Lettera pastorale : nella quale confuta gli errori sparsi in una lettera che un emissario della societa' bibblica di Nome Giovanni Kin Americano scrisse nel 1825. cercando di corrompere colle sue ree massime I cattolici della sorìa ec. /

Title page in Italian; text in Arabic.

America, the land of contrasts; a Briton's view of his American kin;

First published under title: The land of contrasts.

Wowapi inonpa : wowapi wakan etanhan taju wanjikji oyakapi kin he dee = The second Dakota reading book : consisting of Bible stories from the Old Testament /

In the Santee dialect.

Chihō Kin'yū Kumiaikai.

Mode of access: Internet.

"Our kith and kin"?:Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and the ethnonationalist parties of Tamil Nadu

This article explains the impact of substate nationalism on the political dynamic surrounding ethnic kin migration through a case study of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in the southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu. Examples drawn from the migration studies literature identify ethnic kinship between refugees and host as an indicator of favorable reception and assistance. While this expectation is borne out to an extent in the Tamil Nadu case, it is tempered by a period of hostility following the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by an LTTE suicide bomber, when the refugees were figured as a disruptive and dangerous presence by Tamil Nadu's political elites. A version of the "triadic nexus" model of kin state relations, reconfigured to accommodate the larger political unit within which the substate nationalism is incorporated, is proposed as a framework of analysis for these events. This can better account for Tamil Nadu's substate ethnonationalist elite's movement between expressions of coethnic solidarity with the refugees and the more hostile, security-focused response postassassination. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

A "Greater Britain": colonial kin in fictions of settlement, 1850-1890

This dissertation traces the ways in which nineteenth-century fictional narratives of white settlement represent “family” as, on the one hand, an abstract theoretical model for a unified and relatively homogenous British settler empire and on the other, a fundamental challenge to ideas about imperial integrity and transnational Anglo-Saxon racial identification. I argue that representations of transoceanic white families in nineteenth-century fictions about Australian settler colonialism negotiate the tension between the bounded domesticity of an insular English nation and the kind of kinship that spans oceans and continents as a result of mass emigration from the British isles to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the Australian colonies. As such, these fictions construct productive analogies between the familial metaphors and affective language in the political discourse of “Greater Britain”—-a transoceanic imagined community of British settler colonies and their “mother country” united by race and language—-and ideas of family, gender, and domesticity as they operate within specific bourgeois families. Concerns over the disruption of transoceanic families bear testament to contradictions between the idea of a unified imperial identity (both British and Anglo-Saxon), the proliferation of fractured local identities (such as settlers’ English, Irish Catholic, and Australian nationalisms), and the conspicuous absence of indigenous families from narratives of settlement. I intervene at the intersection of postcolonial literary criticism and gender theory by examining the strategic deployments of heteronormative kinship metaphors and metonymies in the rhetorical consolidation of settler colonial space. Settler colonialism was distinct from the “civilizing” domination of subject peoples in South Asia in that it depended on the rhetorical construction of colonial territory as empty space or as land occupied by nearly extinct “primitive” races. This dissertation argues that political rhetoric, travel narratives, and fiction used the image of white female bourgeois reproductive power and sentimental attachment as a technology for settler colonial success, embodying this technology both in the benevolent figure of the metropolitan “mother country” (the paternalistic female counter to the material realities of patriarchal and violent settler colonial practices) and in fictional juxtapositions of happy white settler fecund families with the solitary self-extinguishing figure of the black aboriginal “savage.” Yet even in the narratives where the continuity and coherence of families across imperial space is questioned—-and “Greater Britain” itself—-domesticity and heteronormative familial relations effectively rewrite settler space as white, Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois, and the sentimentalism of troubled European families masks the presence and genocide of indigenous aboriginal peoples. I analyze a range of novels and political texts, canonical and non-canonical, metropolitan and colonial. My introductory first chapter examines the discourse on a “Greater Britain” in the travel narratives of J.A. Froude, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Anthony Trollope and in the Oxbridge lectures of Herman Merivale and J.R. Seeley. These writers make arguments for an imperial economy of affect circulating between Britain and the settler colonies that reinforces political connections, and at times surpasses the limits of political possibility by relying on the language of sentiment and feeling to build a transoceanic “Greater British” community. Subsequent chapters show how metropolitan and colonial fiction writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley, and Catherine Helen Spence, test the viability of this “Greater British” economy of affect by presenting transoceanic family connections and structures straining under the weight of forces including the vast distances between colonies and the “mother country,” settler violence, and the transportation system.

