Question About Syntax For Complex ANOVA Design

(apologies - I should have written coast * MBL not ML)

I'm not sure of my ground here, but surely do lose something - you wouldn't retain coast:MBL if it's not significant, as you lose degrees of freedom, and this gets worse the more terms and the more interactions you consider.

But if you drop the term you are effectively spending your degrees of
freedom twice - once to estimate the effect that you drop, and then
again in the new model.  Another way of to see the problem is to think
about the null distribution of the p-values - if you only include
significant p values in your model, the standard null hypothesis is
clearly not appropriate.

I think there's a good discussion of this in Frank Harrell's
regression modelling strategies, but unfortunately I don't have a copy
on hand to point you to the exact location.

Hadley

http://had.co.nz/