The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Penguin Science)

by Judea Pearl

Ironically, the need for a theory of causation began to surface at the same time that statistics came into being. In fact, modern statistics hatched from the causal questions that Galton and Pearson asked about heredity and their ingenious attempts to answer them using cross-generational data. Unfortunately, they failed in this endeavor, and rather than pause to ask why, they declared those questions off limits and turned to developing a thriving, causality-free enterprise called statistics. This was a critical moment in the history of science. The opportunity to equip causal questions with a language of their own came very close to being realized but was squandered. In the following years, these questions were declared unscientific and went underground. Despite heroic efforts by the geneticist Sewall Wright (1889–1988), causal vocabulary was virtually prohibited for more than half a century.