Change and Aging Senescence as an Adaptation

Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual, and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will propose a model for aging based on assumptions that are compatible with evolutionary theory: i) competition is between individuals; ii) there is some degree of locality, so quite often competition will be between parents and their progeny; iii) optimal conditions are not stationary, and mutation helps each species to keep competitive. When conditions change, a senescent species can drive immortal competitors to extinction. This counter-intuitive result arises from the pruning caused by the death of elder individuals. When there is change and mutation, each generation is slightly better adapted to the new conditions, but some older individuals survive by chance. Senescence can eliminate those from the genetic pool. Even though individual selection forces can sometimes win over group selection ones, it is not exactly the individual that is selected but its lineage. While senescence damages the individuals and has an evolutionary cost, it has a benefit of its own. It allows each lineage to adapt faster to changing conditions. We age because the world changes.

Cuticular hydrocarbons in the stingless bee Schwarziana quadripunctata (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini): differences between colonies, castes and age

Chemical communication is of fundamental importance to maintain the integration of insect colonies. In honey bees, cuticular lipids differ in their composition between queens, workers and drones. Little is known, however, about cuticular hydrocarbons in stingless bees. We investigated chemical differences in cuticular hydrocarbons between different colonies, castes and individuals of different ages in Schwarziana quadripunctata. The epicuticle of the bees was extracted using the nonpolar solvent hexane, and was analyzed by means of a gas chromatograph coupled with a mass spectrometer. The identified compounds were alkanes, branched-alkanes and alkenes with chains of 19 to 33 carbon atoms. Discriminant analyses showed clear differences between all the groups analyzed. There were significant differences between bees from different colonies, workers of different age and between workers and virgin queens.

rst Transcriptional Activity Influences kirre mRNA Concentration in the Drosophila Pupal Retina during the Final Steps of Ommatidial Patterning

Background: Drosophila retinal architecture is laid down between 24-48 hours after puparium formation, when some of the still uncommitted interommatidial cells (IOCs) are recruited to become secondary and tertiary pigment cells while the remaining ones undergo apoptosis. This choice between survival and death requires the product of the roughest (rst) gene, an immunoglobulin superfamily transmembrane glycoprotein involved in a wide range of developmental processes. Both temporal misexpression of Rst and truncation of the protein intracytoplasmic domain, lead to severe defects in which IOCs either remain mostly undifferentiated and die late and erratically or, instead, differentiate into extra pigment cells. Intriguingly, mutants not expressing wild type protein often have normal or very mild rough eyes. Methodology/Principal Findings: By using quantitative real time PCR to examine rst transcriptional dynamics in the pupal retina, both in wild type and mutant alleles we showed that tightly regulated temporal changes in rst transcriptional rate underlie its proper function during the final steps of eye patterning. Furthermore we demonstrated that the unexpected wild type eye phenotype of mutants with low or no rst expression correlates with an upregulation in the mRNA levels of the rst paralogue kin-of-irre (kirre), which seems able to substitute for rst function in this process, similarly to their role in myoblast fusion. This compensatory upregulation of kirre mRNA levels could be directly induced in wild type pupa upon RNAi-mediated silencing of rst, indicating that expression of both genes is also coordinately regulated in physiological conditions. Conclusions/Significance: These findings suggest a general mechanism by which rst and kirre expression could be fine tuned to optimize their redundant roles during development and provide a clearer picture of how the specification of survival and apoptotic fates by differential cell adhesion during the final steps of retinal morphogenesis in insects are controlled at the transcriptional level.

