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>"I think even Fisher would be convinced [1]." I doubt it, he would probably say no progress has been made at all: "Many would still fell, as I did about five years ago, that a good prima facie case had been made for further investigation. None think that the matter is already settled. The further investigation seems, however, to have degenerated into the making of more confident exclamations, with the studied avoidance of the discussion of those alternative explanations of the facts which still await exclusion. [...] the B.B.C. gave me the opportunity of putting forward examples of the two classes of alternative theories which any statistical association, observed without the predictions of a definite experiment, allows—namely, (1) that the supposed effect is really the cause, or in this case that incipient cancer, or a pre-cancerous condition with chronic inflammation, is a factor in inducing the smoking of cigarettes, or (2) that cigarette smoking and lung cancer, though not mutually causative, are both influenced by a common cause, in this case the individual genotype."
https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher269.pdf The current paper:
"Although we cannot exclude roles for covariate behaviors of smokers or differences in the biology of cancers arising in smokers compared with nonsmokers, smoking itself is most plausibly the cause of these differences."
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aag0299 |