its future. Dr. John Birkmeyer, the 2008 Charles Tator lecturer, started the symposium by framing the problem: the need to improve surgical outcomes, selective referral, centres of excellence, process compliance and p...