Saturday, October 16, 2010

Articles and I have a little misunderstanding

The following fun comes from Steven M. Chambers' Spatial Structure, Genetic Variation, and the Neighborhood Adjustment to Population Size. Conservation Biology 9(5): 1312-1315. No harm is meant to Mr. Chambers' original article, he just used lots of lines to play with--->


While flipping through 110 years of journal articles about "spatial structure" of "forest populations" I have inevitably found many articles that use the term "subdivision." Of course, this isn't referring to West Hills or something, it's an ecological term.  but now just imagine, what if you were reading an article about something like this, and you interpreted the words "subdivision" "neighborhood" and "neighbor" to mean exactly what they mean in the non-science world, people living in a community. Behold! Humor!



example: making fun of people living in a red-neck place "Fragmentation can reduce local population size to an extent that demographic instability and dangerous levels of inbreeding may occur."

example:why there's always very interesting people in your neighborhood, even if your township seems mostly the same: "Effective subdivisions may retard the rate of loss of overall variation, but there are limits and exceptional conditions determined by among population migration and extinction rates." 

example: why you should marry your neighbor: "The size of a neighborhood... was intended to approximate the effective size of the local random-mating unit within a continously distributed population." 

:) WIN.

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