Fisher Challenges Smoking Cancer Link

In the 1950s, British polymath R. A. Fisher, often called the father of modern statistics, pushed back against emerging studies that linked cigarette smoking to cancer. He argued that correlation does not imply causation and used this line of reasoning to cast doubt on the new epidemiological evidence. His challenge became one of the earliest and most notorious uses of the “correlation does not imply causation” argument in modern science debates.

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