David Penny
Edward David Penny CNZM FRSNZ (born 1939 in Taumarunui) is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist from New Zealand. He has researched the nature of evolutionary transformations, and is widely published in the fields of phylogenetic tree, genetics and evolutionary biology. Penny's contributions to science have been recognised with several awards and honours, and acceptance into the National Academy of Sciences. Education and career Penny attended New Plymouth Boys' High School before gaining undergraduate degrees in botany and chemistry at the University of Canterbury. He completed his PhD in botany at Yale University in 1965 and later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University. He returned to New Zealand in 1966 and joined the staff at Massey University, within the Department of Plant Biology, School of Biological Sciences, Institute for Molecular BioSciences, and Institute of Fundamental Sciences and in 2005 Penny was named a Distinguished Professor. From 2 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Taumarunui
Taumarunui is a small town in the King Country of the central North Island of New Zealand. It is on an alluvial plain set within rugged terrain on the upper reaches of the Whanganui River, 65 km south of Te Kuiti and 55 km west of Turangi. It is under the jurisdiction of Ruapehu District and Manawatū-Whanganui region. Its population is as of making it the largest centre for a considerable distance in any direction. It is on State Highway 4 and the North Island Main Trunk railway. The name ''Taumarunui'' is reported to be the dying words of the Māori chief Pehi Turoa – ''taumaru'' meaning screen and ''nui'' big, literally translated as Big Screen, being built to shelter him from the sun, or more commonly known to mean – "The place of big shelter". There are also references to Taumarunui being known as large sheltered location for growing kumara. In the 1980s publication ''Roll Back the Years'' there are some details on how Taumarunui got its name. Extra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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National Academy Of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Election to the National Academy is one of the highest honors in the scientific field. Members of the National Academy of Sciences serve '' pro bono'' as "advisers to the nation" on science, engineering, and medicine. The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Founded in 1863 as a result of an Act of Congress that was approved by Abraham Lincoln, the NAS is charged with "providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. ... to provide sci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Life History Theory
Life history theory is an analytical frameworkVitzthum, V. (2008). Evolutionary models of women's reproductive functioning. ''Annual Review of Anthropology'', ''37'', 53-73 designed to study the diversity of life history strategies used by different organisms throughout the world, as well as the causes and results of the variation in their life cycles.Flatt, T., & Heyland, A. (Eds.). (2011). Mechanisms of Life History Evolution : The Genetics and Physiology of Life History Traits and Trade-Offs. Oxford, GB: OUP Oxford. It is a theory of biological evolution that seeks to explain aspects of organisms' anatomy and behavior by reference to the way that their life histories—including their reproductive development and behaviors, post-reproductive behaviors, and lifespan (length of time alive)—have been shaped by natural selection. A life history strategy is the "age- and stage-specific patterns" and timing of events that make up an organism's life, such as birth, weaning, maturation, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Introns
An intron is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is not expressed or operative in the final RNA product. The word ''intron'' is derived from the term ''intragenic region'', i.e. a region inside a gene."The notion of the cistron .e., gene... must be replaced by that of a transcription unit containing regions which will be lost from the mature messenger – which I suggest we call introns (for intragenic regions) – alternating with regions which will be expressed – exons." (Gilbert 1978) The term ''intron'' refers to both the DNA sequence within a gene and the corresponding RNA sequence in RNA transcripts. The non-intron sequences that become joined by this RNA processing to form the mature RNA are called exons. Introns are found in the genes of most organisms and many viruses and they can be located in both protein-coding genes and genes that function as RNA (noncoding genes). There are four main types of introns: tRNA introns, group I introns, group II introns, and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's various operations report to the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim. The NBCUniversal News Group also comprises MSNBC, the network's 24-hour general news channel, business and consumer news channels CNBC and CNBC World, the Spanish language Noticias Telemundo and United Kingdom–based Sky News. NBC News aired the first regularly scheduled news program in American broadcast television history on February 21, 1940. The group's broadcasts are produced and aired from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBCUniversal's headquarters in New York City. The division presides over America's number-one-rated newscast, '' NBC Nightly News'', the world's first of its genre morning television program, '' Today'', and the longest-running television series in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Monotonic Function
