deme
/diːm
/noun
1A political division of Attica in ancient Greece.The Peloponnesian army under King Archidamus reached the borders of Attica and encamped at the deme of Acharnae....
- Life Xenophon, son of Gryllus, from the Athenian deme (rural district) of Erchia, was born into a wealthy but politically inactive family around 430 BC.
- Two portraits of Socrates frame the Symposium, one painted by Aristodemus, the good thief, the best of the deme, the other by Alcibiades, the bad thief.
1.1An administrative division in modern Greece.
2 Biology A subdivision of a population consisting of closely related plants, animals, or people, typically breeding mainly within the group.We have studied different aspects of DNA sequence polymorphism within a single deme drawn from a population that has experienced a range expansion....
- Several of these still capture the essence of island-model subdivision, that is, greater relatedness within than between demes, while others collapse to the unstructured case.
- The effect of genetic hitchhiking on neutral variation is analyzed in subdivided populations with differentiated demes.
Origin
From Greek dēmos 'people'; sense 2 is an extended use dating from the 1930s.