It would be interesting to have this discussion after reading Don Strong's 1980 seminal paper "Null Hypotheses in Ecology" Synthese 43:271-285 . Although I use AIC in my own research (see Grossman et al. 2006 Ecol Monog.76:217), IMO Anderson, Johnson and others have thrown out the baby with the bath water when they state that null hypotheses are trivial in ecology. In fact, the whole neutral model approach in ecology really is based on null hypotheses, and it has been one of the most productive areas in ecology since the 80's (see the great book by Gotelli and Green, Null Models in Ecology). Prior to those conceptual advances we had "models" ( i.e. the competitionist model) and many investigators worked hard to twist their data to fit the "model" (really it could be argued that the development of neutral models were a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense). Frankly, frequentist, information-theoretic, and Bayesian approaches all have their place in ecology and we should just get over, trashing frequentist approaches. To twist a phrase "Statistics don't misuse data, People misuse data" <g>. Frankly, to suggest that information-theoretic approaches are less arbitrary because they don't use cut-off values is inappropriate, because cut off values are used for the interpretation of wi values and DeltaAIC values. Nonetheless, weight of evidence approaches are fantastic tools for ecology, but they are not the end-all and be-all for our field. There have been several back and forth exchanges in the literature over the last 5-6 years regarding these points so I won't belabor them here.
cheers, -- Gary D. Grossman Distinguished Research Professor - Animal Ecology Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA 30602 http://www.arches.uga.edu/~grossman Board of Editors - Animal Biodiversity and Conservation Editorial Board - Freshwater Biology Editorial Board - Ecology Freshwater Fish
