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...

In the present study children’s counterfactual reasoning process is examined in belief contravening problems. The first part of this study uses the visual methodology created for adults by Revlin, Calvillo and Ballard (2005). By five, children display similar reasoning strategies as shown in the same task by adults. When confronted with a counterfactual assumption, children resolve the inconsis...

Facilitation is a positive interaction assembling ecological communities and preserving global biodiversity. Although communities acquire emerging properties when many species interact, most of our knowledge about facilitation is based on studies between pairs of species. To understand how plant facilitation preserves biodiversity in complex ecological communities, we propose to move from the s...

North American family physicians leaving for less-developed countries (LDCs) may not be aware of internationally validated diagnostic and treatment technologies originating in LDCs. Thus they may bring with them inappropriate models and methods of medical care. More useful "exports" are based in sharing our collaborative vocational perspective with dedicated indigenous generalist clinicians who...

In this paper, we study the dynamics of a laissez-faire predator--prey model with both a specialist and a generalist predator. We analyze the stabilities of equilibria by performing linearized stability analyses. We then reexamine the stability of the equilibrium where the prey and predator coexist by constructing a Lyapunov function. If we hold the generalist predator population constant, trea...

In an earlier study, we showed that the ingestive responses of the generalist caterpillar Spodoptera littoralis to foods imbalanced in their protein:carbohydrate content is similar to generalist locusts, but differs from that of specialist-feeding locusts. Here we further pursued the comparison by repeating the experiments using a closely related specialist caterpillar, Spodoptera exempta. Firs...

Long-term human disturbance of tropical forests may favor generalist plant species leading to biotic homogenization. We aimed to a) assess if generalist species dominate across different successional ages and topographical positions in a tropical dry forest with a long history of human disturbance, b) to characterize functional traits associated with generalist and specialist species, and c) to...

Generalist predators such as spiders and ground beetles provide important ecosystem services by suppressing density of pest insects in agroecosystems, which offers a sustainable solution to trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. There is increasing recognition that landscape factors beyond field-plot scale are important determinants for community structure of g...

Epidemiological rate parameters of host generalist parasites are difficult to estimate, especially in cases where variation in parasite performance can be attributed to host species. Such cases are likely common for generalist parasites of sympatric grazing mammals. In this study, we combined data from experimental exposures in cattle and sheep and natural infections in elk to compare the recru...

The range of hosts that parasites can infect is a key determinant of the emergence and spread of disease. Yet, the impact of host range variation on the evolution of parasite genomes remains unknown. Here, we show that codon optimization underlies genome adaptation in broad host range parasites. We found that the longer proteins encoded by broad host range fungi likely increase natural selectio...