Your point is a good one, but as a side issue, let
me object to the word "fudged." It implies
chicanery, which is not something that even Fisher
cared to imply. No one will ever know why Mendel's
results appear as they do, but It was not
necessarily with an intent to mislead. An argument
can be made, that his intent was to call attention
to the regularities involved just as one does by
showing a line on a plot instead of the scattered
points from which it is calculated. Attitudes
about data were different then. The scatter in
this sort of data is large, and quite confusing.
Look at the difficulties and puzzlements of the
three individuals who rediscovered the phenomenon
50 years later -- their data are very confusing,
and none of the three got it quite right until
they found Mendel's paper.
Rich Strauss wrote:
>
> In conjunction with the other comments that have already been made on this
> topic, I'd simply note that testing the left tail of a chi-square
> distribution in the case of a goodness-of-fit test is equivalent to testing
> whether the fit is "better" than expected. This was the basis a few years
> ago of the assertion that the results of Mendel's original genetic crosses
> were "too" good, and that he must have fudged the data to correspond more
> closely to his conceptual model of particulate genes and alleles (the basis
> of modern Mendelian genetics).
>
> Rich Strauss
>
> At 07:26 PM 2/5/01 +0900, you wrote:
> >hi, all.
> >
> >Isn't a chi-squre test inherently a 'one-sided sig. test'?
> >
> >I just read a paper claiming that it uses a 'one-sided' rather than
> >'two-sided' test. So it regards a chi-square value of 3.3 (df=1) is
> >significant at the level of 0.05. (As you all know, the critical value
> >of chi-square (df=1) at the alpha of 0.05 is 3.84.)
> >
> >I know this claim is simply errorneous. But I am just wondering
> >whether there can be any occasion one may use 'two-sided' test
> >with the chi-square distribution.
> >
> >Any comment will be a great help.
> >
> >Thanks in advance.
> >
> >June
>
> ========================
> Dr Richard E Strauss
> Biological Sciences
> Texas Tech University
> Lubbock TX 79409-3131
>
> Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (formerly [EMAIL PROTECTED])
> Phone: 806-742-2719
> Fax: 806-742-2963
> ========================
>
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