Cause and Then, Effect? No, the Cause Can Actually Feed Back to the . . .Cause

Your kid takes your car and crashes it into a tree.  He's ok but the car is totaled.  Now what?  You take away the car keys.

Cause and effect.

But in many cases, the way we interpret cause and effect "fails to accurately describe reality," newswise.com reports.

Scientists led by Albert C. Yang, MD, PhD, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, introduced a new approach to causality that moves away from this temporally linear model of cause and effect, the web site explains.

“The reality in the real-world is that cause and effect are often reciprocal, as in the feedback loops seen in physiologic/endocrine pathways, neuronal regulation, ecosystems, and even the economy,” says Yang, a scientist in the Division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology, at newswise.com. “Our new causal method allows for mutual or two-way causation, in which the effect of a cause can feed back to the cause itself simultaneously.”

Causality is what connects one process with another process or state, where the first is partly responsible for the second, and the second is partly dependent on the first, as stated by Wikipedia.

Yang and colleagues’ new approach defines causality independently from time. "Their co-variation principle of cause and effect defines cause as that which, when present, the effect follows, and that which, when removed, the effect is removed," according to the web site. "The team demonstrates the new approach by applying it to predator and prey systems. Moreover, Yang and colleagues showed that their model can work well in systems where other causality methods cannot work."

Now give your kid back the car keys.