From inclusive fitness to fixation probability in homogeneous structured populations

The methods of inclusive fitness provide a powerful analysis of the action of selection on social behaviour. The key component of this analysis is the concept of relatedness R. In infinite populations, a standard method of calculating relatedness coefficients is through coefficients of consanguinity using the notion of genetic identity by descent. In this paper, we show that this approach can also be made to work in finite populations and we assume here that the population has a homogeneous structure, such as an island model. We demonstrate that, under the assumption that genetic effects are small and additive, the resulting formulation of inclusive fitness is equivalent to other significant measures of selection in finite populations, including the change in average allele frequency and fixation probability. The results are illustrated for a model of the evolution of cooperation in a finite island population.     

In-betweenness and crumbled hopes in Palestine: the global in the local of the occupied territories

Critical discussions among some in Palestinian studies describe foreign involvement in NGO development in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s as having been detrimental to Palestinian collective aspirations, and even a tool of imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip mobilized their own civilian organizations to build an infrastructure of resistance to the Israeli Occupation that gave birth to the Intifada Uprising in December 1987. Foreign governments and organizations were drawn to their struggle and in the 1990s billions of dollars of foreign aid from more than 40 nations and over two dozen multilateral organizations flowed through hundreds of local and foreign NGOs. But this investment in the “peace process” did not stop a worsening occupation, and a second al Aqsa Intifada began in the fall 2000. Palestinian civil society suffered crippling blows and foreign actors were reduced to disaster relief and harm reduction. This article presents three ethnographic portraits from 1992, 1995 and 2002, that examine these changes in Palestinian civil society and the scholarly criticisms of foreign involvement. This article argues that such involvement could put Palestinian participants in a dangerous in-between social position, but that these positions of contradiction are often preferable to the destruction of militarism.     

N30 + 10: global civil society,a decade after the battle of Seattle

Critical discussions among some in Palestinian studies describe foreign involvement in NGO development in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s as having been detrimental to Palestinian collective aspirations, and even a tool of imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip mobilized their own civilian organizations to build an infrastructure of resistance to the Israeli Occupation that gave birth to the Intifada Uprising in December 1987. Foreign governments and organizations were drawn to their struggle and in the 1990s billions of dollars of foreign aid from more than 40 nations and over two dozen multilateral organizations flowed through hundreds of local and foreign NGOs. But this investment in the “peace process” did not stop a worsening occupation, and a second al Aqsa Intifada began in the fall 2000. Palestinian civil society suffered crippling blows and foreign actors were reduced to disaster relief and harm reduction. This article presents three ethnographic portraits from 1992, 1995 and 2002, that examine these changes in Palestinian civil society and the scholarly criticisms of foreign involvement. This article argues that such involvement could put Palestinian participants in a dangerous in-between social position, but that these positions of contradiction are often preferable to the destruction of militarism.     

Biogeographical tests of the vicariance model in Mediterranean land snails

Aim To investigate the importance of vicariance in shaping land snail faunas. Location Three data sets of Mediterranean land snails were analysed: Helicoidea of the Iberian Peninsula and the complete land snail faunas of the central and eastern Aegean Islands and of Israel and Palestine. Methods The vicariance model predicts a clustering of species ranges. We tested for clustering of species ranges with a Monte Carlo simulation. For this simulation we used a null model that generates range data sets in such a way that their range size distribution, their species richness distribution and the spatial autocorrelation of the ranges approximate the parameters in the real data set. Biotic elements (clusters of species ranges) were delimited with model‐based Gaussian clustering. A second prediction of the vicariance model is that closely related species belong to different biotic elements. This was tested with a chi‐squared test. Results The distribution areas of the Iberian Helicoidea and the Israeli/Palestinian land snails are significantly clustered. The same is true for Israeli/Palestinian land snail species belonging to groups with geographically restricted species. However, the clustering is not significant in the complete central and eastern Aegean land snail data set, the Iberian Helicoidea species, and the central and eastern Aegean land snails belonging to groups with geographically restricted species. Contrary to the prediction of the vicariance model, closely related Iberian Helicoidea species and Israeli/Palestinian land snails belong significantly more often to the same biotic element than expected by chance. The null hypothesis that closely related species are homogeneously distributed across biotic elements cannot be rejected only for the data set that includes the Israeli/Palestinian land snails belonging to groups with geographically restricted species. Main conclusions The patterns found in the central and eastern Aegean land snail and the Iberian Helicoidea data sets do not correspond with the predictions of the vicariance model. This indicates that speciation modes other than vicariance were frequent, or that the distribution areas of many species in these faunas were largely modified by extensive post‐speciation dispersal and/or regional extinction. Hardly any possible vicariance events that might have contributed to the origin of the observed biotic elements in the Israeli/Palestinian land snail fauna could be identified. On the contrary, the biotic elements of the Israeli/Palestinian land snail fauna correspond with ecological factors. Vicariance has had only a limited influence on current biogeographical patterns in Mediterranean land snails.     

