01
Association is not causation
Observational or correlational relationships should not be described as causal without appropriate perturbation, mediation, transfer, rescue, or dependency evidence.
Signature frameworkCausal reasoning
Evidence & Mechanism
Evidence & Mechanism is the methodological signature of the site: a framework for aligning the strength of a scientific claim with the strength and type of evidence supporting it.
Evidence pathway
From observation to stronger mechanistic inference.
- 01Observation
- 02Association
- 03Perturbation
- 04Dependency
- 05Rescue / Mediation
- 06Stronger mechanistic inference
02
Expression is not function
Changes in expression, abundance, or localization may support a mechanistic hypothesis but do not alone establish functional dependency.
03
Prediction is not validation
Network pharmacology, docking, molecular dynamics, enrichment analysis, computational target prediction, and multi-omics integration are hypothesis-generating or supportive unless experimentally validated.
04
Abundance change is not mediation
A change in a metabolite, microbial taxon, receptor, or pathway marker does not establish that it mediates the observed phenotype.
05
Experimental unit matters
Biological independence, replication structure, donor/animal/sample hierarchy, and pseudoreplication can determine whether an apparent effect is statistically interpretable.
06
Claims should scale with evidence
Language should distinguish association, modulation, involvement, dependency, necessity, sufficiency, rescue, and causation.
The goal is not to make every conclusion stronger. It is to make every conclusion proportionate to the evidence.