birds of the Tonlé Sap lake [jatp]

Nature snippets

Besides this remarkable picture of a fox and an eagle fighting for a rabbit, posted in Nature of 7 June, I noticed [in Nature 24 May] an editorial by Richard McEalreath, author of the remarkable Statistical Rethinking, about a paper by González-Forero & Gardner developing a model for brain vs body growth, incorporating social and ecological challenges. The goal was to fit the actual growth in body mass and brain mass. As in the one below.Without reading the supplementary material, I cannot tell how much statistics was involved in preventing the “best fit” to turn to overfitting. But Richard McEalreath points out that this modelling goes away and presumably beyond the “purely statistical”, including regression approaches, without elaborating more on the methodological aspects.