CLUENaban—A land use change model combining social factors with physical landscape factors for a mountainous area in Southwest China

Land use modelling has used rural areas as object for a long time. Modellers start in general with physical landscape factors to determine the spatial distribution of land use, especially agricultural crops. An important factor defining rural areas is the dominance of livelihoods/economies based on agriculture combined with a strong relationship to tradition, high value of family ties, scales of social aggregation, and a framework given by nature. The inter-linkages among economic, social and environmental components determine both the complexity and dynamics of rural development. Both modellers and social scientists seek a better understanding of these complex rural systems in terms of their development paths, the underlying forces and the interactions between physical land use and rural society. In this paper, we use a combination of a land use change model and information about social relationship by referring both to the common spatial unit of villages for a rural region in south west China. We want to show how such a common unit can help to include social science information into a physically oriented land use model. The inclusion of social data results in a substantial improvement of the modelling results. In the model run we could show that land use patterns in the study area were closely related to socio-economic characteristics and governmental rules. In China, collective land and state land are distinguished. This land designation turned out to be the most important factor for the land use types rainfed, irrigated land, and rubber. All land use types were influenced by the ethnicity of village inhabitants because they had different land use traditions.     

Representation,minorities and electoral reform: the case of the Palestinian minority in Israel

ABSTRACT

The article examines the impact of the recent change in the electoral threshold in Israel, from 2 per cent to 3.25 per cent, on the political representation of the Palestinian minority in Israel in the 2015 national election. I argue that the change in the threshold had a direct impact on Palestinian electoral representation and that this change provided incentives to Palestinian leadership to broaden their appeal and become more inclusive in their agenda. Following recent scholarship on ethnic minorities and employing the concept of “representational claims”, I suggest that through the provision of electoral incentives, institutional design can influence not only the degree of representation, but its substantive claims as well.     

Governmentality and the Family: Neoliberal Choices and Emergent Kin Relations in Southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACT  Rather than strictly local expressions of relatedness, kinship in southern Ethiopia has long been entangled with broad political and economic forces as people negotiate relations with each other, past generations, and the state. Accompanying government reforms in the 1990s, idioms of individualism and choice have circulated in transnational and national neoliberal discourses of development, rights, and economics. People in southern Ethiopia who use ideologies of ascribed social statuses to define local social hierarchies have employed these discourses in reshaping relatedness through an expansive trade association, which is referred to as a family and works through kinship principles of descent and generation. Drawing from recent scholarship on kinship and new reproductive technologies, I argue that, through mobile knowledges in neoliberal contexts, people choose this family and its lineage founder, transforming descent relations and land-based ideologies. These choices represent the workings of neoliberal governmentality in altering cultural relations of power and inequality. [Keywords: kinship, neoliberalism, governmentality, hereditary status groups, Ethiopia]     

Hawaii as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics

The human ecodynamics approach in archaeology privileges landscape as a core concept, asserting that there can be no environment or ecosystem detached from humans and their behavior. Drawing on recent research of a multidisciplinary biocomplexity project, I explore in this article the Hawaiian archipelago as a model system for studying human ecodynamics. Natural patterns of biogeochemical and climate gradients constrained the development of intensive agroecosystems over 1,000 years. An early phase of exponential population growth was linked with agricultural intensification of terraced irrigation systems, primarily on the older islands. After C.E. 1400, expansion of population onto the leeward slopes of the young islands of Maui and Hawai'i was accompanied by intensification of dryland agricultural field systems. These changes were in turn linked to significant transformations of social and political formations, including restructuring of the system of land tenure and descent group organization, and the imposition of a system of surplus extraction organized around a ritual hierarchy of temples.     

Male reproductive skew, paternal relatedness, and female social relationships

Female social relationships among primates are thought to be shaped by socio-ecological factors and phylogenetic constraints. We suggest that patterns of paternal relatedness among females influence measures of social tolerance that have been used to classify species into different social relationship categories. As kin support and kin preference have only been measured for matrilineal kin and related individuals exchange less aggression and have a higher conciliatory tendency, the observed low nepotism levels and high tolerance levels may be an artifact of hidden paternal relatedness among the nonkin category. Using comparative data on macaques, we investigate this hypothesis using male reproductive skew as a proxy for paternal relatedness. Within the limitations of the study we show that populations classified as being less nepotistic, and more tolerant exhibit higher levels of reproductive skew. This first result and the reasoning behind may motivate future students of social relationships to take paternal relatedness into consideration. Potential implications of this finding if repeated with larger samples include that variation in aspects of macaque social relationships may be explained without considering phylogeny or the strength of between-group contest competition for food.     

