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Correlations can’t imply causation? Not so fast. A primer on causal networks
The old statistics axiom that correlation doesn’t imply causation is true, but causation can be drawn from more than one correlation. A clever and impressively efficient explainer, this short animation from MinutePhysics clears up a common maths misconception by showing how the concept of causal networks can be used to draw a straight line between correlations and causation via a process of elimination.
Video by MinutePhysics
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes