Fellow Ecologgers,
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the role of hypothesis testing
(both the statistical and falsificationist varieties) in biology in
general and ecology in particular. Before saying anything, I want to
ask the forum a few questions.
1. What do you think of the current
2011 SUMMER COURSES AND WORKSHOPS
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The Highlands Biological Station, an inter-institutional research center of
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Dear Jane,
That is a topic that have interested me for a long time. I teach
something of this in my classes to master students in wildlife
management and conservation here in Costa Rica. I know this is a
controversial issue.
First I recommend these 3 books:
Scientific Method for
Manuel Spínola mspinol...@gmail.com wrote:
There is no a superior approach to obtain scientific knowledge.
My dissertation advisor said on more than one occasion that, The scientific
method is doing whatever is necessary to get good answers to questions worth
asking. I don't think
* Spaces still available for this intensive hands-on workshop for working
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The Vancouver Aquarium has teamed with ScienceFilm to offer another week
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My experience:
During my dissertation proposal defense, I was surprised by this debate
coming up.
I had listed my hypotheses within a powerpoint presentation as more or less
statistical hypotheses rather than explanatory ecological hypotheses. As a
'green' PhD student, I was somewhat aware of the
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Unity College invites applications for a full time faculty position in wildlife
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I was delighted to read this. My background is physics, and I always
interpreted Einstein's comment that Nature is subtle but not malicious to
mean that we might have to be very devious in discovering her secrets.
Sticking to a rigorous scientific method and fussing about hypothesis
testing
This may seem like blatant self-promotion, but I think that the best synthesis
of the interplay between natural history, experimentation, and theory is Earl
Werner's chapter in our Experimental Ecology book from 1998 (Werner, E.E.
1998. Ecological experiments and a research program in
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I like Manuel's response.
To answer Jane's other questions:
1. Does it help you do better science?
It can, but not necessarily. See below.
Is it crowding out other approaches?
I'd like to hear more about this - what other systematic approaches are
there? For example, anecdotal observations are
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I'm not sure I understand Manuel's distinction between statistical
hypootheses and scientific hypothesis. Is not the former supposed in some
way to mathematically embody/parameterize the latter?
But in any case, it seems to me that it is often hard to rigorously
formulate a null
Dear Manuel,
Thanks for your reply! I'll have to look up the books you recommended.
On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Manuel Spínola mspinol...@gmail.com wrote:
Is necessary to distinguish between statistical and scientific hypothesis.
Statistical hypotheses is about patterns, scientific
ANNOUNCEMENT
THE LEPIDOPTERA COURSE 2011
Where and When: Southwestern Research Station (SWRS), Portal, Arizona, 14-22
August 2011.
Organizers: P.D. Hulce (Southwestern Research Station)
mailto:dhu...@amh.org ; Richard Zweifel and Jim Miller (American Museum of
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Dear Jane,
That is true (and very interesting), Popper didn't believe in inductive
reasoning as part of the scientific process, however, when you apply the
H-D method you can only corroborate the hypothesis, you cannot confirm
or prove logically an hypothesis, but you can logically reject the
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In honor of National Invasive Species Awareness Week (Feb. 28 - Mar. 4),
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Hi Martin,
If you state a scientific hypothesis you need to derive predictions from
it, and sometimes you can state the predictions as statistical
hypotheses, but not always, in fact, Karl Popper was not thinking on
statistics or statistical hypotheses.
As Malcolm McCallum said if you use
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