1,721,102 research outputs found
Human Evolutionary Demography: Closing Thoughts
No full textA complete understanding of demographic patterns and behaviours is not possible without including the role of evolutionary processes. Many challenges in the social sciences, and in demography in particular, can be more readily met if they include the rich collection of perspectives, models, tools, and theories that evolutionary sciences can provide. Perhaps unexpectedly, the benefits of this inclusion can be indirect, as many benefits of an evolutionary perspective may take the form of a new way of approaching an old problem that leads to insights independent of any goal related to isolating the role of natural selection or adaptation. In other cases, the role of adaptation may have been under-appreciated and can lead to a different understanding of the mechanisms involved. To help human evolutionary demography improve going forward, we offer two general recommendations. One is improving the integration of contemporary developments in evolutionary thought about the role of culture and environment, such as dual-inheritance theory, epigenetics, and the role of social learning and cultural transmission. Many of these developments reflect an increasingly sophisticated understanding of cultural processes in and understanding of core concepts like fitness and heritability. The role of culture may be a productive point of contact between the social sciences and evolutionary social sciences given shared interests in this area. Second is a call to re-invigorate evolutionary demography with some of the classical ideas that come from life history theory and population ecology, such as the use of energy and resource budgets to structure tradeoffs, a focus on the role of ecological factors like density and resources, and the use of formal mathematical models
Human Evolutionary Demography: Introduction and Rationale
No full textHuman evolutionary demography combines research in evolutionary biology with the study of human demographic patterns and behaviors. Evolutionary biology and demography share many conceptual features that give rise to a natural complementarity, such as a focus on the population as a unit of study and emphasis on aggregate processes that have implications for individuals. They also have distinct strengths that further this natural partnership. Evolutionary approaches are often top-down and theory driven, while demographic ones are more often bottom-up and driven by data and robust estimation procedures. We suggest that human evolutionary demography reflects these areas of overlap and complementary strengths while emphasizing at least two main objectives: understanding the role of evolutionary processes in shaping population-level demographic patterns (e.g., the evolution of age-specific patterns of mortality or fertility), and using an evolutionary approach to understand contemporary variation between individuals in demographic patterns (e.g., how and why does fertility respond to environmental influences, and vary between and within populations?).
Evolutionary demography is also inherently interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary approaches are vital to furthering our understanding of the complex processes underlying demographic patterns, in part because such approaches can be a disruptive force challenging researchers to question assumptions and see the world differently.
The papers in this volume demonstrate that integration of demography and evolutionary sciences strengthens both. This recognition by an ever-growing number of researchers has resulted in such a successful body of research that we are now able to showcase this field with this collection of papers, illustrating the vibrancy and diversity of research in human evolutionary demography
Human evolutionary demography
Full text linkHuman evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines. By bridging the boundaries between social and biological sciences, the volume stresses the importance of a unified understanding of both in order to grasp past and current demographic patterns. Demographic traits, and traits related to demographic outcomes, including fertility and mortality rates, marriage, parental care, menopause, and cooperative behavior are subject to evolutionary processes. Bringing an understanding of evolution into demography therefore incorporates valuable insights into this field; just as knowledge of demography is key to understanding evolutionary processes. By asking questions about old patterns from a new perspective, the volume-composed of contributions from established and early-career academics-demonstrates that a combination of social science research and evolutionary theory offers holistic understandings and approaches that benefit both fields. Human Evolutionary Demography introduces an emerging field in an accessible style. It is suitable for graduate courses in demography, as well as upper-level undergraduates. Its range of research is sure to be of interest to academics working on demographic topics (anthropologists, sociologists, demographers), natural scientists working on evolutionary processes, and disciplines which cross-cut natural and social science, such as evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and evolutionary medicine. As an accessible introduction, it should interest readers whether or not they are currently familiar with human evolutionary demography
PHASE BEHAVIOR IN AQUEOUS SOLUTIONS OF ROD-LIKE SOLUTES: THE CASE OF A COLLAGEN-LIKE POLY(PEPTIDE);
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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