The paper introduces the Bradford-Hill criteria of causality and uses the example of links between smoking and lung cancer to describe how they operate (p. 362, right column). Describe how these criteria might explain links between other real-world phenomena of your choice, and give examples for the principles of temporality, specificity, dose response, physiological plausibility, and reversibility.
For example: "Eating a diet high in cholesterol causes heart disease: eating a high-cholesterol diet consistently precedes heart disease (temporality); the risk of heart disease increases specifically after eating a high-cholesterol diet but not after eating a low-cholesterol diet (specificity); the more cholesterol in one's diet the higher the risk of developing heart disease (dose-response); cholesterol leads to the buildup of fatty deposits in the circulatory system, leading to increased blood pressure and cardiac stress (physiological plausibility); the risk of heart disease drops precipitously when patients are switched from a high- to a low-cholesterol diet (reversibility).
