Generalism vs Generalist - What's the difference?
generalism | generalist |
Generalization: lack of specialization.
* 2006 January 17, Adam Nicolson, “
*2001 May 11, Mark E. J. Woolhouse et al."
A person with a broad general knowledge, especially one with more than superficial knowledge in several areas and the ability to combine ideas from diverse fields.
(medicine) A general practitioner.
(ecology) Species which can thrive in a wide variety of environmental conditions.
As nouns the difference between generalism and generalist
is that generalism is generalization: lack of specialization while generalist is a person with a broad general knowledge, especially one with more than superficial knowledge in several areas and the ability to combine ideas from diverse fields.generalism
English
Noun
(en noun)Where have all our hedgehogs gone?”, in The Guardian :
- What the biologists call the hedgehog's generalism , its lack of slick speciality, the way it noses for beetles, caterpillars, earwigs and worms, sometimes eating frogs, baby mice, eggs and chicks, its happy existence at the bottom of hedges and in people's back gardens, its inability to cope with very large, chemically denuded arable fields - in other words its fondness for the private, the scruffy and the marginal - all make it a measure of the state of the landscape's health as a whole.
Population Biology of Multihost Pathogens", in the journal Science V.292, Isuue 5519, pp.1109-1112
- Factors that predispose pathogens to generalism include high levels of genetic diversity and abundant opportunities for cross-species transmission, and the taxonomic distributions of generalists and specialists appear to reflect these factors.