False facts and false views: coalescent analysis

4 Darwin’s dictum on false facts and false views points the way to opening the 5 road to truth via cogent criticism of the published record. Here I discuss a case in 6 which a truncated dataset (false facts) is used for coalescent analysis of historical 7 demography that reaches a foregone conclusion of a bottleneck of numbers (false 8 views). 9 “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often en10 dure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for 11 everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is 12 done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same 13 time opened” (Darwin, 1871, p. 385). Darwin’s dictum is in full force and I apply 14 it here to a case where false facts have led to false views hoping to open the road 15 to truth. 16 Ólafsdóttir et al. (2014) studied demographic history of Atlantic cod, Gadus 17 morhua, at Iceland using mtDNA isolated from vertebrae from archaeological 18 sites. They compare their results to already published results from modern times 19 (citing Árnason, 2004). They notice a reduction in haplotype and nucleotide diver20 sity in modern times and use coalescent analysis to infer a bottleneck of numbers 21 at 1400–1500 and a marked reduction of effective population size, Ne, in mod22 ern times. They use Approximate Bayesian Computation, ABC, to model three 23 2 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/006445 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 20, 2014;