Kevin Scott Fleming, of Evansville, Ind., lectured fellow Santas on the evolution of a character resembling Saint Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra, and described making money off the beloved character as "poison, absolutely poison".
Normally, for logistical, economic and other reasons, the scores of individual scenes that comprise a motion picture are filmed out of sequence; unlike a theatrical play, actors do not have an opportunity to perform their roles sequentially; nor do they ever act out a part in its entirety, making it more difficult to understand the evolution of a character during a story.
It is important to distinguish tokogenetic processes from homoplasy, which consists of convergence (independent evolution or invention) and reversal (evolution of a character state followed by its reversion to a previous state).
Homoplasy is positively correlated with the rate of evolution of a character [36], [37]: the higher the rate, the lower the ci.
The most extreme level of succulence seen, namely the miniature succulents with reduced stone-shaped leaves, appears to have independently evolved multiple times and is evident in 15 genera, suggesting convergent evolution of a character state that may be beneficial in semi-arid conditions.
Our null assumption is that if the rate of evolution of a character system across the phylogeny is proportional to time it could be considered "neutral", in the sense that it is not subjected to any strong directional or stabilizing selection ([ 17], see other examples in e.g. [ 1] for genital shape; [ 18] for ecological differences; [ 19] for general morphological traits).
A character history reveals more information about the evolution of a specific character than just the reconstruction of ancestral states at the nodes of the tree.
The continued evolution of a particular character past its point of origin is called an evolutionary transformation series.
Here, we instead used the absolute number of changes in the evolution of a given character as a more appropriate measure of its degree of conservation.
We applied the BiSSE method [ 53], which evaluates jointly the evolution of a binary character (here presence or absence of mutualism with sea anemones), speciation and extinction rates.
Few historians are adept at describing the crucial role that infrastructure development plays in the evolution of a city's character.
