Good Fences: The Importance of Setting Boundaries for Peaceful Coexistence

We consider the conditions of peace and violence among ethnic groups, testing a theory designed to predict the locations of violence and interventions that can promote peace. Characterizing the model''s success in predicting peace requires examples where peace prevails despite diversity. Switzerland is recognized as a country of peace, stability and prosperity. This is surprising because of its linguistic and religious diversity that in other parts of the world lead to conflict and violence. Here we analyze how peaceful stability is maintained. Our analysis shows that peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country. In Switzerland, mountains and lakes are an important part of the boundaries between sharply defined linguistic areas. Political canton and circle (sub-canton) boundaries often separate religious groups. Where such boundaries do not appear to be sufficient, we find that specific aspects of the population distribution guarantee either sufficient separation or sufficient mixing to inhibit intergroup violence according to the quantitative theory of conflict. In exactly one region, a porous mountain range does not adequately separate linguistic groups and that region has experienced significant violent conflict, leading to the recent creation of the canton of Jura. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that violence between groups can be inhibited by physical and political boundaries. A similar analysis of the area of the former Yugoslavia shows that during widespread ethnic violence existing political boundaries did not coincide with the boundaries of distinct groups, but peace prevailed in specific areas where they did coincide. The success of peace in Switzerland may serve as a model to resolve conflict in other ethnically diverse countries and regions of the world.     

Creating the conditions for peacemaking: theories of practice in ethnic conflict resolution

Establishing the conditions for effective intergroup peacemaking is a formidable task in severe ethnic conflicts. Conflict resolution practitioners argue that a critical first step is developing preconditions which convince competing groups that there are opponents to whom it is worth talking, that it is possible to create structural changes conducive to a stable peace, and that an agreement is possible which can meet each side's basic concerns and needs. This article compares six theories of practice of ethnic conflict resolution: community relations, principled negotiation; human needs; psychoanalytically rooted identity; intercultural miscommunications and conflict transformation, examining how each understands ethnic conflict; the goals it articulates; the effects of good practice on participants in interventions; the mechanisms by which the project achieves its impact; and the dynamics of transfer affecting the course of a wider conflict. It is argued that clearer articulation of these assumptions will improve both theory and practice in the search for settlements to severe ethnic conflict.     

Landscape-scale habitat response of African elephants shows strong selection for foraging opportunities in a human dominated ecosystem

Balancing trade-offs between foraging and risk factors is a fundamental behavior that structures the spatial distribution of species. For African elephants Loxodonta africana, human pressures from poaching and conflict are primary drivers of species decline, but little is known about how elephants structure their spatial behavior in the face of human occupancy and predation. We seek to understand how elephants balance trade-offs between resource access, human presence and human predatory risk factors (poaching and conflict killing) in an unfenced, dynamic ecosystem where elephants persist primarily outside protected areas in community rangelands. We used tracking data from 101 elephants collected between 2001 and 2016. We investigated elephant behavior in response to landcover, topography, productivity, water, human features and human predation risk using third-order resource selection functions. We extended this analysis by employing a mixed-effects multinomial regression to identify temporal shifts in habitat use, and evaluated temporal shifts in movement patterns by estimating mean squared displacement across different productivity periods. Across periods, elephants displayed strong selection for productive areas and areas near water. Temporal shifts in habitat use showed that, during the dry period, elephants were clustered around permanent water sources where humans also congregated. At the onset of the wet period, a shift occurred where elephants moved away from permanent water and from permanent settlements towards seasonal water sources and seasonal settlements. Our findings indicate that foraging and water access are important limiting factors affecting elephants that potentially restrain their spatial responses to humans at the scale of our analysis. Given that pastoralists and elephants rely on the same resources, increasing human and livestock populations enhance pressure on shared resources and space in Africa's drylands. The long-term conservation of elephants will require approaches that reduce poaching as well as landscape level planning to prevent negative impacts from increasing competition for preferred resources.     

