Word: causality
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Doctors and environmental officials plan to test Rutherford's air, water and soil, check out any radiation sources in the area and interview families of cancer victims to identify any factors that might reveal causal links between the various cases. But they candidly warned it was impossible to promise hard results. Studies of similar clusters, as such groupings of cases are called, have turned up no clear clues as to their causes...
...methods are questionable at best. No sociologist would try to apply his social theories to a rabbit warren or a nest of squirrels; by the same token, someone who has spent his life studying insects or baboons should not try to explain human phenomena--which is qualitatively different--by causal theories based on the observed motivations of non-human creatures. This is a question of academic imperialism...
...were faced squarely last week by Olympic Decathlon Medalist Bruce Tenner, who does commercials for the cereal and whose picture appears on the box. San Francisco District Attorney Joseph Freitas slapped General Mills with a truth-in-advertising suit, charging that Tenner's Wheaties ads falsely imply a causal connection between his taste in breakfast food and his athletic prowess...
...determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system... retrospectively (just as)... scientists can readily reconstruct the causal chain of adaptations that led from fish to birds. But what biologist looking at a primitive shark could have envisioned a pigeon...
...culture, the world is full of moralists insisting that they have freely willed what they were unwittingly forced to want... To change social life for the better one must begin with the knowledge of why it usually changes for the worst. That is why I consider ignorance of the causal factors in cultural evolution and disregard of the odds against a desired outcome to be a form of moral duplicity...