I have an honest, intelligent disagreement with the answer regarding whether astrology is real. The science hasn’t been done, so how can it have been disproven? I believe it is a matter of physics, but has anyone considered that science is not sophisticated enough to test astrology or cannot handle the right-brained aspects of science that work, but cannot be explained?
For example, each planet gives off a magnetic field. Supposedly, the fields are far too weak to affect humans on earth. But is that really true? Nature often seems to defy science’s current assumptions. I don’t have a problem with modern science, but it shouldn’t dismiss what it can’t currently comprehend.
This is false. Venus and Mars both have no or negligible magnetic fields. Mercury, the nearest planet with a global magnetic field, has a field of just over 1% the strength of Earth’s, and it’s more than 55 million miles away at its closest approach. Since the B-field’s strength drops off with the cube of the distance, the effect of mercury’s magnetism on Earthbound objects is thousands of orders of magnitude smaller than any local field. Someone down the street with a cell phone is exposing you to a stronger field than Mercury is.
I think a rough form of astrology is almost certainly true, and has no (causal) connection whatsoever to the position of the planets. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a well-known condition that causes personality changes in individuals based on seasonal factors such as the amount of daylight. Brain development in infants progresses through a series of “developmental windows” that are highly impacted by timing. Combine these two factors, and you have a developmental impact on personality development that’s directly related to the time of year a person is born.
There are numerous other factors that could come into play as well, including diet, social events (e.g. holidays) and the fact that people in temperate climates spend more time outdoors in warmer months, etc. Societal norms can affect personality as well, since children born in the autumn months will tend to be the oldest kids in their class at school (vs. those born in the spring or summer, who will be the youngest in their class) and so forth.
There are a LOT of factors that can (and almost surely do) impact personality, none of which have anything to do with the position of celestial bodies except as a proxy for more mundane seasonal variations. These factors probably had a lot more impact in older times (especially things like seasonal availability of various foods in the diet) and probably contributed to the development of astrology.
To my knowledge, no scientific study has ever been conducted to test the impact of these factors – INCLUDING the meta-studies often cited as a refutation of traditional astrology. All the studies I’ve ever seen have involved more specific claims that are too fine-grained to take into consideration broader seasonal changes, or which are too focused on subjective interpretations of personality rather than the more concrete things we can measure.
Of course, as soon as you even mention scientific testing of astrology, most science-minded people shut off immediately and won’t bother listening to the rest of what I think is a pretty solid argument.
Unfortunately for this theory, people born under a particular sign in the northern hemisphere would have a different SAD effect on them than those born at the same time in the southern hemisphere. So a Naries would be entirely different to a Saries, yet horoscopes don’t differentiate.
Furthermore there is virtually no effect like this between the two Tropics, and again horoscopes fail to note this.
I’m really tired so I am only going to pull out one example BASED on my experience:
Remember the big thing in the night sky made out of cheese? Yup, that one… the MOON. There really is a “man” or three (well, it would just be cruel to make him stay there all by himself) that shoot beams to many people, effecting there moods (or turning them into werewolves). These effected people, mainly from the water-element signs or those that have a large number of water signs showing in their chart.
The Moon affects waves of the ocean - yes? So why couldnt it affect (some) people?
Several years back a friend of mine confessed to me that the reason he knew what mood I was in before talking w/me is because he kept a farmer’s almanac, marking my moods and he found a pattern consistant with the phase of the moon. My friend doesnt dabble in astrology. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. I am very much a water sign.
I believe there is something to Astrology; we lack the master key to unlock its doors.
P.S. - Cecil doesn’t just say that it’s implausible. And, by the way, it’s up to the astrologers to prove that it DOES work, not up to others to prove it doesn’t. You say you’ve got an anti-gravity machine? Prove it. I don’t have to disprove your statement, you have to prove it.
However, Cecil does say:
He doesn’t actually site the studies, his column space is too limited, but there’s plenty of 'em.
In any case, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, econodude, glad to have you here.
I came here to link to that exact study. It studies “time twins” (people who were born at the same time) and tests whether astrology correctly predicts their character traits, etc. (which it doesn’t). So you can’t say “the science hasn’t been done”–it has, and astrology failed. Any defender of astrology should read that study, so they can at least say that they know what the arguments are.
But people born on the same day in different hemispheres would be exposed to opposite seasons. So astrology would have to have two opposite inferences depending on which hemisphere in which you born.
The Moon affects tides only because of its gravitational pull. Its effect on you and me is just to make us a tiny fraction lighter or heavier depending on where it is relative to your position. So small a difference as to be undetectable. The effect on the ocean is much more noticeable just because there’s a lot more of it, and it’s fluid. Meanwhile the Earth has a much stronger gravitational pull than the Moon by being a lot closer and a lot bigger. It would further drown out the effect of the Moon’s pull.
I’ll try to put this delicately… the Moon’s cycle of phases lasts just about a month.
Yes, planets - and stars - have magnetic fields. But they are so incredibly distant that the magnetic field generated by, say, your television will have more of an effect on you.
Although… perhaps that explains why we’re so screwed up these days?
I don’t wear makeup, so I don’t subscribe and post to message boards about cosmetics. Why do people subscribe to this board and yet be so uninterested in fighting ignorance?
It’s hard to imagine anything for which there is less evidence than Astrology.
I did my own test study on 2 of my water friends with 4 or more planets in a water sign in their charts, and 2 friends of another sign with little water in their chart (one was significantly water-deficiant). My water friends were in line w/my own moods and the other 2 - one an Aries, one Leo (both fire signs) had simular moods to eachother but in different degrees. I used a mood calender often used to track the highs and lows of bi-polar disorder.
Hate to spoil a joke, but since we aim for dissemination of knowledge, thought I’d point out that there’s no evidence for anything more than a coincidental rough correlation between the length of a Lunar month (about 29 and a half days from New Moon to New Moon) and the length of a woman’s menstrual cycle (with a normal range from maybe 21 to 35 days).
Not that it matters, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the charts you looked at didn’t even have the planets in the right part of the sky for the dates given. I used to read an astrology column that regularly stated that, say, Mars was in a constellation it simply wasn’t in, a fact that could have been confirmed by consulting an almanac or just going outside at night and looking for the red dot. And newspaper daily horoscopes typically use “Sun signs” based on the sky of 2,000 years ago.
The tidal force exerted on you by the Moon is insignificant compared to the tidal force you experience from everyday nearby ojects–cars, other people, your desk, etc. It’d be like trying to hear a mosquito next to a jet engine with full afterburners.
The issue isn’t whether the entire concept of astrology is flawed. The issue isn’t whether the field of astrologers is full of phonies and frauds. The issue isn’t even whether my aunt’s hairdresser’s son–who’s a taurus–is the most stubborn person on the planet.
The issue is that there has never been one statistically-meaningful study that validates any facet of astrology. In however many hundreds of years people have been following this, not one person has been able to prove it works even at the most trivial level.
We’re here to fight ignorance. Astrology is the living, reeking, staggering personification of ignorance. Let’s do our best to stamp it out.
As my lawyer friends would say, “Asked and answered. Move on.”
If only. Unfortunately, we have right here in this very thread clear evidence than at least some apparently intelligent and well-educated Dopers still cling to the fiction of astrology. It boggles the mind.
