116,939 research outputs found
Gender revolution, evolution or neverlution?
Liberal feminists of the 1960s viewed women’s increasing levels of education and employment throughout their lives as harbingers of a gender equality revolution. In this commentary, I draw on economic and sociological research since that time to argue why gender equality in public and private domains remains elusive. For one, it is a story of women changing their behaviour to be more like men in employment, without the necessary complementarity of men behaving more like women in caring responsibilities. Despite women’s employment gains, they remain under-represented at business executive levels and on boards, as well as among MPs. In addition, women continue to be physically oppressed through sexual harassment, exploitation and violence in the home, education, organizations and broader society. The COVID pandemic accentuated women’s employment disadvantage, family responsibilities and physical risks. I recommend the sorts of small, doable policy steps needed to nudge us further toward gender equality
Gender revolution, evolution or neverlution?
Liberal feminists of the 1960s viewed women’s increasing levels of education and employment throughout their lives as harbingers of a gender equality revolution. In this commentary, I draw on economic and sociological research since that time to argue why gender equality in public and private domains remains elusive. For one, it is a story of women changing their behaviour to be more like men in employment, without the necessary complementarity of men behaving more like women in caring responsibilities. Despite women’s employment gains, they remain under-represented at business executive levels and on boards, as well as among MPs. In addition, women continue to be physically oppressed through sexual harassment, exploitation and violence in the home, education, organizations and broader society. The COVID pandemic accentuated women’s employment disadvantage, family responsibilities and physical risks. I recommend the sorts of small, doable policy steps needed to nudge us further toward gender equality
Does Meaning Evolove?
A common method of improving how well understood a theory is, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation is treated as another time dependent theory and compared to the time dependent theory of biological evolution. Several similarities and differences are uncovered. Biological evolution can be gradual or punctuated. Whether radical interpretation is gradual or punctuated depends on how the question is framed: on the coarse-grained time scale it proceeds gradually, but on the fine-grained time scale it proceeds by punctuated equilibria. Biological evolution proceeds by natural selection, the counterpart to this is the increase in both correspondence and coherence. Exaption, mutations, and spandrels have counterparts metaphor, speech errors, and puns respectively. Homologous and analogs have direct counterparts in specific words. The most important differences originate from the existence of a unit of inheritance (the traditional gene) occurring in biological evolution - there is no such unit in language
Evolution or revolution? a study of price and wage volatility in England, 1200-1900
Using annual data 1209-1914, this paper examines whether there are structural breaks in the movements of prices and wages that correspond to the major ‘revolutions’ identified in historical narratives. Econometric modelling of trend and volatility in prices and wages confirms the importance of the Commercial Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, but suggests that the Industrial Revolution may be better described in evolutionary terms. The evidence also points to a late medieval revolution at the time of the Good Parliament, shortly after the Black Death and just before the Peasant’s Revolt. This supports Britnell and Campbell’s commercialisation hypothesis - that the institutional pre-conditions for the Industrial Revolution began to develop at a very early date.Economic evolution; Economic revolution; Historical economics;
2003--2005 INTEGRAL and XMM-Newton observations of 3C 273
The aim of this paper is to study the evolution of the broadband spectrum of
one of the brightest and nearest quasars 3C 273.
We analyze the data obtained during quasi-simultaneous INTEGRAL and XMM
monitoring of the blazar 3C 273 in 2003--2005 in the UV, X-ray and soft
gamma-ray bands and study the results in the context of the long-term evolution
of the source.
The 0.2-100 keV spectrum of the source is well fitted by a combination of a
soft cut-off power law and a hard power law. No improvement of the fit is
achieved if one replaces the soft cut-off power law by either a blackbody, or a
disk reflection model. During the observation period the source has reached the
historically softest state in the hard X-ray domain with a photon index
. Comparing our data with available archived X-ray data
from previous years, we find a secular evolution of the source toward softer
X-ray emission (the photon index has increased by
over the last thirty years). We argue that existing theoretical models have to
be significantly modified to account for the observed spectral evolution of the
source.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to A&
Evolution favors protein mutational robustness in sufficiently large populations
BACKGROUND: An important question is whether evolution favors properties such
as mutational robustness or evolvability that do not directly benefit any
individual, but can influence the course of future evolution. Functionally
similar proteins can differ substantially in their robustness to mutations and
capacity to evolve new functions, but it has remained unclear whether any of
these differences might be due to evolutionary selection for these properties.
RESULTS: Here we use laboratory experiments to demonstrate that evolution
favors protein mutational robustness if the evolving population is sufficiently
large. We neutrally evolve cytochrome P450 proteins under identical selection
pressures and mutation rates in populations of different sizes, and show that
proteins from the larger and thus more polymorphic population tend towards
higher mutational robustness. Proteins from the larger population also evolve
greater stability, a biophysical property that is known to enhance both
mutational robustness and evolvability. The excess mutational robustness and
stability is well described by existing mathematical theories, and can be
quantitatively related to the way that the proteins occupy their neutral
network.
CONCLUSIONS: Our work is the first experimental demonstration of the general
tendency of evolution to favor mutational robustness and protein stability in
highly polymorphic populations. We suggest that this phenomenon may contribute
to the mutational robustness and evolvability of viruses and bacteria that
exist in large populations
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