Pondoks, Madrasahs, and the Production of Ulama in Malaysia

This essay traces the development of pondoks, or peoples' Islamic schools (sekolah ngama rakyat), in nineteenth and twentieth century Malay peasant society, their evolution into institutions styled madrasahs, and the role both played in the production of 'ulama'. Their equivalents in Indonesia, generally known as pesantren, have been the subject of substantial research and several notable published studies. Though this has been much less true for Malaysia, the scattered material that does exist perhaps warrants the following attempt to piece it together.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v11i1.65

Macroscale evolutionary patterns of flight muscle dimorphism in the carrion beetle Necrophila japonica

Some insect species exhibit polymorphisms in flight muscles or wings, which provide opportunities for studying the factors that drive dispersal polymorphisms and the evolution of flightlessness in insects. We investigated the macroscale evolutionary pattern of flightlessness in the widespread Japanese beetle Necrophila japonica (Coleoptera: Silphidae), which exhibits flight muscle dimorphisms using phylogeographic approaches. N. japonica lives in both stable and unstable habitats, and the flight muscle dimorphisms may have been maintained through the use of these diverse habitats. We studied the distribution pattern of the proportion of individuals lacking flight muscles in relation to the genetic differentiation among geographic populations using an 842-base pair sequence of the COI-II gene. Both flight-capable and flightless individuals occurred over the distribution area, and the flight muscle condition showed no significant phylogeographic pattern. Several populations comprised flight-capable individuals only, whereas few comprised flightless ones only. Demographic expansion was suggested for major clades of COI-II haplotypes, and the genetic differentiation showed an isolation-by-distance pattern among the populations in Japan. The proportion of flightless individuals was higher in a population with a higher annual mean temperature and with higher genetic diversity among individuals. These results indicate that geographic expansion occurred recently while flight muscle dimorphisms have been maintained, that flight-capable individuals have colonized cooler (peripheral) habitats, and that flightlessness has increased in long-persisting populations as suggested by high genetic diversity

Connecting species’ geographical distributions to environmental variables: range maps versus observed points of occurrence

Connecting the geographical occurrence of a species with underlying environmental variables is fundamental for many analyses of life history evolution and for modeling species distributions for both basic and practical ends. However, raw distributional information comes principally in two forms: points of occurrence (specific geographical coordinates where a species has been observed), and expert-prepared range maps. Each form has potential short-comings: range maps tend to overestimate the true occurrence of a species, whereas occurrence points (because of their frequent non-random spatial distribution) tend to underestimate it. Whereas previous comparisons of the two forms have focused on how they may differ when estimating species richness, less attention has been paid to the extent to which the two forms actually differ in their representation of a species’ environmental associations. We assess such differences using the globally distributed avian order Galliformes (294 species). For each species we overlaid range maps obtained from IUCN and point-of-occurrence data obtained from GBIF on global maps of four climate variables and elevation. Over all species, the median difference in distribution centroids was 234 km, and median values of all five environmental variables were highly correlated, although there were a few species outliers for each variable. We also acquired species’ elevational distribution mid-points (mid-point between minimum and maximum elevational extent) from the literature; median elevations from point occurrences and ranges were consistently lower (median −420 m) than mid-points. We concluded that in most cases occurrence points were likely to produce better estimates of underlying environmental variables than range maps, although differences were often slight. We also concluded that elevational range mid-points were biased high, and that elevation distributions based on either points or range maps provided better estimates

The origins of Malay nationalism, 1900-1941

The purpose of this study has been to trace the growth of communal, ethnic and national feeling among the Malays of Peninsular Malaya in the first four decades of this century, and the expression of this feeling in voluntary associations of a modern and potentially political-nationalist kind. The study opens with a brief examination in Chapter I of the social organisation of the traditional Malay polity as it was at the time of British intervention in the internal affairs of the western states in the 1870s, and of the first effects upon Malay society of patterns of British rule formed during the early years of the Residential system. A second introductory chapter deals with the growth in the peripheral Straits Settlements, and particularly in Singapore, of a distinctive and heterogeneous urban Malayo-Muslim community, which acted as the focus in the latter part of the nineteenth century for the cultural and economic energies of the Malaysian world as a whole, and as a notable stimulant for subsequent Malay social change in the peninsular hinterland. The main body of the thesis spans the years 1900 to 1941. No attempt has been made to present a detailed account of British policy and administration in Malaya during the period

