Pretty much the title
In: 210
I guarantee the people in here arguing semantics are either philosophers (respect, philosophy is super important) or just giving their own opinion. They are not researchers.
In the of practice science, or at least in the biology research that I am familiar with, causation is established without a causal mechanism all the time. We use the terms **necessary** and **sufficient** to distinguish different types of causation.
To give an extremely common example (gazillions of studies have used this approach), if you delete a gene from an organism, and that organism loses a trait (simplifying here) compared to its unmodified kin, that gene was **necessary** to cause that trait. If you then put that gene in a related but different organism that lacks the trait, and it gains the trait, then that gene was also **sufficient** to cause that trait.
**Necessary but not sufficient** genes are the norm, **necessary and sufficient** genes are great to find because you are really getting to the root of things, and **sufficient but not necessary** genes occur when the organism has some redundancy built into its genome, which is not uncommon. In all three of these cases, the gene causes the trait in a different way.
But even after you have done all this, you still have no idea of the mechanism! It takes a lot more work to figure out what protein (or functional RNA) the gene codes for, and how that protein leads to the trait. This is much harder.
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