Suppression subtractive hybridization analysis reveals expression of conserved and novel genes in male accessory glands of the ant Leptothorax gredleri

Background: During mating, insect males eject accessory gland proteins (Acps) into the female genital tract. These substances are known to affect female post-mating behavior and physiology. In addition, they may harm the female, e. g., in reducing its lifespan. This is interpreted as a consequence of sexual antagonistic co-evolution. Whereas sexual conflict abounds in non-social species, the peculiar life history of social insects (ants, bees, wasps) with lifelong pair-bonding and no re-mating aligns the reproductive interests of the sexes. Harming the female during mating would negatively affect male fitness and sexual antagonism is therefore not expected. Indeed, mating appears to increase female longevity in at least one ant species. Acps are presumed to play a role in this phenomenon, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. In this study, we investigated genes, which are preferentially expressed in male accessory glands of the ant Leptothorax gredleri, to determine which proteins might be transferred in the seminal fluid. Results: By a suppression subtractive hybridization protocol we obtained 20 unique sequences (USs). Twelve had mutual best matches with genes predicted for Apis mellifera and Nasonia vitripennis. Functional information (Gene Ontology) was available only for seven of these, including intracellular signaling, energy-dependent transport and metabolic enzyme activities. The remaining eight USs did not match sequences from other species. Six genes were further analyzed by quantitative RT-PCR in three life cycle stages of male ants. A gene with carboxy-lyase activity and one of unpredicted function were significantly overexpressed in accessory glands of sexually mature males. Conclusions: Our study is the first one to investigate differential gene expression in ants in a context related to mating. Our findings indicate that male accessory glands of L. gredleri express a series of genes that are unique to this species, possibly representing novel genes, in addition to conserved ones for which functions can be predicted. Identifying differentially expressed genes might help to better understand molecular mechanisms involved in reproductive processes in eusocial Hymenoptera. While the novel genes could account for rapidly evolving ones driven by intra-sexual conflict between males, conserved genes imply that rather beneficial traits might get fixed by a process described as inter-sexual cooperation between males and females.

The number of reproductive workers in highly eusocial Hymenoptera: monogyny and monandry

Haplodiploidy results in relatedness asymmetries between colony members of highly eusocial Hymenoptera. As a consequence, queen and reproductive workers are more related to their own sons than to each other's male offspring. Kin selection theory predicts multiple optima in male parentage: either the queen or the workers should produce all the males. Nevertheless, shared male parentage is common in highly eusocial hymenopterans. An inclusive fitness model was used to analyze the effect of the number of reproductive workers on male parentage shared by the queen and laying workers by isolating the male component from an inclusive fitness equation using the equal fitness through male condition for each pairwise combination of the three female classes comprised of the queen, laying workers and non-laying workers. The main result of the theoretical analyses showed that the fraction of males produced by workers increases asymptotically with the number of laying workers at an increasingly diminishing rate, tending to an asymptotic value of 0.67. In addition, as the number of laying workers increases, the share of male parentage converges to that of non-laying workers. The diminishing return effect on male parentage share depending on the number of reproductive workers leads us to expect the number of reproductive workers to be relatively small in a stingless bee colony, even in the absence of productivity costs. The available data confirms this hypothesis, as there is an unusually small number of reproductive workers in stingless bee colonies.

The queen is dead-long live the workers: intraspecific parasitism by workers in the stingless bee Melipona scutellaris

Insect societies are well known for their high degree of cooperation, but their colonies can potentially be exploited by reproductive workers who lay unfertilized, male eggs, rather than work for the good of the colony. Recently, it has also been discovered that workers in bumblebees and Asian honeybees can succeed in entering and parasitizing unrelated colonies to produce their own male offspring. The aim of this study was to investigate whether such intraspecific worker parasitism might also occur in stingless bees, another group of highly social bees. Based on a large-scale genetic study of the species Melipona scutellaris, and the genotyping of nearly 600 males from 45 colonies, we show that similar to 20% of all males are workers` sons, but that around 80% of these had genotypes that were incompatible with them being the sons of workers of the resident queen. By tracking colonies over multiple generations, we show that these males were not produced by drifted workers, but rather by workers that were the offspring of a previous, superseded queen. This means that uniquely, workers reproductively parasitize the next-generation workforce. Our results are surprising given that most colonies were sampled many months after the previous queen had died and that workers normally only have a life expectancy of similar to 30 days. It also implies that reproductive workers greatly outlive all other workers. We explain our results in the context of kin selection theory, and the fact that it pays workers more from exploiting the colony if costs are carried by less related individuals.