cline

plural clines

1. systematics; evolution; systematics; evolutionbiogeographyA gradation in a character or phenotype within a species, deme, or other systematic group.

   2 more examples

   2000 Michael J. O'Brien and R. Lee Lyman: Applying Evolutionary Archaeology →ISBN [A cline is a] character gradient, wherein a character such as length increases or decreases gradually and continuously. A cline distributed over geographic space is a "chorocline"; a cline distributed over time is a "chronocline." Compare with chorospecies and chronospecies. . . Simpson termed the change through time a "chronocline", where a cline represents a character gradient. A chunk of a chronocline comprises a chronospecies. The difficulty with identifying a chronospecies resides, then, in first identifying a chronocline, or temporal gradient in a character or attribute. As pointed out by Kevin Padian, some characters "change more or less uniformly through time, but others change not at all, and still others vacillate with no clear trend. This is ... one reason to be suspicious of the evolutionary utility of clines: no criterion for identifying a cline seems to be in force. A cline is simply a gradient in character state along a continuum, and it may be broken, temporarily reversed, or stepped. Furthermore, there is no criterion for a cline's magnitude and no control on its probability."

   2002 The Future of Evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Recent studies have shown that invaders can rapidly adapt to the new environments in which they find themselves. Huey et al. demonstrated how an introduction of a new fruit fly into the west coast of North America resulted in the evolution, in only 20 years, of an apparently adaptive cline related to wing size, throughout the vast new latitudinal range extending from southern California to British Columbia. The cline that developed in North American female flies was similar to that found in the European native populations. Interestingly, the developmental basis for the cline of wing size was different in Europe than for the invader in North America, although the functional result was the same, providing additional evidence for the adaptive advantage of this set of traits.

2. Any graduated continuum.

   This account effectively reconstructs the well-known grammaticalisation cline from anaphora to agreement, …

   2005, Ronnie Cann, Ruth Kempson, Lutz Marten, The Dynamics of Language, an Introduction, page 412

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   2004 Language typology: a functional perspective →ISBN The cline of instantiation is a dimension that organizes systems of all kinds — physical systems like that of meteorology, biological systems, social systems and semiotic systems. In the realm of semiotic systems, text lies at the instance end of the cline. Text is "semiotic weather"; but what about the "semiotic climate", weather patterns and subclimates? There are in fact clear semiotic analogies. The "semiotic climate" is the overall linguistic system; it is the meaning potential of a language. Thus a text instantiates the linguistic system; and the linguistic system "potentializes" innumerable texts.

plural clines

1. inversive geometrygeometryA generalized circle.

   Let C₁ and C₂ be two nonintersecting clines. Prove that there is a unique pair of points that are simultaneously symmetric to both C₁ and C₂.

   2001, Michael Henle, Modern Geometries: Non-Euclidean, Projective, and Discrete, page 77

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   To visualize Möbius transformations, it is helpful to focus on fixed points and, in the case of two fixed points, on two families of clines with respect to these points.

   2009, Michael P. Hitchman, Geometry with an Introduction to Cosmic Topology, page 64

   2011, Dominique Michelucci, What is a Line?, Pascal Schreck, Julien Narboux, Jürgen Richter-Gebert (editors), Automated Deduction in Geometry, 8th International Workshop, ADG 2010, Revised Selected Papers, LNAI 6877, page 139, Let Ω be a fixed, arbitrary, point. Then circles (in the classical sense) through Ω can be considered as lines. For convenience, such circles are called clines in this section. Two distinct clines cut in one point (ignoring Ω and the two cyclic points); it can happen that Ω is a double intersection point; in this case, one may say that the two clines are parallel, and that they meet at a point at infinity, which is Ω.

   Synonyms: circline, generalized circle

1. A surname.