Understanding how animal signals are produced is critical for understanding their evolution because complexity and modularity in the underlying morphology can affect evolutionary patterns. Hummingbird feathers show some of the brightest and most iridescent colors in nature. These are produced by optically complex stacks of hollow, platelet-shaped o...
© 2019 The Authors Understanding the processes that determine the architecture of interaction networks represents a major challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. One of the most important interactions involving plants is the interaction between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. While there is a mounting body of research that has studied the arch...
The consensus is that nature is a tremendous source of ideas for innovative designs that can meet various specific functional needs, relevant to society. Designs rely on structural, constructional, process-based and behavioral traits that all result from a natural trial-and-error cycle: evolution. Being one of the pillars of biomimicry, through bil...
The potential role of whole genome duplication (WGD) in evolution is controversial. Whereas some view WGD mainly as detrimental and an evolutionary 'dead end', there is growing evidence that the long-term establishment of polyploidy might be linked to environmental change, stressful conditions, or periods of extinction. However, despite much resear...
Networks are a convenient way to represent many interactions among ecological entities. The analysis of ecological networks is challenging for two reasons. First, there is a plethora of measures that can be applied (and some of them measure the same property). Second, the implementation of these measures is sometimes difficult. We present 'Ecologic...
Objectives: Although the evolution of the hominin masticatory apparatus has been linked to diet and food processing, the physical connection between neurocranium and lower jaw suggests a role of encephalization in the trend of dental and mandibular reduction. Here, the hypothesis that tooth size and mandibular robusticity are influenced by morpholo...
Published in Cognition
Cognitive processing in many domains (e.g., sentence comprehension, music listening, and math solving) requires sequential information to be organized into an integrational structure. There appears to be some overlap in integrational processing across domains, as shown by cross-domain interference effects when for example linguistic and musical sti...
Published in Evolutionary Biology
The origins of and potential constraints on the evolution of phenotypic diversity remain one of the central questions in evolutionary biology. The vertebrate skeleton is governed by historical, developmental, architectural, and functional constraints that all play a role in establishing its final form. Whereas the factors underlying shape variation...
This paper presents the Architecture Framework for Product Family Master Plan. This framework supports the identification of a program architecture (the way cost competitive variance is provided for a full range of products) for a product program for product-based companies during the early stages of a product development project. The framework con...
Mechanistic philosophy of science views a large part of scientific activity as engaged in modelling mechanisms. While science textbooks tend to offer qualitative models of mechanisms, there is increasing demand for models from which one can draw quantitative predictions and explanations. Casini et al. (Theoria 26(1):5-33, 2011) put forward the Recu...
