Why and How We Should Join the Shift From Significance Testing to Estimation

Berner, Daniel; Amrhein, Valentin

doi:10.20944/preprints202112.0235.v2

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 58 publications

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“…But more importantly, publishing new methodologies will help accelerate research by making new tools accessible, and stimulate discussion of best practice. Our inaugural article by Berner and Amrhein (2022) is an excellent example of the latter, arguing in favour of parameter estimation as opposed to hypothesis testing in statistical analysis.…”

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confidence: 99%

An update on recent developments at JEB

Reuter

2022

J of Evolutionary Biology

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Having found my feet over the past months, I feel that it is time to provide you, the JEB readership, with an update on my vision and plans for the journal and some of the initiatives that I have been working on, together with JEB's Managing Editor Nicola (Nicki) Cook and the JEB editorial board.Overall, I see my mission as solidifying and growing the journal's reputation as an attractive outlet for quality research in evolutionary biology. We are starting from a good position, JEB is seen as a solid journal and we have a history of publishing important contributions to the field. Furthermore, there is a growing recognition among evolutionary biologists that publishing in society journals like JEB is the right thing to do, keeping funds within the community. But we are operating in an environment of growing competition-from new society journals, from commercial outfits that offer more glamour, but also from innovative and exciting new approaches to free and open scientific publishing. As a consequence, JEB and many other traditional journals in the field have seen a decline in submissions and published papers over recent years that we need to counter.My main focus of attention as Editor-in-Chief will therefore be to maintain and further grow the quality and long-term impact of articles published in JEB. This is paramount, as it underlies the reputation of our journal and the relevance of our published work for the evolutionary research community. Growing the quality and impact of JEB's output is a lofty goal, and there isn't an easy way of achieving it-certainly not quickly. But with the day-to-day help of Nicki and the support of the ESEB steering committee, we have been and are working on a range of initiatives that we believe will benefit the journal. Some of these reflect recommendations made by the JEB Advisory Group, a panel convened by ESEB that reported back last year, others are devised internally. I describe the most important changes and initiatives below.

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confidence: 99%

An update on recent developments at JEB

Reuter

2022

J of Evolutionary Biology

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Reduced social function in experimentally evolvedDictyostelium discoideumimplies selection for social conflict in nature

Larsen,

Jahan,

Brock

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Many microbes interact with one another, but the difficulty of directly observing these interactions in nature makes interpreting their adaptive value complicated. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum forms aggregates wherein some cells are sacrificed for the benefit of others. Within chimeric aggregates containing multiple unrelated lineages, cheaters can gain an advantage by undercontributing, but the extent to which wild D. discoideum has adapted to cheat is not fully clear. In this study, we experimentally evolved D. discoideum in an environment where there were no selective pressures to cheat or resist cheating in chimeras. D. discoideum lines grown in this environment evolved reduced competitiveness within chimeric aggregates and reduced ability to migrate during the slug stage. By contrast, we did not observe a reduction in cell number, a trait for which selection was not relaxed. The observed loss of traits that our laboratory conditions had made irrelevant suggests that these traits were adaptations driven and maintained by selective pressures D. discoideum faces in its natural environment. Our results suggest that D. discoideum faces social conflict in nature, and illustrate a general approach that could be applied to searching for social or non-social adaptations in other microbes.

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