Tempest in another time: Shakespeare, Greenaway, Céline

Hainge examines Shakespeare's play The Tempest, which was used in the allusions of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel Guignol's Band and Peter Greenaway's 1991 film Prospero's Book. He hypothesizes that Céline's novel Feerie pour une autre fois can be conceived of as a response to and interpretation of the The Tempest in the same way that Greenaway's film can be conceived of not as a representation of Shakespeare's play, a simple staging of it, but rather as a subjective response to it, an adaptation in the truest sense of the term.

The genetic covariance among clinal environments after adaptation to an environmental gradient in Drosophila serrata

We examined the genetic basis of clinal adaptation by determining the evolutionary response of life-history traits to laboratory natural selection along a gradient of thermal stress in Drosophila serrata. A gradient of heat stress was created by exposing larvae to a heat stress of 36degrees for 4 hr for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 days of larval development, with the remainder of development taking place at 25degrees. Replicated lines were exposed to each level of this stress every second generation for 30 generations. At the end of selection, we conducted a complete reciprocal transfer experiment where all populations were raised in all environments, to estimate the realized additive genetic covariance matrix among clinal environments in three life-history traits. Visualization of the genetic covariance functions of the life-history traits revealed that the genetic correlation between environments generally declined as environments became more different and even became negative between the most different environments in some cases. One exception to this general pattern was a life-history trait representing the classic trade-off between development time and body size, which responded to selection in a similar genetic fashion across all environments. Adaptation to clinal environments may involve a number of distinct genetic effects along the length of the cline, the complexity of which may not be fully revealed by focusing primarily on populations at the ends of the cline.

When vicars meet: A narrow contact zone between morphologically cryptic phylogeographic lineages of the rainforest skink, Carlia rubrigularis

Phylogeographic analyses of the fauna of the Australian wet tropics rainforest have provided strong evidence for long-term isolation of populations among allopatric refugia, yet typically there is no corresponding divergence in morphology. This system provides an opportunity to examine the consequences of geographic isolation, independent of morphological divergence, and thus to assess the broader significance of historical subdivisions revealed through mitochondrial DNA phylogeography. We have located and characterized a zone of secondary contact between two long isolated (mtDNA divergence > 15%) lineages of the skink Carlia rubrigularis using one mitochondrial and eight nuclear (two intron, six microsatellite) markers. This revealed a remarkably narrow (width < 3 km) hybrid zone with substantial linkage disequilibrium and strong deficits of heterozygotes at two of three nuclear loci with diagnostic alleles. Cline centers were coincident across loci. Using a novel form of likelihood analysis, we were unable to distinguish between sigmoidal and stepped cline shapes except at one nuclear locus for which the latter was inferred. Given estimated dispersal rates of 90-133 m x gen(-1/2) and assuming equilibrium, the observed cline widths suggest effective selection against heterozygotes of at least 22-49% and possibly as high as 70%. These observations reveal substantial postmating isolation, although the absence of consistent deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium at diagnostic loci suggests that there is little accompanying premating isolation. The tight geographic correspondence between transitions in mtDNA and those for nuclear genes and corresponding evidence for selection against hybrids indicates that these morphologically cryptic phylogroups could be considered as incipient species. Nonetheless, we caution against the use of mtDNA phylogeography as a sole criterion for defining species boundaries.