Hassan Vally does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

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 ...

That’s a great headline. After all, the search engine’s algorithm placed it at the top of the list, and I clicked on it. Should pro-family politicians get concerned and divorce lawyers excited? Should ...

The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the ...

Quantum mechanics wreaks even more havoc with conventional ideas of causality than some have suspected – according to a team of researchers based in Australia, with collaborators in Scotland and ...

In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up. “Romeo wants Juliet ...

Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island ...