i understand correlation and causation (as a math person for decades) and the article talks of trying to establish correlation with experiments on e coli and introducing similar breaks.
Inserting the same break in the ribosomes of Escherichia coli bacteria made the engineered cells produce proteins with about twice their usual accuracy.
they then went looking at the divergence data between the various distantly related cephalopods and again said they again couldn't find a counterexample to the conjecture that the RNA break and higher intelligence are correlated, but not established causal, because both phenotype and genetics are individually correlated to the same timeframes. that doesn't mean they're correlated to each other, let alone causal, of course, in either direction.
Inserting the same break in the ribosomes of Escherichia coli bacteria made the engineered cells produce proteins with about twice their usual accuracy.
they then went looking at the divergence data between the various distantly related cephalopods and again said they again couldn't find a counterexample to the conjecture that the RNA break and higher intelligence are correlated, but not established causal, because both phenotype and genetics are individually correlated to the same timeframes. that doesn't mean they're correlated to each other, let alone causal, of course, in either direction.