The dialectic between modernization and orientalization: ethnicity and work relations in the 1950s Lakhish region project

This article focuses on agricultural planning and work relations in the Lakhish regional settlement project in 1950s Israel. During this period, Jewish immigrants from Arab countries – considered the other of allegedly Modern and Western Israeli society – were sent to settle the new frontier, in order to establish Jewish sovereignty over former Palestinian land. I discuss the ways in which agricultural planning and the organization of the work process created a relationship of dependency between the settlers and the settling institutions. I show, that the plans were shaped by Orientalist assumptions concerning the nature of the settlers, their social and family relationships and their cognitive abilities. I argue that it was these plans and the work relations they engendered, that doomed the settlers from the start, undermining their ability to form functioning cooperative communities. The settlers, however, were not passive objects of state policies but rather displayed patterns of resistance to state regulation.     

Relatedness in trait group models of social evolution

Genetic relatedness is a central concept in the study of social evolution. Though originally defined in terms of genealogy, the modern version of relatedness accommodates genetic similarity of any origin. This paper examines relatedness in group structured modes, in which a trait affects the fitness of all group members. Such traits can be divided into two types, based on whether their group fitness effects encompass all group members including the actor ("whole-group traits"), or only group members other than the actor ("other-only traits"). Both trait types are common in nature as well as in theoretical models, but they have rarely been distinguished clearly. The average relatedness of recipients to actors differs for the two trait types within the same population and even the same individual, leading to different selection pressures and evolutionary outcomes. Total relatedness in group-structured models can be partitioned into two components: structural relatedness due to the size and number of groups in the population, and assortative relatedness due to the distribution of genotypes among groups. Each component differs for whole-group vs. other-only traits, both in terms of their values and the factors that influence them. Some key differences include: positive relatedness requires positive assortment for other-only but not for whole-group traits; negative relatedness is possible for other-only but not whole-group traits; relatedness depends on average group size for whole-group but not other-only traits, and non-random assortment into groups affects relatedness more strongly for other-only than whole-group traits. Recognizing the distinction between these trait types resolves some apparent contradictions in the literature, and clarifies the limits of some previous results.     

New developments in the sociology of Palestinian citizens of Israel: an analytical review

This article reviews and analyses new approaches in the sociology of Israel's Palestinian citizens which began to develop in the early eighties. After comparing their common basic assumptions and those of more traditional perspectives, the central theoretical controversies between the newer approaches are examined. These controversies are discussed along three analytical axes: 1. the basic factors which explain the emergence and institutionalization of the ethno-national hierarchy (ideological principles and distributive conflicts); 2. the significant social actors in the shaping of majority-minority power relations and the social arenas in which this process takes place (state and civil society); 3. the use of general analytical frameworks which allow comparative research as opposed to the emphasis on the idiosyncrasy of the Israeli case. The article concludes by suggesting some new research topics and perspectives that might shed light on the dynamics of the subordinate status of Palestinian citizens in Israeli social formation.     

The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You're dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.     

How are humans related to other primates? A guided inquiry laboratory for undergraduate students

Understanding that phylogenies depict the evolutionary history of species is a critical concept for undergraduate biology students. We present an inquiry-based laboratory exercise exploring this concept in the context of the human phylogeny. This activity reinforces several important biological concepts and skills. Bolstered concepts include that evolution is descent with modification, that evolution is a genetic process, and that humans are closely related to apes. In terms of thinking skills, the lab gives students practice with hypothetical-deductive thinking, quantifying patterns from complex data, and evaluating evidence.     

Dcifer: an IBD-based method to calculate genetic distance between polyclonal infections

An essential step toward reconstructing pathogen transmission and answering epidemiologically relevant questions from genomic data is obtaining pairwise genetic distance between infections. For recombining organisms such as malaria parasites, relatedness measures quantifying recent shared ancestry would provide a meaningful distance, suggesting methods based on identity by descent (IBD). While the concept of relatedness and consequently an IBD approach is fairly straightforward for individual parasites, the distance between polyclonal infections, which are prevalent in malaria, presents specific challenges, and awaits a general solution that could be applied to infections of any clonality and accommodate multiallelic (e.g. microsatellite or microhaplotype) and biallelic [single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)] data. Filling this methodological gap, we present Dcifer (Distance for complex infections: fast estimation of relatedness), a method for calculating genetic distance between polyclonal infections, which is designed for unphased data, explicitly accounts for population allele frequencies and complexity of infection, and provides reliable inference. Dcifer’s IBD-based framework allows us to define model parameters that represent interhost relatedness and to propose corresponding estimators with attractive statistical properties. By using combinatorics to account for unobserved phased haplotypes, Dcifer is able to quickly process large datasets and estimate pairwise relatedness along with measures of uncertainty. We show that Dcifer delivers accurate and interpretable results and detects related infections with statistical power that is 2–4 times greater than that of approaches based on identity by state. Applications to real data indicate that relatedness structure aligns with geographic locations. Dcifer is implemented in a comprehensive publicly available software package.     

