Wednesday January 24, 2007
Cause and effect
During the Christmas season, I spent ten days with our granddaughter Katherine. At two years and ten months old, her vocabulary has developed wondrously. We\’re told (and of course we are totally unbiased about this) that she converses at a four-year-old level.
But her mind still has difficulty connecting cause and effect.
I took her tobogganing, for example. She had a wonderful time hurtling down a little slope and out onto the ice of a small lake.
We slipped and slithered back up the slope, and did it all over again.
Of course, she got snow on her mittens. She tried to shake the snow off. All she managed to shake off was her mittens.
“Keep your mittens on, Katherine,” I cautioned. “Or your hands will get cold.”
“No they won\’t,” she told me, with the sublime confidence of almost three.
Of course, she slipped. And fell. And plunged bare hands deep into a drift of piercingly cold snow crystals. As the flakes melted on her skin like a thousand pin-pricks, she started to cry.
“See, that\’s what happens when you don\’t wear your mittens,” I told her.
“No,” she said.
“Yes it does.”
“Grampa, you don\’t know everything!”
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I could almost hear her two-year-old mind rationalizing: “There\’s no scientific proof that wearing mittens will prevent cold hands. It\’s all anecdotal evidence. Until someone can show me precisely how the act of not wearing mittens directly causes cold hands, I shall exercise my personal freedom of choice and continue to shake off my mittens.”
She didn\’t really think those words, of course. But that was the gist of the argument used by the big tobacco manufacturers for years to dismiss evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. They didn\’t want to believe it.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund responded the same way to growing evidence that their monetary policies – while perhaps applicable in wealthy capitalized economies – have had devastating effects in developing nations.
In an earlier century, Vatican officials applied the same thought process to Galileo\’s discoveries about the solar system. James MacLachlan\’s school text about Galileo describes how Galileo offered to set up a telescope at a Vatican window, so that the prelates could see for his discoveries for themselves. They replied loftily, “We do not need to see. We know.”
University of Toronto chemistry professor Scott Mabury still encounters the same mental process. He has been studying how perfluorocarboxylates (PFCAs) break down in the environment. I had never heard of PFCAs. But science writer Peter Calamai says they have been turning up everywhere, from human blood in Toronto to seals in the Arctic.
Mabury and his students have undergone vicious verbal attacks from the chemical industry, which, notes Calamai, “makes billions of dollars annually selling fluorinated polymers, the vast family of compounds that eventually transform into PFCAs by degradation…”
I wonder if some of us ever really get beyond a two-year-old level of reasoning, when we don\’t want to.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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