A Survey of Non-Classical Polyandry

We have identified a sample of 53 societies outside of the classical Himalayan and Marquesean area that permit polyandrous unions. Our goal is to broadly describe the demographic, social, marital, and economic characteristics of these societies and to evaluate some hypotheses of the causes of polyandry. We demonstrate that although polyandry is rare it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide, and is most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during early human history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and, possibly, male absenteeism. Other factors may contribute, but our within-polyandry sample limits analysis.     

A Primer of Ecology with R by STEVENS,M. H. H.

A Primer of Ecology with R (M. H. H. Stevens) Péter Sólymos Handbook on Analyzing Human Genetic Data: Computational Approaches and Software (S. Lin and H. Zhao, Editors) Peter M. Visscher From Finite Sample to Asymptotic Methods in Statistics (P. K. Sen, J. M. Singer, and A. C. Pedroso de Lima) Miodrag Lovric Dynamic Linear Models with R (G. Petris, S. Petrone, and P. Campagnoli) Helio S. Migon Functional Data Analysis with R and Matlab (J. O. Ramsay, G. Hooker, and S. Graves) Hervé Cardot Continuous Bivariate Distributions, 2nd edition (N. Balakrishnan and C.‐D. Lai) Márcia D'Elia Branco Brief Reports by the Editor The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, 2nd edition. (T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman) Gene Expression Studies Using Affymetrix Microarrays (H. Göhlmann and W. Talloen)     

中国科学院外藉院士--世界著名的植物学家彼得·雷文博士

彼得·雷文博士 (Ｄｒ.ＰｅｔｅｒＨ .Ｒａｖｅｎ)是当代世界著名的植物学家与生物多样性保护与持续利用的倡导者之一。他现任美国密苏里植物园主任、圣·路易斯华盛顿大学终生教授、圣·路易斯大学与密苏里大学圣·路易斯分校生物系教授、美国国家科学委员会地球与生命学部主席、美国国家地理学会研究与调查委员会主席、美国科学促进委员会主席等职。他在 1987～ 1995年间担任美国国家科学院内务秘书长 ,1989～ 2 0 0 0年间担任美国国家科学委员会咨询报告复审委员会主席 ,1994～ 2 0 0 0年间担任美国总统科学与技术顾问委员会委员等职。雷…     

Reply to R. H. Abbott

IN our article in Nature last year¹ we showed that, after a step change of length imposed during tetanic contraction, the early tension recovery varies in speed according to the size and direction of the step, being slowest in large stretches and fastest in large releases. Abbott² now proposes that this variation is due not to a change of time scale of a single process but to a change in the relative amplitudes of two exponentially decaying components each of which has a fixed time constant. He shows that the records in Fig. 2 of ref. 1 can be approximately fitted in this way and concludes that “either the results are not typical or the mathematical theory put forward by Huxley and Simmons is not correct”.