Kelly C K
Department of Biological Sciences, P.O. Box 5218, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas 76203-5218, USA.
New Phytol. 1997 Jan;135(1):169-174. doi: 10.1046/j.1469-8137.1997.00599.x.
Re-analysis of data from Salisbury (1974) shows no significant relationship between seed size and habitat conditions, a relationship for which this paper is frequently cited as support. The discrepancy between the results reported here and those found in the original paper is due to Salisbury's 'evidence' being a table of congeneric pairs collected specifically because they possessed the target relationship. This paper emphasizes particularly the need for an unbiased sampling of species pairs in comparisons attempting to define ecological relationships. The analysis presented here represents the fourth such instance in which previously assumed robust examples of the relationship between seed size and habitat type are shown not to be so when the appropriate methods are used to account for relatedness among species.
对索尔兹伯里（1974年）数据的重新分析表明，种子大小与栖息地条件之间不存在显著关系，而本文经常被引用来支持这一关系。此处报告的结果与原始论文中的结果之间的差异，是由于索尔兹伯里的“证据”是一个同属配对表，专门收集这些配对是因为它们具有目标关系。本文特别强调，在试图定义生态关系的比较中，需要对物种对进行无偏抽样。此处呈现的分析是第四个这样的例子，即当使用适当方法来考虑物种间的相关性时，之前假定的种子大小与栖息地类型之间关系的有力例子并不成立。
