Title: On the use and abuse of Price equation concepts in ecology,
Abstract: In biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) research, the Loreau-Hector
(LH) statistical scheme is widely-used to partition the effect of biodiversity
on ecosystem properties into a "complementarity effect" and a "selection
effect". This selection effect was originally considered analogous to the
selection term in the Price equation from evolutionary biology. However, a key
paper published over thirteen years ago challenged this interpretation by
devising a new tripartite partitioning scheme that purportedly quantified the
role of selection in biodiversity experiments more accurately. This tripartite
method, as well as its recent spatiotemporal extension, were both developed as
an attempt to apply the Price equation in a BEF context. Here, we demonstrate
that the derivation of this tripartite method, as well as its spatiotemporal
extension, involve a set of incoherent and nonsensical mathematical arguments
driven largely by naïve visual analogies with the original Price equation,
that result in neither partitioning scheme quantifying any real property in the
natural world. Furthermore, we show that Loreau and Hector's original selection
effect always represented a true analog of the original Price selection term,
making the tripartite partitioning scheme a nonsensical solution to a
non-existent problem [...]