Or so you'll discover in a new book, Dressed To Kill. One of the authors has an undergraduate degree in biology and a master's degree in anthropology. The other, his wife, is an optician. A story like this surfaces somewhere or other in the national press every week or two. Fields from power lines kill children.
Breast implants cause arthritis.
Herbicides cause infertility. Microwave ovens send Audis diving down elevator shafts. But in many studies inquiring into the causes of cancer, few suspected links have proved out. These facts engage a simple formula for inference elucidated by an 18th-century English mathematician, Thomas Bayes. Consider a simple case.