Your professionalism is not my professionalism:congruence and variance in the views of medical students and faculty about professionalism

Abstract Background Medical professionalism is an essential aspect of medical education and practice worldwide and it must be adopted according to different social and cultural contexts. We examined the current congruence and variance in the perception of professionalism in undergraduate medical students and faculty members in one medical school in Saudi Arabia. Methods The target population was first year to final year medical students of College of Medicine, King Saud University. Out of a total of 1431 students at College of Medicine 750 students (52 %) participated in the study. Fifty faculty members from clinical and non-clinical departments of the College of Medicine were randomly selected for this study and all participated in the study. The respondents recorded their responses through the Bristol online survey system, using a bilingual (English and Arabic) version of the Dundee Polyprofessionalism Inventory I: Academic integrity, which has 34 items. Results There are 17 lapses (50 % of the total) in professional behaviour where none of the faculty recommend the ignore sanction while students recommended a variable ignore sanction in a range of 6–29 % for different behaviours. Students and faculty recommended similar sanctions for 5 lapses (14.7 % of the total) in professional behaviours. Furthermore, there is statistically significant two level difference between the sanctions approved by faculty and students in the recommended sanctions for 12 lapses (35 % of the total (p < 0.050). Conclusions These results raised concerns in relation to the students’ understanding of professionalism. It is therefore, important to enhance their learning around the attributes of medical professionalism

Senescence and costs of reproduction in the life history of a small precocial species

Trillmich F, Geißler E, Günther A. Senescence and costs of reproduction in the life history of a small precocial species. Ecology and Evolution. 2019;9(12):7069-7079.Species following a fast life history are expected to express fitness costs mainly as increased mortality, while slow-lived species should suffer fertility costs. Because observational studies have limited power to disentangle intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing senescence, we manipulated reproductive effort experimentally in the cavy (Cavia aperea) which produces extremely precocial young. We created two experimental groups: One was allowed continuous reproduction (CR) and the other intermittent reproduction (IR) by removing males at regular intervals. We predicted that the CR females should senesce (and die) earlier and produce either fewer and/or smaller, slower growing offspring per litter than those of the IR group. CR females had 16% more litters during three years than IR females. CR females increased mass and body condition more steeply and both remained higher until the experiment ended. Female survival showed no group difference. Reproductive senescence in litter size, litter mass, and reproductive effort (litter mass/maternal mass) began after about 600 days and was slightly stronger in CR than IR females. Litter size, litter mass, and offspring survival declined with maternal age and were influenced by seasonality. IR females decreased reproductive effort less during cold seasons and only at higher age than CR females. Nevertheless, offspring winter mortality was higher in IR females. Our results show small costs of reproduction despite high reproductive effort, suggesting that under ad libitum food conditions costs depend largely on internal regulation of allocation decisions

Parasite infections in a social carnivore: Evidence of their fitness consequences and factors modulating infection load

There are substantial individual differences in parasite composition and infection load in wildlife populations. Few studies have investigated the factors shaping this heterogeneity in large wild mammals or the impact of parasite infections on Darwinian fitness, particularly in juveniles. A host's parasite composition and infection load can be shaped by factors that determine contact with infective parasite stages and those that determine the host's resistance to infection, such as abiotic and social environmental factors, and age. Host–parasite interactions and synergies between coinfecting parasites may also be important. We test predictions derived from these different processes to investigate factors shaping infection loads (fecal egg/oocyte load) of two energetically costly gastrointestinal parasites: the hookworm Ancylostoma and the intracellular Cystoisospora, in juvenile spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in the Serengeti National Park, in Tanzania. We also assess whether parasite infections curtail survival to adulthood and longevity. Ancylostoma and Cystoisospora infection loads declined as the number of adult clan members increased, a result consistent with an encounter‐reduction effect whereby adults reduced encounters between juveniles and infective larvae, but were not affected by the number of juveniles in a clan. Infection loads decreased with age, possibly because active immune responses to infection improved with age. Differences in parasite load between clans possibly indicate variation in abiotic environmental factors between clan den sites. The survival of juveniles (<365 days old) to adulthood decreased with Ancylostoma load, increased with age, and was modulated by maternal social status. High‐ranking individuals with low Ancylostoma loads had a higher survivorship during the first 4 years of life than high‐ranking individuals with high Ancylostoma loads. These findings suggest that high infection loads with energetically costly parasites such as hookworms during early life can have negative fitness consequences

