Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry

Eighteenth-century, British, georgic poems participate in the work of the new discipline of political economy of naturalizing economic and political liberalism. Georgics indirectly communicate a moral philosophy amenable to the system of natural laws and rights in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). In light of the groundbreaking economic science of François Quesnay which Adam Smith revised in his more historically-informed, open-ended analysis, states were increasingly regarded as serving rather than served by their subjects, who now best fulfilled their natural law-based obligation to thrive by freely pursuing their rational self-interests. Georgic poems primarily undermine a conception of state government as a locus of moral authority and social order by presenting alternative, nominally natural sources of socio-economic stability. James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) moralizes personal industry and innovation while veering from detailed examples of natural phenomena, to vast ecological networks, to nature’s determinative, physical and moral laws. William Mason’s The English Garden (1782) asserts that proprietors possessing enough wealth and taste to landscape their estates in a naturalistic style thereby could prove their fitness to participate in liberal government. Scientist-poet Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (1803) rigorously argues for emergent order by presenting a physiological model in which a universal pleasure principle drives all organisms to imitate and synthesize ideas which enable innovation and self-transformation. He defines liberty as immanent to organisms\u27 volitional capacity and locates potential progress in his model’s innate operations. In Darwin, as elsewhere, government becomes an imperfect, refinable technology subservient to a nation’s economy

FLORAL SCENT IN A WHOLE-PLANT CONTEXT Floral volatiles controlling ant behaviour

Summary 1. Ants show complex interactions with plants, both facultative and mutualistic, ranging from grazers through seed predators and dispersers to herders of some herbivores and guards against others. But ants are rarely pollinators, and their visits to flowers may be detrimental to plant fitness. 2. Plants therefore have various strategies to control ant distributions, and restrict them to foliage rather than flowers. These 'filters' may involve physical barriers on or around flowers, or 'decoys and bribes' sited on the foliage (usually extrafloral nectaries -EFNs). Alternatively, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are used as signals to control ant behaviour, attracting ants to leaves and ⁄ or deterring them from functional flowers. Some of the past evidence that flowers repel ants by VOCs has been equivocal and we describe the shortcomings of some experimental approaches, which involve behavioural tests in artificial conditions. 3. We review our previous study of myrmecophytic acacias, which used in situ experiments to show that volatiles derived from pollen can specifically and transiently deter ants during dehiscence, the effects being stronger in ant-guarded species and more effective on resident ants, both in African and Neotropical species. In these plants, repellence involves at least some volatiles that are known components of ant alarm pheromones, but are not repellent to beneficial bee visitors. 4. We also present new evidence of ant repellence by VOCs in temperate flowers, which is usually pollen-based and active on common European ants. We use these data to indicate that across a wide range of plants there is an apparent trade-off in ant-controlling filter strategies between the use of defensive floral volatiles and the alternatives of decoying EFNs or physical barriers

Overview of habitat history in subtropical oceanic island summit ecosystems

Summit ecosystems of oceanic islands constitute one of the most ephemeral and isolated ecosystems existing, harboring specific features that confer on their biota an outstanding distinctness. Summits are short-lived entities, being the last ecosystems to be constructed during the growth of the new oceanic island, and the first to vanish due either to island subsidence, island erosion, or both. Whereas their geological emergence/disappearance is controlled by the volcanic/erosion activity, Pleistocene glaciations in the past million years, by forcing the altitudinal shift of the timberline, have also likely created or destroyed summit ecosystems, enabling the appearance of alpine ecosystems during glacial maxima where they were not present in interglacial periods and vice versa. On the other hand, summit ecosystems constitute islands within islands, being more isolated from climatically similar ecosystems than the coastlines of the islands containing them. Thus summit biota, frequently displaying a high endemicity, may originate either through dispersal from other close summit ecosystems during peak periods, or from the colonization of the summits and later evolution to the new conditions from mid-altitude species of the same island. Conversely, if peak periods are absent, the disappearance of summit ecosystems implies the extinction or extirpation of their constitutive species. Current summit species have likely occupied a much larger area during glacial periods. Thus the summits may be classified as climatic refuges. This is especially the case if glacial periods were associated with much drier conditions on oceanic islands as is the case on continents