Infidelity,jealousy, and wife abuse among Tsimane forager–farmers: testing evolutionary hypotheses of marital conflict

The role of men's jealousy over a wife's infidelity in precipitating marital conflict and wife abuse is well documented. The role of women's jealousy over a husband's infidelity has received little attention, which is puzzling given high potential costs to women of withdrawal of paternal investment. We address this gap by investigating marital conflict and wife abuse among Tsimane forager–farmers of Bolivia. We test predictions derived from male jealousy and paternal disinvestment hypotheses, which consider threats and consequences of infidelity by women (male jealousy hypothesis) and men (paternal disinvestment hypothesis). The paternal disinvestment hypothesis proposes that wife abuse is employed by husbands to limit wives' mate retention effort and maintain men's opportunities to pursue extrapair sexual relationships. Interviews were conducted among husbands and wives in the same marriages using a combination of open-ended and structured items. Spouses agree that the most frequently reported type of marital argument is women's jealousy over a husband's infidelity (N=266 arguments). Roughly 60% of abusive events occurred during arguments over men's diversion of household resources (N=124 abusive events). In multivariate analyses, likelihood of wife abuse is greater in marriages where husbands have affairs, where wives are younger, and where spouses spend more time apart (N=60 husbands, 71 wives). While we find strong support for both male jealousy and paternal disinvestment hypotheses, it is men's infidelity, not women's, that precipitates most instances of marital conflict and wife abuse. We conclude that men's aggression towards their wives facilitates men's diversion of family resources for their selfish interests.     

Why mutual helping in most natural systems is neither conflict-free nor based on maximal conflict

Mutual helping for direct benefits can be explained by various game theoretical models, which differ mainly in terms of the underlying conflict of interest between two partners. Conflict is minimal if helping is self-serving and the partner benefits as a by-product. In contrast, conflict is maximal if partners are in a prisoner''s dilemma with both having the pay-off-dominant option of not returning the other''s investment. Here, we provide evolutionary and ecological arguments for why these two extremes are often unstable under natural conditions and propose that interactions with intermediate levels of conflict are frequent evolutionary endpoints. We argue that by-product helping is prone to becoming an asymmetric investment game since even small variation in by-product benefits will lead to the evolution of partner choice, leading to investments by the chosen class. Second, iterated prisoner''s dilemmas tend to take place in stable social groups where the fitness of partners is interdependent, with the effect that a certain level of helping is self-serving. In sum, intermediate levels of mutual helping are expected in nature, while efficient partner monitoring may allow reaching higher levels.     

All that Glisters is not Gold: Sensory Bias, Sexual Conflict and Nuptial Feeding in Insects and Spiders

It is becoming increasingly clear that the evolutionary interests of the sexes are often in conflict when it comes to mating. Sexual encounters involving nuptial gifts, however, have often been viewed as prime examples of sexual co‐operation, rather than conflict. In this review, I explore the proposition that nuptial gifts act as sensory traps: by exploiting the female's gustatory responses, the male may be able to entice females to accept superfluous matings and/or transfer greater volumes of ejaculate than are in the female's reproductive interests. Evidence suggests that the females’ sensory biases may have played an important role in shaping gift characteristics in at least four different systems, although relatively few forms of nuptial feeding have so far been examined from this perspective. I argue that gift composition is more likely to be tailored to increasing the attractiveness of the gift to the female and/or maximizing gift handling time than to suit the female's nutritional needs and that the fecundity‐enhancing benefits of nuptial gifts are often questionable and have been over‐stated in the literature. Fertilization biases associated with the female's attraction to the nuptial gift, however, could lead to in‐direct benefits for the female. On the other hand, nuptial feeding may also lead to significant costs to the female. Evidence suggests that some types of gift entice the female to mate, but it is not clear whether the resultant degree of polyandry is higher than optimal for the female. In other cases, evidence suggests that the gift enables the male to overcome the resistance of the female to accepting an extra large ejaculate and that large ejaculates are associated with longer post‐mating sexual refractory periods in the female. This could represent a cost to the female by delaying or preventing her from receiving the genetic benefits of polyandry. At present, it is not clear, however, whether such costs outweigh the potential benefits of nuptial feeding for the female.     

