We compared nine linear measures of body size and their appropriateness as estimators for body size in apoid wasps. A correlation and a multiple regression analysis with backward elimination of non-significant variables of the linear parameters with dry weight were carried out for the entire data set and for various subsets (defined by sex, body size classes, and systematic position). All variables are significantly correlated with dry weight. Since all variables are also correlated with each other, multicolinearity effects are likely to occur, which reflect a biological fact rather than an extraneous factor to be eliminated. Head width, mesoscutum width, and forewing length are generally better predictors of body size in apoid wasps than any other variable. This result is in accord with the fact that these variables are already commonly in use in the literature. Our results provide selection criteria to choose among the variables to be best used in body-size related studies. If a single variable is required to estimate body size in apoid wasp, mesoscutum width should be used.
This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies. While a wealth of contemporary speculative materialisms is currently circulating in academia, art and activism, in this article we focus upon a few ethico-political stakes in the different, loosely affiliated conceptions of ontologies of immanence. More specifically, we are concerned here with the very meaning of speculation itself after the many new headings of immanent ontologies, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism or the (feminist) new materialisms. Our concern is a feminist concern, as some of the immanent ontologies seem to actively connect with the varied feminist archive of speculative thought while others seem to actively disconnect from the very same archive. What does this imply for the feminist scholar who is in want of tools for navigating the contemporary landscape of ontologies of immanence? Here, we highlight some important overlapping as well as poignant clashes between various feminist materialist genealogies and OOO/speculative realism. In our discussion we underline the importance of situatedness and context, relationality and affinity—and the possibility for rewiring relations—amid a plethora of lively historiographies and emergent post-disciplinary movements and world-makings.
In critical cultural analysis, the metaphor of 'diffraction' surfaced in 1992 with Donna Haraway's 'The Promises of Monsters' as a feminist tool to rethink difference/s beyond binary opposition/s. 2 Drawing on physical optics, where it describes the interference pattern of diffracting light rays, Haraway adopted diffraction to move our images of difference/s from oppositional to differential, from static to productive, and our ideas of scientific knowledge from reflective, disinterested judgment to mattering, embedded involvement. It is an 'invented category of semantics' 3 that builds on and contests metaphors we habitually use to describe as practices of knowing and living. Diffraction, thus, is a significant 'subject-shifter'. 4 It shifts the subjects of critique andif we leap to Karen Barad's quantum understanding of diffraction -it even shifts the foundational ontological and epistemological presuppositions that condition these subject-formations. With Barad's quantized diffraction, a relational ontology emerges that can no longer be categorically separated from its epistemological processes. Quantized diffraction becomes 'entangled': as both method of engagement and radically immanent world(ing) where relationality/differentiation are primary dynamics of all material-discursive entanglements. Ontology and epistemology become inter-/intra-laced as onto-epistemology. 5Drawing on Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, Barad highlights the (uncanny) inseparability of the queer behaviour of matter evidenced on a quantum level and our practices of (scientific) observation, knowledge and 'meaning-mattering'. The quantumphysical 'two-slit diffraction experiment' was for Bohr a thought-experiment to determine if light was particle (as classically held by Newton) or wave (as experimentally shown by Young in 1803). It made evident that under certain conditions (if it remains unclear through which slit the photon passes) the results are a wave pattern, while under other conditions (if the photon's path is defined by a 'which-path detector') light behaves like a particle.6 One crucial point of this quantum mechanical paradox -with far reaching implications -is that 'the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus'. 7 The transparency of measurement assumed in classical physics and reflexive theories of knowledge are thereby toppled. Measurement matters, and it does so not only in the supposedly small-scale, weird world of quanta. As Vicki Kirby notes, the full implications of the insight that 'the very ontology of the entities emerges through relationality' still need to be fathomed for 'life at large'.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.