the DNA found at the crime scene and the DNA in O.J.’s body did not match, indicating that someone other than O.J. committed the murder. The idea of the unreliability of cause and effect relationships is also introduced in this chapter. It stresses the importance of realizing the difference between cause and correlation and cause and effect. For example, children with big feet are correlated with high math scores among schoolchildren. This does not mean that kids with big feet have big brains and thus score higher on tests. A more likely cause would be that the children have the big feet because they are older, and score higher on math tests because they have had more years of math instruction than younger, small-footed children. This unclearness in the area of cause-and-effect can lead to questionable truths and court decisions. Though many causes can be correlated to an effect, few can be proven as a true cause.After reading the whole book, although I encountered many new ways of looking at things, there were only a few ideas that will probably affect me very much in the long run. One such concept is in the chapter about scale. It basically says that if we were much larger, we would collapse, due to physical laws of nature, and if we were much smaller, we would be unable to function, due to similar laws. This gave me the idea that everything is the size it is because it has to be. The scale of things on Earth is the only scale possible for Earth; just as the scale of things on other planets follow the physical laws of that planet. For instance, if people existed on Jupiter, they would have to be extremely large giants, due to the size of the planet. This is the only major change in thought I took away from this book, though it was filled with many interesting new ideas. ...
