Volume 1, Issue 1 · September 2024
Fall 2024
7 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.
- 1
ExplainerScientific Practice
How to Read a Scientific Paper Without Pretending You Understood It
Reading primary research is the one skill this club exists to teach. Almost nobody gets taught it. Here is the handout we wish somebody had pushed across the table on day one: what each part of a paper does, why experienced readers go to the figures before the prose, how to check whether the statistics carry the conclusion, and what peer review promises in writing. Honesty demanded that we measure the thing we were d
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- 2
Original ResearchFall 2024
How Often Does a Good Gene Lose? Measuring the Reach of Genetic Drift
A mutation that makes its carrier one percent fitter still disappears almost every time it appears. We measured how often. The instrument was a Wright-Fisher simulation the club wrote and ran on a laptop, and no organism entered the study at any point, because here the computation is the experiment. Across a grid of eight selection coefficients ((s = 0) to (0.1)) and five population sizes ((N = 50) to (10{,}00
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- 3
Original ResearchFall 2024
A Population That Grows on Average Can Still Die Out
A population in which every individual leaves 1.15 offspring on average grows by 15 per cent a generation and can still go extinct by bad luck alone. We simulated a Galton-Watson branching process and a continuous-time birth-death process, 20,000 replicates per parameter cell, for starting sizes from 2 to 500 and five offspring distributions whose variance ranges from 1.15 to 33.2 with the mean held exactly fixed. Th
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- 4
Original ResearchFall 2024
Everything a Small Founding Group Loses on the Way
A founding group of two individuals carries 74.973% 0.048% of the source population's heterozygosity and 20.69% of its alleles. Both numbers come out of one run of one program. They are most of what this paper has to say. We simulated founder events by drawing (2k) gametes from a source population with a fixed and printed allele frequency spectrum, then grew the new population back to a carrying capacity of 1,000 u
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- 5
MethodsFall 2024
Absence of Evidence: How Many Surveys Before You Can Say a Species Is Gone
A survey that finds nothing has not proved anything. We built the detection half of a single-season occupancy model and asked the scheduling question underneath it: how long does a run of blank visits have to be before finding nothing counts as evidence of absence? With a constant per-visit detection probability (p), the probability that an occupied site produces (k) blanks is ((1-p)^k), so 95 percent confidenc
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- 6
MethodsFall 2024
How Many Samples Before Your Species Count Means Anything
A species count is always short. The four estimators everybody reaches for are supposed to tell you by how much, so we tested them against a truth we knew, because we built it: five community types, each holding exactly 100 species, sampled at ten levels of effort, 6,000 replicate communities per configuration, 300,000 simulated surveys in total. No organism was involved at any stage. On a mildly uneven community (lo
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- 7
Ecology
The Insect Decline Literature Disagrees With Itself, and We Wanted to Know How Badly
One German study reported a 76.7 percent fall in flying-insect biomass over 27 years [1]. A synthesis of 166 long-term surveys put terrestrial declines near 9 percent per decade while freshwater insects rose about 11 percent per decade, and an erratum later steepened the terrestrial figure [2, 3]. More than 5,300 American time series gave net trends indistinguishable from zero [6], which is a statement about time ser
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