Comparative and phylogenetic analysis of developmental sequences

Event pairing has been proposed for the optimization of developmental sequences (event sequences) on a given phylogenetic hypothesis (cladogram) to determine instances of sequence heterochrony. Here, we show that event pairing is faulty, leading to the optimization of impossible hypothetical ancestors, the underestimation of the lengths of the developmental sequences on the tree, and the proposition of synapomorphies that are not supported by the data. When used for phylogenetic analysis, event pairing can even produce cladograms that are inconsistent with the data. These errors are caused by the fact that event pairing treats dependent features as if they were independent. We present a new method for comparative and phylogenetic analysis of developmental sequences that does not exhibit these errors. Our method applies Search-based character optimization and treats the entire developmental sequence as a single character that is then analyzed by using an edit cost function, which specifies the transformation cost between pairs of observed and unobserved character states, and dynamic programming. In other words, the developmental sequence is directly optimized on the tree. We used event pairing as an edit cost function, but others are possible.     

The Impact of the Law of the Sea Convention on Conflict and Conflict Management in the South China Sea

This article examines the impact of the UN Law of the Sea Convention on conflict behavior and management in the South China Sea during four periods: during its negotiation (1973–1982); from its signing to the entry into force (1982–1994); from then until the China-ASEAN Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (1995–2002); and from the setting of a timeline for outer limits of continental shelf submissions to the events following the 2009 submissions (2003–2013). Ambiguous effects were found. On the one hand, the Convention has generated or exacerbated conflict by raising the stakes, failing to resolve key legal issues, and encouraging overlapping zone claims. On the other hand, it has provided obligations, language, and techniques for conflict management and resolution. The conflict-enhancing impact was found to have been more substantial than the peace-promoting effects. Nevertheless, the balance has shifted toward more emphasis on conflict management and also some utilization of the Convention's peacemaking potential. If this long-term trend continues and the Convention is more rigorously respected and applied, the Convention may in the end be found to have contributed to regional peace.     

Is the COI barcoding gene involved in speciation through intergenomic conflict?

We here test the proposition that changes in the barcoding region of COI are commonly involved in speciation through intergenomic conflict. We demonstrate that this is unlikely given that even with incomplete taxon sampling, 78-90% of closely-related animal species have identical COI amino acid sequences. In addition, in those cases where amino acid substitutions between closely related species are observed, the inter- and intra-specific substitution patterns are very similar and/or lack consistent differences in the number, position and type of amino acid change. Overall, we conclude that there is little evidence for a widespread involvement of the barcoding gene in speciation.     

Corrections for measurement error due to delayed onset of illness for case-crossover designs

Epidemiologic studies of the short-term effects of ambient particulate matter (PM) on the risk of acute cardiovascular or cerebrovascular events often use data from administrative databases in which only the date of hospitalization is known. A common study design for analyzing such data is the case-crossover design, in which exposure at a time when a patient experiences an event is compared to exposure at times when the patient did not experience an event within a case-control paradigm. However, the time of true event onset may precede hospitalization by hours or days, which can yield attenuated effect estimates. In this article, we consider a marginal likelihood estimator, a regression calibration estimator, and a conditional score estimator, as well as parametric bootstrap versions of each, to correct for this bias. All considered approaches require validation data on the distribution of the delay times. We compare the performance of the approaches in realistic scenarios via simulation, and apply the methods to analyze data from a Boston-area study of the association between ambient air pollution and acute stroke onset. Based on both simulation and the case study, we conclude that a two-stage regression calibration estimator with a parametric bootstrap bias correction is an effective method for correcting bias in health effect estimates arising from delayed onset in a case-crossover study.     

Soil carbon and litter development along a reconstructed biodiverse forest chronosequence of South-Western Australia

We performed a meta-data analysis to investigate the importance of event based fluxes to DOC export from forested watersheds. A total of 30 small eastern United States forested watersheds with no wetland component, with a total of 5,176 DOC and accompanying discharge measurements were used in this analysis. There is a clear increase in DOC concentration during hydrologic events (storms and snow melt) that follows a power relationship. We estimate that 86% of DOC is exported during events. The majority (70%) of this event based DOC flux occurs during the rising hydrograph and during large events. Events with a discharge greater than 1.38 cm day^?1 make up only 4.8% of the annual hydrograph, yet are responsible for 57% of annual DOC flux. The relationship between event discharge and both DOC concentration and flux is also regulated by temperature and antecedent conditions, with a larger response in both fluxes and concentrations to events during warmer periods and periods where the preceding discharge was low. The temperature relationship also shows seasonality indicating a potential link to the size or reactivity of watershed OM pools. The 86% of DOC lost during events represents a conservative estimate of the amount of allochthonous forested DOC transported laterally to streams. Future research on watershed cycling of DOC should take into account the importance of events in regulating the transport of DOC to downstream ecosystems, determine the relative importance of abiotic versus biotic processes for the temperature regulation of event-associated DOC fluxes, and elucidate the interactions between processes that respond to climate on event versus longer time scales.     

