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Category Archives: methods
Easy as ABC
Determining the whens and hows of biological invasions using genetic data is a major goal of molecular ecology. One such tool is approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) which is being used for inferring invasion histories. In a new paper in Heredity, Benazzo et … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, methods, population genetics
Tagged ABC, invasion, microsatellites
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The death of the p-value? Probably not.
In February, a social psychology journal, Basic and Applied Social Psychology , made the bold (and extreme) move to ban the use of p-values, F-statistics, T-values, and any other form of Null Hypothesis Testing (NHT) method. This major move generated … Continue reading
Posted in methods, politics, science publishing
Tagged null hypothesis testing, p-value, statistics
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Coral conservation through assisted evolution
Coral reefs occupy a tiny portion of the world’s oceans (see map below) but their biodiversity is hugely disproportionate to their size. More than 450 million people from 109 countries live in close proximity to coral reefs and depend upon the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, conservation, evolution, methods
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Show me the power
Describing the patterns of genetic structure and mating system variation in presents challenges from the outset of sample collection to data analysis (see this post and this post). At the beginning of February, I had the pleasure to collaborate with Sean … Continue reading
Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, interview, methods, population genetics, software, Uncategorized
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The results are in for the journal selection survey
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about a recent paper by Salinas and Munch that presented a model-based method for determining to which journal an author should submit a manuscript for publication. I was curious to know how the readers … Continue reading
Posted in career, Impact Factors, methods, peer review, science publishing
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Genome-wide effects of artificial selection
Humans have been artificially selecting for favorable traits in crops, pets, and livestock over millennia. Years of theoretical predictions and experimental evolution studies have shown the detrimental effects of increased homozygosity, and the population-wide advantages of artificially maintaining heterozygosity. Two … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, methods, mutation, population genetics, theory
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Breaking free of the guide tree: two new species delimitation methods
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a new method to incorporate morphology and DNA sequences into species delimitation. Including both data types improved the results but a couple of tricky spots remained: 1) correctly assigning individuals to putative species and 2) estimating … Continue reading
Posted in methods, species delimitation
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Incorporating phenotype and genotype in model-based species delimitation
Species are the fundamental unit of biology but identifying them is a challenging task that receives a lot of theoretical and empirical attention. In a recent Evolution paper, Solís‐Lemus et al. (2015) introduce a new model-based method that integrates phenotypic and genetic data … Continue reading
Posted in methods, speciation, species delimitation, theory
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