I'm not overly familiar with this story, but it is easy to recast as a fight between the empiricist and the theoretician. To the empiricist, a man shows up with statistics showing a correlation, maybe even causality, and that's all you need. To the theoretician, if the man with the statistics says it's due to little green men that live in his head, the numbers aren't enough.

In hindsight, we can see that he was right and it doesn't matter why. But there are also plenty of other stories where acting too soon, before having a real, theoretical understanding of what's going on, would have been a lot more detrimental in the long run.