The coast's fishing industry, along with its tourism ambitions, shaped a population that was diverse, and ever open to the next big prospect.
Yet the new forecast from the US-based Population Reference Bureau attracted no comment from our government, which has barely begun to shape a population policy, as distinct from an immigration policy, which it says sets "no upper limits".
Although natural selection is often viewed as a slow pruning process, a dramatic new field study suggests it can sometimes shape a population as fast as a chain saw can rip through a sapling.
The role of individual variation in shaping a population's niche was first articulated as a component of Van Valen's [5] niche variation hypothesis.
Understanding how social determinants of health interact to ultimately shape a population's pattern of disease is a daunting task, full of methodological complexity and theoretical uncertainty.
Analytical results are derived for single-shape landscapes, in particular, simple expressions are obtained for the mean fraction of master shapes in a population and for phenotypic error thresholds.
Second, there is discordance between the genetic constitution and the prevailing leaf shape of a population; genetic clustering does not predict leaf shape genotype frequencies for populations.
Based on 37 measurements--ranging from the length of the cranium to the height of the eye sockets--the team reports this week in Nature that the worldwide pattern of skull shapes closely matches the genetic data: The diversity of cranial shape within a population falls off the farther it is from Africa.
The age and sex structure of the population determines the ultimate shape of a population pyramid, such that the representation may take the form of a pyramid, have a columnar shape (with vertical sides rather than sloped sides), or have an irregular profile.
Treue and colleagues use electrophysiological recordings in monkeys and psychophysical experiments in humans to suggest that the shape of a population response in a motion sensitive region of the brain (area MT), rather than the peak of the response, determines motion perception.
