ANT333Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Sifaka, True Lemur, Null Hypothesis
Document Summary
Ant333 lecture #5 methodological issues in studying primate positional. Major goal of primate evolutionary biology is relate limb anatomy to aspects of locomotor or postural behavior. Data can be used to reconstruct behavior of extinct primates. Despite importance of above, relatively few quantitative studies of primate in wild. Most studies of primate positional behavior focused on platyrrhines and few cattarhine monkeys. Answers to these questions depend of what we want to ask of our data. Most studies are very descriptive, and seek only to provide data useful for explaining anatomical form. Id exact question(s) to be answered and clearly id relevant population, null hypothesis & alternative hypothesis: develop plan for collecting data. Plan should describe in detail conduct of an observational study or an experiment. It should be carefully designed so that collected data are representative of population in question: collect the data. Be careful to minimize errors leading to biased data: analyze the data and draw conclusions.
