Relationships between hosts and host-associated microbial communities are complex, intimate, and associated with a wide variety of health and disease states. For these reasons, these relationships have raised many difficult questions and claims about microbiome causation. While philosophers and scientists alike have pondered the challenges of causal inference and offered postulates and rules, there are no simple solutions, especially with poorly characterized, putative causal factors such as microbiomes, ill-defined host effects, and inadequate experimental models. Recommendations are provided here for conceptual and experimental approaches regarding microbiome causal inference, and for a research agenda.

中文翻译：

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将微生物组视为人类健康和疾病的因果因素：哲学和实验考虑。

宿主和宿主相关微生物群落之间的关系是复杂、密切的，并且与多种健康和疾病状态相关。由于这些原因，这些关系引发了许多关于微生物组因果关系的难题和主张。虽然哲学家和科学家都在思考因果推理的挑战并提供假设和规则，但没有简单的解决方案，尤其是在微生物组、不明确的宿主效应和不充分的实验模型等缺乏表征、推定的因果因素的情况下。此处提供了有关微生物组因果推断的概念和实验方法以及研究议程的建议。