In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of order theory. In calculus and analysis In calculus, a function f defined on a subset of the real numbers with real values is called ''monotonic'' if and only if it is either entirely non-increasing, or entirely non-decreasing. That is, as per Fig. 1, a function that increases monotonically does not exclusively have to increase, it simply must not decrease. A function is called ''monotonically increasing'' (also ''increasing'' or ''non-decreasing'') if for all x and y such that x \leq y one has f\!\left(x\right) \leq f\!\left(y\right), so f preserves the order (see Figure 1). Likewise, a function is called ''monotonically decreasing'' (also ''decreasing'' or ''non-increasing'') if, whenever x \leq y, then f\!\left(x\right) \geq f\!\left(y ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Archaea
Archaea ( ; singular archaeon ) is a domain of single-celled organisms. These microorganisms lack cell nuclei and are therefore prokaryotes. Archaea were initially classified as bacteria, receiving the name archaebacteria (in the Archaebacteria kingdom), but this term has fallen out of use. Archaeal cells have unique properties separating them from the other two domains, Bacteria and Eukaryota. Archaea are further divided into multiple recognized phyla. Classification is difficult because most have not been isolated in a laboratory and have been detected only by their gene sequences in environmental samples. Archaea and bacteria are generally similar in size and shape, although a few archaea have very different shapes, such as the flat, square cells of '' Haloquadratum walsbyi''. Despite this morphological similarity to bacteria, archaea possess genes and several metabolic pathways that are more closely related to those of eukaryotes, notably for the enzymes invo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Genome
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as regulatory sequences (see non-coding DNA), and often a substantial fraction of 'junk' DNA with no evident function. Almost all eukaryotes have mitochondria and a small mitochondrial genome. Algae and plants also contain chloroplasts with a chloroplast genome. The study of the genome is called genomics. The genomes of many organisms have been sequenced and various regions have been annotated. The International Human Genome Project reported the sequence of the genome for ''Homo sapiens'' in 200The Human Genome Project although the initial "finished" sequence was missing 8% of the genome consisting mostly of repetitive sequences. With advancements in technology that could handle seq ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Eukaryotes
Eukaryotes () are organisms whose cells have a nucleus. All animals, plants, fungi, and many unicellular organisms, are Eukaryotes. They belong to the group of organisms Eukaryota or Eukarya, which is one of the three domains of life. Bacteria and Archaea (both prokaryotes) make up the other two domains. The eukaryotes are usually now regarded as having emerged in the Archaea or as a sister of the Asgard archaea. This implies that there are only two domains of life, Bacteria and Archaea, with eukaryotes incorporated among archaea. Eukaryotes represent a small minority of the number of organisms, but, due to their generally much larger size, their collective global biomass is estimated to be about equal to that of prokaryotes. Eukaryotes emerged approximately 2.3–1.8 billion years ago, during the Proterozoic eon, likely as flagellated phagotrophs. Their name comes from the Greek εὖ (''eu'', "well" or "good") and κάρυον (''karyon'', "nut" or "kernel"). ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Numerical Taxonomy
Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster analysis rather than using subjective evaluation of their properties. The concept was first developed by Robert R. Sokal and Peter H. A. Sneath in 1963 and later elaborated by the same authors.Sneath and Sokal: ''Numerical Taxonomy'', San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1974 by Tejanshu Ravesh They divided the field into phenetics in which classifications are formed based on the patterns of overall similarities and cladistics in which classifications are based on the branching patterns of the estimated evolutionary history of the taxa.{{cn span, In recent years many authors treat numerical taxonomy and phenetics as synonyms despite the distinctions made by those authors., date=May 2017 Although intended as an objective method, in practice the ch ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Implied Weighting
Implied weighting describes a group of methods used in phylogenetic analysis to assign the greatest importance to characters that are most likely to be homologous. These are a posteriori methods, which include also dynamic weighting, as opposed to a priori methods, which include adaptive, independent, and chemical categories (seWeightingat the American Museum of Natural History's website). The first attempt to implement such a technique was by Farris (1969), which he called successive approximations weighting, whereby a tree was constructed with equal weights, and characters that appeared as homoplasies on this tree were downweighted based on the CI (consistency index A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to ...) or RCI (rescaled consistency index), which are measures of homo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Oral History
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. ''Oral history'' also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries.oral history. (n.d.) The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia®. (2013). Retrieved March 12, 2018 from https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/oral+history Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |