[Final, summary post.]
I thought I should post some notes about the responses to Andrea’s recent
postings. Several people seem to have extrapolated beyond what Andrea said.
After a few months of the Cardini, O’Higgins, Rohlf, and Bookstein
collaboration (Polly was CC:ed on the very early emails but I do not
remember him engaging), I suggested to Andrea that there should be two
publications not one. I could see that while writing about the same flaws
in the same method the approaches Fred and I were taking would be difficult
to combine in the same paper. Andrea and Paul agreed and Andrea then
suggested to Fred that he write a paper separate from ours. Thus, Fred did
not unilaterally jump ahead and just write his own paper as some seem to
have assumed. The understanding was that we expected the two papers to be
published together as “companion papers” in some journal yet to be
determined.
I know that Fred was concerned about the ethics of waiting a long time to
warn people that they were using a severely flawed (I would say strongly
biased) method. The usage of BG-PCA seems to have increased lately and it
did not seem fair to let people continue to write papers and dissertations
based on this method once we knew how bad it was. His biorxiv upload and
his announcement of it on morphmet were not a surprise to us. There were
emails exchanged about the need to warn users. At the time, Fred told me
that he needed to go ahead with the biorxiv upload as it was unclear how
long it would take our ms. to be completed due to other demands on our time.
Reading Fred’s papers can take time but if one just looks at his Fig. 1
(Google "biorxiv 627448" if you lost the link that Fred posted) you will
see the magnitude of the problem. It is not subtle! Incidentally, the
Cardini et al. draft also has a more extensive Figure illustrating the same
problem as a function of n but the rest of the paper is very different. In
fact, I found it interesting how two papers about the same defect in the
same method and reaching the same conclusion could have so little overlap.
Thus, Fred’s paper does not infringe on the content of the Cardini et al.
manuscript or interfere with its publication – in fact I think it makes it
more important as it will show the problem does not require an
understanding of an abstract theorem. I believe the Cardini et al. paper
will show that the defects in the method are very easy to understand and
obvious once you think about it in the right way.
F. James Rohlf, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus. Ecology & Evolution
Research Professor, Anthropology
Stony Brook University
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