Inferring and Explaining

109 e 1 . Of the 771 men in the forty- to forty-nine- year age group, 29 percent showed some signs of coronary heart disease. e 2 . Of the 954women in the forty- to forty-nine- year age group, only 14 percent showed signs of coronary heart disease. t 0 . Coronary heart disease appears much more often in men than in women. t* 0. The biological makeup of males, their hormones, physiology, and DNA, causes an increased danger of coronary heart disease. But certainly, the possibility of a cultural expla- nation must be taken seriously, particularly since the data was collected at a time in our history when gender roles were much more pronounced. Perhaps something regarding the diferences in workforce stress between men and women accounts for the disparity in coro- nary heart disease. Or, perhaps, it’s a simple as diet and alcohol consumption. We are once again confronted with a serious rival explanation: t* 1. The culturally defned diferences in work and lifestyles between men and women cause the diferences in coronary heart disease. Or this may well be one of those times when the best explanation combines the features identi- fed in alternative explanations: t* 2. The biological makeup of males as well as the culturally defned diferences in lifestyles between men and women jointly cause an increased danger of coronary heart disease. I hope that it is obvious by now that I am not suggesting that statistical studies such as the Framingham study are too ambiguous to tell us anything important. Te message I take from this is that explaining statistical data can be a difcult task indeed and that carefully consid- ering alternative accounts of statistical correla- tions may suggest further studies that may need to be conducted before we can fully understand the causal connections between gender and cor- onary heart disease. CO 2 and Global Temperatures Consider the following data that played such a prominent role inAl Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . Mr. Goreused thesedataas evidence thatCO 2 con- centrations cause global temperature variations. CorrelatIons and Causes e 1 . There is a strong correlation between CO 2 levels and the Earth’s average temperature. fIgure 6. Temperature variation from present-day values (blue), atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (green), and dust (red) based on data from ice cores retrieved at the Vostok drilling site in Antarctica. Retrieved from Randy M. Russell , https://eo.ucar.edu/staf/rrussell/climate/ paleoclimate/ice_core_proxy_records.html.