Well, no. Science can’t “prove” anything. All it can do look at evidence for something, and then disprove the alternative explanations for the evidence. We believe that car crashes cause broken bones because the evidence suggests that, and the alternatives such as evil spirits don’t stack up.
Nobody has ever proved a causal relationship between car crashes and broken bones. I doubt if anyone has ever even tried to investigate. All we know is that when people get involved in car crashes they often get broken bones, car crashes involve large impact forces, and bones can be broken by large impact forces. We combine those three observations and come up with the conclusion: car crashes cause broken bones.
And exactly the same applies to cancer and smoking. We know that smokers often get cancer. We know that smoke contains a range of carcinogens, and when know that when cells are exposed to carcinogens, they often become cancerous. We combine those three observations and come up with the conclusion: smoking causes cancer.
Neither conclusion has a “proven” causative relationship. Science doesn’t work that way.
Definitely not. If we take a bunch of pregnant mice, feed half of them alcohol, and observe increased birth defects in the alcohol group compared to the control group, we can infer causality even if we don’t understand the mechanism.
You can take credit for indirectly causing a win with this. I was getting a headache looking for peered review papers on the topic, veered off on another direction, ended up here: Probabilisitic Causation. I can’t argue against using that definition in this case.
No. You have very fundamental misconceptions about the nature and logic of causality. Here is a primer (I was going to send you to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy rather than Wikipedia, as it would be more reliable, but everything they have seems to be far more advanced, and to take that basic level of understanding of causation for granted).
As I previously stated, there is no single cause of anything. Any particular event had indefinitely many causes, and many types of events have many types of causes. THE cause of lung cancer will never be known because there is no such, unique thing. On the other hand, it is among the most firmly established of scientific facts that smoking is a cause of lung cancer. Many other things may be causes of it too, some together with smoking and some quite independently of it.
No such facts are established. And if you choose to call the Big Bang the cause of all things then there’s no point in discussing such matters with you.
Those Americans who regularly eat McDonalds Happy meals have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease than those that don’t.
Another interesting finding that came up in an analysis I was doing a while ago found that smokers had a better chance of surviving a heart attack than non-smokers. This was probably due to the fact that smoking caused heart attacks in a healthier group of people, while non-smokers would be less healthy when they had the heart attack.
Nice. How about this one: Americans whose first name ends with a vowel are signficantly shorter than Americans whose first name does not end with a vowel
Not to speak for njtt, but that misstates his position. You are correct that if we take such a loose definition of “cause” that the Big Bang did cause everything.
As was said earlier, most disciplines whether that be law, science, or otherwise use “proximate cause.” Generally speaking that means a cause which, without a new intervening or efficient cause, is linked to the harm.
So let’s say that we hypothesize that cars cause lung cancer because most smokers drive to the store in cars, buy cigarettes, smoke them, cause the virus that you spoke of, and get lung cancer. That breaks down because the step between cars and buying cigarettes creates a new cause that breaks the previous string: buying cigarettes. Driving the car to the store doesn’t necessitate or directly lead to buying cigarettes.
However, smoking cigarettes directly leads to the virus which directly causes the lung cancer. It’s an unbroken string with no intervening cause.
I haven’t read it in a while, but The Chain of Chance, the detective/science-philosophy novel by Stanislaw Lem, explores causation quite entertainingly.
I used to read a magazine called “Iron Mind”* that covered a bunch of different strength sports. I ended my subscription after reading an article in which an entirely serious author wrote about how he noticed that shortly after he started hearing birds singing in the morning, plants started to grow. His conclusion was that birdsong made plants grow. If I remember correctly, he then concluded that it was the vibrations in the birdsong that made the plants grow, therefore vibrations were good for strength, therefore you could make your muscles grow through being exposed to certain types of vibrations, i.e. birdsong. It was my favorite article of all time, just for the way the guy started out so absurdly wrong and just kept digging.
I think it was the same author who noticed that his athletes who walked with their toes pointed out were worse athletes that those who walked with their toes pointing forward. The guy was apparently a high school strength coach, because if I remember correctly he had his players practice walking with their toes pointed forward, in order that they could become better athletes. (The more likely chain of causation is that excess fat causes you to walk with your feet pointing outward, which makes you slower on the field. Practing walking with your toes pointing forward won’t help you at all.)
I used to read old weight training books. In one of them the author proudly recalled how his secretary had asked him for advice on how to lose weight. This guy went around studying all the secretaries and noticed that the thin ones sat more upright compared to the fat ones. He then recommended to his secretary that she sit more upright, and if she did this she would lose weight. What I loved most about that whole story was that the guy was so proud of his analysis and conclusion that he made it an entire chapter of his book, and that no one in the entire publishing chain from the writer to the editor to the proofreader to the librarian who put the book on the shelves noticed any problems with any of it.
I’m thinking this is circular. The claim (of which I’m skeptical) is “smoking is not part of a causal chain that disproportionately leads to lung cancer.” To rebut this with “cigarette smoke contains carcinogens” seems to me like assuming the conclusion.
Not at all. There are substances that are known a priori to be carcinogens, and they are found to be in cigarette smoke. The conclusion that they are carcinogens does not follow from an assumption that cigarette smoke causes cancer.
It would be like saying that drunk driving does not cause death by pointing out the fact that your Uncle Fred drives drunk 4 times a week and hasn’t killed anyone. The exceptions don’t always prove the rule.
My favorite, twenty years ago, was the expert who said “Since Canada implemented UHC, 90% of Canadians have moved to within 100 miles [160km] of the US border.” Not exactly in the actual realm of the original question, but breathtakingly deceitful.
Actually, no need to guess. I’ll provide a cite from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institute of Heath. If you have anything different, bring it on. and let’s skip silly websites, OK?
I’m loving the course on logic and causation unfolding here. However, as to the OP, a classic is this: Roosters crow before sunrise. Therefore, roosters cause the sun to rise.
Or is this a different but related case? - the post hoc fallacy.
It’s similar. If you correlated the times that roosters crowed with the time the sun came up after taking lots of data, you could correlate the two, but not prove that one causes the other.
In this thread so far, have we made an explicit distinction between correlations that are just happenstance (that is, you measured two seemingly-unrelated variables from 1980 to 1990 and found a high correlation, but it appears to be totally coincidental and not repeatable), versus systematic correlations that are related by a common cause and are thus reliably repeatable (like the ice cream / snakebite thing)?