A parsimonious view of the parsimony principle in ecology and evolution
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2019
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Resumo
The idea that simplicity of explanation is important in science is as old as science
itself. However, scientists often assume that parsimonious theories, hypothesis and
models are more plausible than complex ones, forgetting that there is no empirical
evidence to connect parsimony with credibility. The justification for the parsimony
principle is strongly dependent on philosophical and statistical inference. Parsimony
may have a true epistemic value in the evaluation of correlative and predictive models,
as simpler models are less prone to overfitting. However, when natural mechanisms are
explicitly modelled to represent the causes of biological phenomena, the application
of the parsimony principle to judge the plausibility of mechanistic models would
entail an unsupported belief that nature is simple. Here, we discuss the challenges
we face in justifying, measuring, and assessing the trade-off between simplicity and
complexity in ecological and evolutionary studies. We conclude that invoking the
parsimony principle in ecology and evolution is particularly important in modelbuilding
programs in which models are viewed primarily as an operational tool to
make predictions (an instrumentalist view) and in which data play a prominent role
in deciding the structure of the model. However, theoretical advances in ecology and
evolutionary biology may be derailed by the use of the parsimony principle to judge
explanatory mechanistic models that are designed to understand complex natural
phenomena. We advocate a parsimonious use of the parsimony principle.
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Parsimony principle, Mechanistic models, Statistical inference, Correlative models, Ockham’s razor
Citação
COELHO, Marco Túlio P.; DINIZ-FILHO, José Alexandre; RANGEL, Thiago F. A parsimonious view of the parsimony principle in ecology and evolution. Ecography, Nova Jersey, v. 42, p. 968-976, 2019.