Post-modernism and recent critical theory has sought to deconstruct the role of particular ‘Great Traditions’ and ‘Grand Narratives’ as privileged accounts of world affairs, contemporary and historical. In spite of this, such narratives, even if poorly understood, remain at the heart of much public debate and continue to shape national and global policies. These traditions, linked to elements o...

The colonization of the human environment by plants, and the consequent evolution of domesticated forms is increasingly being viewed as a co-evolutionary plant-human process that occurred over a long time period, with evidence for the co-evolutionary relationship between plants and humans reaching ever deeper into the hominin past. This developing view is characterized by a change in emphasis o...

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved profound cultural and technological changes. In Western and Central Europe, these changes occurred rapidly and synchronously after the arrival of early farmers of Anatolian origin [1-3], who largely replaced the local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers [1, 4-6]. Further east, in the Baltic region, the transition was gradual, with little or ...

Working together in groups may be beneficial if compared to isolated efforts. Yet this is true only if all group members contribute to the success. If not, group efforts may act detrimentally on the fitness of their members. Here we study the evolution of cooperation in public-goods games on scale-free networks that are subject to deletion of links connected to the highest-degree individuals, i...

In this article, I model how a problem-posing framework can be used to enhance our abilities to systematically generate mathematical problems by modifying the attributes of a given problem. The problem-posing model calls for the application of the following fundamental mathematical processes: proving, reversing, specializing, generalizing, and extending. The given problem turned out to be a ric...

From the Clinical Pathological Conference Series, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston (J.M.C., J.T.K., B.D.L., J.L.); and the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/ Oncology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.C.). Address reprint requests to Dr. Loscalzo at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medic...

Apparently ancient DNA has been reported from amber-preserved insects many millions of years old. Rigorous attempts to reproduce these DNA sequences from amber- and copal-preserved bees and flies have failed to detect any authentic ancient insect DNA. Lack of reproducibility suggests that DNA does not survive over millions of years even in amber, the most promising of fossil environments.

Ancient DNA sequences are able to offer valuable insights into molecular evolutionary processes, which are not directly accessible via modern DNA. They are particularly suitable for the estimation of substitution rates because their ages provide calibrating information in phylogenetic analyses, circumventing the difficult task of choosing independent calibration points. The substitution rates o...

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to a cohort of exclusively Yiddish-speaking and multilingual AJs. GPS localized most AJs along major ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that resemble the word "Ashkenaz." These find...

DNA sequences extracted from preserved remains can add considerable resolution to inference of past population dynamics. For example, coalescent-based methods have been used to correlate declines in some arctic megafauna populations with habitat fragmentation during the last ice age. These methods, however, often fail to detect population declines preceding extinction, most likely owing to a co...