I have a very intelligent friend who is a light smoker, and also a Biology layperson.
I wondered whether understanding exactly how cigarettes smoke can cause cancer, might encourage him to smoke less (or quit entirely).
So how would you explain to a Biology layperson how cigarettes smoke might cause cancer?
To clarify, I am looking for a detailed explanation for a layperson, that makes the cause-and-effect much more vivid for them, and thus makes it much more likely that the intelligent layperson would internalize the risks of smoking.
Online resources that I found either gave a too simple answer or concentrated on statistics (which are usually hard for humans to internalize, if I understand correctly).
(Nothing wrong with such explanations, they are just not what I am looking for.)