The Palestinian cause in Syrian nationalism

This article examines the role of the Palestinian cause in Syrian nationalism over the past century, specifically in how it served to unite political leadership and people during times of crisis. Syrian nationalism emerged from Pan-Arabism and remained closely affiliated with the political ideology of Arab unity that could not be complete without Palestine. It was closely associated with the anti-colonial struggle that included the Zionist encroachment on Palestine. However, Syrian nationalism was full of contradictions and ambiguities from the beginning as the nation was composed of groups with competing interests. I argue the Palestinian cause was important for overcoming the ambiguities of Syrian nationalism and allowed for the different groups to find a common ground through their support for the cause. While most work examines the role of the Palestinian cause as a political ideology, I demonstrate that it informed political practices and patronage as well. Support for the cause was based on the cultural system that existed in the Ottoman period and prior to the colonial division of the Arab Middle East into separate nation-states. It allowed for the political and cultural networks to emerge in the post-empire period. The political practices surrounding the cause such as demonstrations continued through Syrian history particularly during period of crises. Support for the cause was enforced through social and personal networks in which ordinary Syrians and their leaders engaged. I conclude with how the current crisis in Syria illustrates the limits of the cause in bridging social and political divisions in Syrian society.     

Reproduction as spiritual kin work: Orthodoxy, ivf, and the moral economy of motherhood in greece

Bringing gender and kinship studies together with an anthropology of religion, in this article I demonstrate how urban Greek couples and clinical practitioners in the middle 1990s proceeded with in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the absence of government regulations, and did so with reference to cultural beliefs and social relations consistent with Greek Orthodox religious practice. Drawing on ethnographic observations at an Athens IVF clinic as well as on interviews with former patients, I argue that Athenian women, in particular, engage IVF as a kind of spiritual kin work, normalizing the use of medical techniques with reference to ideologies of motherhood that treat it as a woman’s moral achievement and as a source of womanly suffering. Since the period of ethnographic research described here, and despite disapproval of the Greek Orthodox Church, legislation regulating the use of IVF and other methods of medically assisted reproduction has become law. This article reconciles how the Church can officially reject medically assisted means of reproduction that Athenian users have normalized with reference to spiritual beliefs and practices.     

Estimation of relatedness by DNA fingerprinting

The recent discovery of hypervariable VNTR (variable number of tandem repeat) loci has led to much excitement among population biologists regarding the feasibility of deriving individual estimates of relatedness in field populations by DNA fingerprinting. It is shown that unbiased estimates of relatedness cannot be obtained at the individual level without knowledge of the allelic distributions in both the individuals of interest and the base population unless the proportion of shared marker alleles between unrelated individuals is essentially zero. Since the latter is usually on the order of 0.1-0.5 and since there are enormous practical difficulties in obtaining the former, only an approximate estimator for the relatedness can be given. The bias of this estimator is individual specific and inversely related to the number of marker loci and frequencies of marker alleles. Substantial sampling variance in estimates of relatedness arises from variation in identity by descent within and between loci and, with finite numbers of alleles, from variation in identity in state between genes that are not identical by descent. In the extreme case of 25 assayed loci, each with an effectively infinite number of alleles, the standard error of a relatedness estimate is no less than 14%, 20%, 35%, and 53% of the expectation for full sibs and second-, third-, and fourth-order relationships, respectively. Attempts to ascertain relatedness by means of DNA fingerprinting should proceed with caution.      

Staging Social Structures: Ritual and Social Organisation in an Egalitarian Society. The Pastoral Pokot of Northern Kenya

The pastoral Pokot of northern Kenya represent their society as highly structured by descent and age grading. Descent groups (clans, lineages) and age grades (age sets, generation sets) are depicted as bounded but related units within a complex hierarchical and coherent system, the essence of Pokot society which is staged and visualised in major rituals. This study shows that they are not important in Pokot economic exchange. The formal analysis of livestock exchange networks centred upon individuals shows that emic representations do not match actual exchange behaviour. Complementing the well-established structuralist representation of pastoral social systems, this paper investigates the agency aspect, which has been largely unexplored. It furthermore documents how social exchange is contained in the various institutions of descent and age grading. Contextualising the case historically it is shown that the pastoral Pokot developed from a fragmented clan-based agro-pastoral society in which descent was the main ordering principle for land tenure and conflict management into a more comprehensive social entity with clearly definable borders to the outside, dense internal exchange networks and strong representations of the corporateness of subgroups. The rapid adoption of mobile livestock husbandry was accompanied by the rise of widespread exchange networks and social interaction with a much wider group of unrelated actors marking the foundations of a pastoral society.