A major historical scandal in statistics was R. A. Fisher, an eminent founder of the field, insisting that no causal link had been established between smoking and lung cancer. “Correlation is not causation,” he testified to Congress. Perhaps smokers had a gene which both predisposed them to smoke and predisposed them to lung cancer. Or maybe Fisher’s being employed as a consultant for tobacco firms gave him a hidden motive to decide that the evidence already gathered was insufficient to come to a conclusion, and it was better to keep looking. Fisher was also a smoker himself, and died of colon
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