Explaining the social gradient in smoking and cessation: the peril and promise of social mobility

Smoking in high-income countries is now concentrated in poor communities whose relatively high smoking prevalence is explained by greater uptake but above all by lower quit rates. Whilst a number of barriers to smoking cessation have been identified, this is the first paper to situate cessation itself as a classed and cultural practice. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in a working class community in the North of England between 2012 and 2015, I theorise smoking cessation as a symbolic practice in relation to the affective experience of class and social mobility. I show that ambivalence about upward mobility as separation and loss translated into ambivalence about smoking cessation. The reason for this was that the social gradient in smoking operated dynamically at the level of the individual life course i.e. smoking cessation followed upward mobility. A serious health problem was an appropriate reason to quit but older women continued to smoke despite serious health problems. This was linked to historical gender roles leading to women placing a low priority on their own health as well as the intergenerational reproduction of smoking through close affective links with smoking parents

Taxonomic surrogacy in biodiversity assessments, and the meaning of Linnaean ranks

Copyright © 2006 The Natural History MuseumThe majority of biodiversity assessments use species as the base unit. Recently, a series of studies have suggested replacing numbers of species with higher ranked taxa (genera, families, etc.); a method known as taxonomic surrogacy that has an important potential to save time and resources in assesments of biological diversity. We examine the relationships between taxa and ranks, and suggest that species/higher taxon exchanges are founded on misconceptions about the properties of Linnaean classification. Rank allocations in current classifications constitute a heterogeneous mixture of various historical and contemporary views. Even if all taxa were monophyletic, those referred to the same rank would simply denote separate clades without further equivalence. We conclude that they are no more comparable than any other, non-nested taxa, such as, for example, the genus Rattus and the phylum Arthropoda, and that taxonomic surrogacy lacks justification. These problems are also illustrated with data of polychaetous annelid worms from a broad-scale study of benthic biodiversity and species distributions in the Irish Sea. A recent consensus phylogeny for polychaetes is used to provide three different family-level classifications of polychaetes. We use families as a surrogate for species, and present Shannon–Wiener diversity indices for the different sites and the three different classifications, showing how the diversity measures rely on subjective rank allocations.Y. Bertrand, F. Pleijel and G. W. Rous

Facets of phylodiversity: evolutionary diversification, divergence and survival as conservation targets

Biodiversity is often described as having multiple facets, including species richness, functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity. In this paper, we argue that phylogenetic diversity itself has three distinct facets-lineage diversification, character divergence and survival time-that can be quantified using distinct branch length metrics on an evolutionary tree. Each dimension is related to different processes of macroevolution, has different spatial patterns and is tied to distinct goals for conserving biodiversity and protecting its future resilience and evolutionary potential. We compared the landscapes identified as top conservation priorities by each of these three metrics in a conservation gap analysis for California, a world biodiversity hotspot, using herbarium data on the biogeography and evolutionary relationships of more than 5000 native plant species. Our analysis incorporated a novel continuous metric of current land protection status, fine-scale data on landscape intactness and an optimization algorithm used to identify complementary priority sites containing concentrations of taxa that are evolutionarily unique, vulnerable due to small range size and/or poorly protected across their ranges. Top conservation priorities included pockets of coastal and northern California that ranked highly for all three phylodiversity dimensions and for species richness, as well as sites uniquely identified by each metric whose value may depend on whether properties such as genetic divergence, high net diversification or independent survival experience are most desirable in an Anthropocene flora.Matthew M. Kling, Brent D. Mishler, Andrew H. Thornhill, Bruce G. Baldwin and David D. Ackerl

Differential patterns of floristic phylogenetic diversity across a post-glacial landscape

Aim: In this study, we explored spatial patterns of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and endemism in the flora of Norway and tested hypothesized post-glacial environmental drivers of PD, including temperature, precipitation, edaphic factors and time since glacial retreat. Location: Norway. Taxon: Vascular plants (Trachaeophyta). Methods: We produced a multi-locus maximum-likelihood (ML) phylogeny using a combination of newly produced DNA sequences from herbarium specimens and sequences available from public repositories. We combined the phylogeny with species occurrence data to estimate PD and phylogenetic endemism across Norway, using a spatial randomization to judge statistical significance. We used multiple-model inference to identify environmental variables that contributed the most to the patterns of PD. Finally, we estimated phylogenetic turnover and used this to identify Norwegian plant assemblages in terms of composition and evolutionary history. Results: Our ML phylogeny contained 87% of all currently described native Norwegian vascular plants. Assemblages were phylogenetically overdispersed in warmer and wetter regions of Norway, as well as in regions with a longer post-glacial history. In cold and dry regions, plant assemblages were phylogenetically clustered, and characterized by neo-endemism, while the mild and wet regions were characterized by both paleo- and neo-endemism. PD was positively correlated with summer temperature and habitat heterogeneity, and peaked in the southeast of Norway. Main conclusions: Both contemporary ecological factors (climate and habitat heterogeneity), and post-glacial history seem to have shaped the phylogenetic structure of the flora of Norway. The flora in the far north of Norway appear to be a result of recent diversification while the coastal regions are assemblages of deeper lineages. Our results suggest that there is an evolutionary signal in the distribution of the Norwegian vascular flora.Ida M. Mienna, James D.M. Speed, Mika Bendiksby, Andrew H. Thornhill, Brent D. Mishler, Michael D. Marti