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Handbook of Biological Statistics (2014) (biostathandbook.com)
63 points by Tomte on July 29, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



They give the necessary advice then go on to ignore it in the very next section:

>'When there are multiple biological interpretations of a statistical result, you need to think of additional experiments to test the different possibilities.

[...]

You've fed chocolate to a bunch of female chickens (in birds, unlike mammals, the female parent determines the sex of the offspring), and you get 25 female chicks and 23 male chicks. Anyone would look at those numbers and see that they could easily result from chance; there would be no reason to reject the null hypothesis of a 1:1 ratio of females to males. If you got 47 females and 1 male, most people would look at those numbers and see that they would be extremely unlikely to happen due to luck, if the null hypothesis were true; you would reject the null hypothesis and conclude that chocolate really changed the sex ratio."

Nope, alternative statistical hypothesis != biological hypothesis.




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