The changes started out small--a crop that spread slightly easier, a population that grew slightly faster--but compounded into substantial differences over time.
In this view, more and better schooling will help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, make it easier for populations to cope with change and stimulate the kind of innovation that Mr. Lesser sees already in technology, medicine and health care.
"It's clearly a business decision," says Les Firbank of the Center for Hydrology and Ecology in Lancaster, who helped to organize the farm-scale trials published last year that suggested that planting the GM variety might be easier on populations of native plants than conventional crops are (ScienceNOW, 16 October 2003).
This implies that the evolution towards higher dispersal distances will be easier in populations that occupy a large distribution range or face lower dispersal costs, thereby allowing individuals to keep track of faster moving climate windows.
The establishment of the quasispecies is easier in populations with small genomes, as in these the number of neutral sites is reduced and therefore the neutral space is also smaller.
This finding is analogous to the conclusion that within-generation plasticity can facilitate niche-shift simply by increasing the amount of (random) phenotypic variation, thereby 'smoothing' the fitness landscape and thus making it easier for populations to evolve away from their local fitness peak (Whitlock 1995; Borenstein et al. 2006).
Previous research has suggested that it is relatively easy to construct population databases useful for re-identification about certain sub-populations in Canada because of the information available about them in public and semi-public registries [ 129, 130].
But making that happen is not easy, because the population that calls itself Asian is extremely diverse.
And Vancouver, which has a large Chinese population, easy access to the Pacific Rim, and nice weather, has become a magnet for Chinese investors looking for insurance against uncertainty.
Both macro and micro issues are considered in constructing dialogue systems that are engaging for the target population, easy to use, and effective at promoting positive health behaviors and outcomes.