Bigger is not always better : viability selection on body mass varies across life stages in a hibernating mammal

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We would like to express our thanks to all the hard-working marmoteers, across the course of the study, that helped to collect the annual field data. In addition, we would like to specifically thank Kenneth B. Armitage for starting the project and access to the long-term body mass data. This work 431 was supported by an EASTBIO PhD studentship from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the University of Aberdeen, which was awarded to A.H.M.J. D.T.B was supported by the National Geographic Society, UCLA (Faculty Senate and the Division of Life Sciences), a Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory research fellowship, and NSF-IDBR-0754247, DEB435 1119660 and 1557130 (to DTB); and NSF-DBI 0242960, 0731346, and 1262713 (to the RMBL).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Ecological theatre and the evolutionary game: how environmental and demographic factors determine payoffs in evolutionary games

In the standard approach to evolutionary games and replicator dynamics, differences in fitness can be interpreted as an excess from the mean Malthusian growth rate in the population. In the underlying reasoning, related to an analysis of "costs" and "benefits", there is a silent assumption that fitness can be described in some type of units. However, in most cases these units of measure are not explicitly specified. Then the question arises: are these theories testable? How can we measure "benefit" or "cost"? A natural language, useful for describing and justifying comparisons of strategic "cost" versus "benefits", is the terminology of demography, because the basic events that shape the outcome of natural selection are births and deaths. In this paper, we present the consequences of an explicit analysis of births and deaths in an evolutionary game theoretic framework. We will investigate different types of mortality pressures, their combinations and the possibility of trade-offs between mortality and fertility. We will show that within this new approach it is possible to model how strictly ecological factors such as density dependence and additive background fitness, which seem neutral in classical theory, can affect the outcomes of the game. We consider the example of the Hawk-Dove game, and show that when reformulated in terms of our new approach new details and new biological predictions are produced

Niche variation and the maintenance of variation in body size in a burying beetle

© 2015 The Authors. Ecological Entomology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Entomological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Online Version of Record published before inclusion in an issue.The final published version is available via DOI: 10.1111/een.122751. In burying beetles (Nicrophorinae) body size is known to provide both a fecundity advantage (in females) and successful resource defence (in males and females). Despite this, considerable variation in body sizes is observed in natural populations. 2. A possible explanation for the maintenance of this variation, even with intra- and interspecific resource competition, is that individuals might assort according to body size on different sized breeding-resources. 3. We tested the prediction that ‘bigger is always better’ in the wild, and in the laboratory, by experimentally manipulating combinations of available breeding-resource size (mouse carcasses) and competitor’s body size in Nicrophorus vespilloides (Herbst 1783). 4. In the field, large female beetles deserted small carcasses, without breeding, more often than they did larger carcasses, but small females used carcasses indiscriminately with respect to size. In the laboratory large beetles reared larger broods (with more offspring) on larger carcasses than small beetles, but on small carcasses small beetles had a reproductive advantage over large ones. Offspring size covaried with carcass size independently of parental body size. 5. Our combined results suggest breeding resource value depends on an individual’s body size, and variation in body size is environmentally induced: maintained by differences in available carcass sizes. This produces a mechanism by which individual specialisation leads to an increase in niche variation via body size in these beetles.This work was supported by a PhD studentship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/1528326/1) and a grant from NERC to N.J.R. and A.J.M. (NE/1025468/1)