I'd like to thank the author of this article for bringing attention to the problem of inadequate statistics education. It is worth noting that the use of statistics in biology is currently in a state of crisis, such that there aren't hard and fast rules (except to be wary of relying on the P-value, and know what it really means). I worry that some of the errors made by biologists ( http://www.nature.com/new... ) are propagated in the references supplied in the "Helping Hand" article. In particular, the definition of P-value in the decision tree reference seems to be at odds with the Nature News link above.

With regards to normality testing in Biology, here is a very different perspective (see first answer):

http://stackoverflow.com/...