It is often easy to relate a particular thing to a certain cause by association, but it is very important in science to also understand causation; why a certain thing is caused by something else. If a ...

Most of us have heard the phrase “correlation does not equal causation”. But understanding how scientists move beyond identifying correlations to establish causation remains a mystery to many. Finding ...

IN THE mid-1990s, an algorithm trained on hospital admission data made a surprising prediction. It said that people who presented with pneumonia were more likely to survive if they also had asthma.

After reading Dalton Conley’s piece on recent developments in social-science research (“The Data in Your Lap: How to Interpret Naturally Occurring Experiments,” The Review, December 19), I can only ...

You often hear the admonition “correlation does not imply causation.” But what exactly is causation? Unlike correlation, which has a specific mathematical meaning, causation is a slippery concept that ...

The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. By Prof. Mario Bunge. Pp. xx + 380. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press ...

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