Maybe this is an oversimplification, and I readily admit to being in
a fog about the long list of "conceptual advances" (however
useful--in their fashion), but isn't the point of all of them to
strain, without mercy, the biases out of hypotheses and let the light
of reality shine through, no matter what the result?
WT
At 10:16 AM 2/21/2008, Gary Grossman wrote:
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
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