Beyond Bonferroni Revisited: Concerns over inflated false positives in conservation genetics, genetics, and neuroscience

In 2006, Narum published a paper in Conservation Genetics that was motivated by the stringent nature of the Bonferroni approach for family wise error correction. That work suggested that the approach of Benjamini and Yekutieli in 2001 provided adequate correction and was more biologically relevant. However, there are crucial differences between the original Benjamini and Yekutieli procedure and that described by Narum. After carefully reviewing both papers, we believe that the Narum procedure is both different than the Benjamini and Yekutieli procedure and does not adequately control for family wise error. We provide an overview of approaches for FWE correction as well as evidence for the faulty implementation of the Benjamini and Yekutieli procedure by Narum using the equations from the respective papers, data from both papers, and the results of simulation.