Comparing the adoption of protective behaviors: The framing effects of national culture and hazard onset type

On the basis of framing effect and protective action decision model, this study examines the differences in people's response to diverse hazard onset types (sudden or gradual) under different cultural frameworks (China and the United States) and the framing effects of culture and hazard onset type on people's perception and behavioral response. The data are derived from three questionnaire surveys on people's behavioral response to H7N9 and smog emergency in China and H1N1 in the United States. Results indicate that people with different cultures and diverse contexts of hazard onset type present substantial differences in risk perception, protective action perception, stakeholder perception, and behavioral expectations. Furthermore, culture and hazard onset type exert significant framing effects on people's three types of perception, reliance on official information sources, and intention to adopt protective actions. This research empirically verifies the existence of framing effect in culture and decision scenarios, thereby helping in developing different emergency communication strategies.     

Behavioural acclimation to cameras and observers in coral reef fishes

Observer presence can bias behavioural studies of animals in both the wild and the laboratory. Despite existing evidence for significant observer effects across several taxa, little is known about the minimum periods of acclimation that should precede behavioural observations. To date, most studies either do not report any acclimation periods or include a non‐specific period without empirically quantifying its appropriateness. Here, we conducted in situ behavioural observations of two species of demersal coral reef fishes using cameras and/or observers to examine the biases associated with either approach. For both treatments, we generated 25 min time series of a number of vigilance‐associated behaviours (i.e., distance from shelter and mate, time out of shelter, swimming activity) and estimated the point of acclimation using changepoint analysis. In the camera trials, acclimation in both species appeared to occur between 2 and 7 min for different behaviours. When an observer was present, however, no apparent acclimation occurred until the observer left the area. Overall, our findings demonstrate that (i) behavioural studies of wild fishes conducted by an observer may be biased due to permanent observer effects, and (ii) when using video equipment, a species‐ and behaviour‐specific acclimation period should precede behavioural scoring.     

Regulation of cardiac rhythm in hibernating mammals

The dramatic fall in heart rate exhibited by mammals entering hibernation begins before there is any noticeable fall in body temperature. The initial, progressive decrease in heart rate is the result of a cyclic parasympathetic activation that induces skipped beats and regular asystoles as well as slows the even heart beat. As body temperature subsequently falls, the parasympathetic influence is progressively withdrawn and periods of parasympathetic and sympathetic dominance alternate and give rise to regular periods of arrhythmia (tachycardia followed by bradycardia), and occasional long asystoles or periods of highly irregular cardiac activity. Superimposed on this is a vagally-mediated, respiratory sinus arrhythmia that is accentuated in species that breathe episodically. These events give way to a uniform heart rate in deep hibernation at low temperatures where both parasympathetic and sympathetic tone appear absent. The complete absence of tone is not a function of reduced temperature but is reflective of the state of deep, steady state hibernation. The elevation in heart rate that accompanies the onset of arousal is the result of dramatic increases in sympathetic activation that precede any increases in body temperature. As body temperature then rises, sympathetic influence is slowly withdrawn. Arrhythmias are also common during natural arousals or shifts from lower to warmer hibernation temperatures as periods of parasympathetic and sympathetic dominance again alternate en route to re-establishing a steady state in euthermia. The mechanism behind, and the biological significance of, cardiac changes mediated through orchestrated arrhythmias remain unknown.     

Parkinson's disease: convergence on synaptic homeostasis

Parkinson's disease, the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, affects millions of people globally. There is no cure, and its prevalence will double by 2030. In recent years, numerous causative genes and risk factors for Parkinson's disease have been identified and more than half appear to function at the synapse. Subtle synaptic defects are thought to precede blunt neuronal death, but the mechanisms that are dysfunctional at synapses are only now being unraveled. Here, we review recent work and propose a model where different Parkinson proteins interact in a cell compartment‐specific manner at the synapse where these proteins regulate endocytosis and autophagy. While this field is only recently emerging, the work suggests that the loss of synaptic homeostasis may contribute to neurodegeneration and is a key player in Parkinson's disease.