Well, there is evidence for variation in personality traits depending on the season of birth (check here for a quickly googled up study), but that doesn’t actually lend any credence to astrology (which is thoroughly debunked by the realization that star signs, drawn up quite a while ago, are by now out of whack by something like a month due to the precession of the equinoxes, so the sun was actually nowhere near the sign you’re said to have been born under when you were born) – though of course it does link one star’s influence to personality traits, namely that of the sun, being what creates seasons and the associated changes in nature and thereby, in biology. Specifically, what appears to have been somewhat consistently found are differences in levels of monoamine neurotransmitters, a group which includes, for instance, serotonin, which is known to play an important role in the regulation of mood, anger, and aggression.
He was probably mistaken. His results aren’t replicated. I don’t know about cherry picking etc.
Though if you believe this:
http://www.skepsis.nl/mars.html
He was probably deliberately distorting results.
I have always thought a better group to analyze would be the CEO’s of the Fortune 500.
In my high school physics class, we calculated the gravitational effect in play if all 7 outer planets were aligned with the Earth. We then calculated the gravitational effect of the pediatric doctor in a delivery room.
Guess which was larger?
That’s not what astrology does. Astrologers don’t ask when in the sunspot cycle a person was born. They look at the position of the sun and planets in the zodiac. The sunspot cycle has an average length of 11 years. No planet returns to the same place in the zodiac every 11 years, so there’s nothing in what astrologers look at that would correspond to the sunspot cycle. What’s more, the sunspot cycle varies in length, which the orbits of the planets don’t.
If the sunspot cycle does affect people’s brains, the effects wouldn’t be correlated with anything that is going to appear in a horoscope.
The article I read implied that there was some sort of field generated by the sun that was affected by the positions of the planets, somewhat alike two stones being dropped into a pond and their ripples interacting.
Yes, that’s called gravity. The sun’s mass bends space-time and that affects the other planets, just as their mass affects the sun, albeit to a much tinier amount.
Nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation or their relatives positions at any time in your life.
perhaps conjoined twins who were separated when they were a year or so old? usually conjoined twins are born at the same moment by cesarian.
Ivan, I guess your references make my point for me? One article? Gauquelin’s lone research? After centuries of opportunity and actual research? Is this what the pattern of research findings would be expected to look like if there was something in this?
There is a tendency to privilege “new” work in the rhetoric of supporters of woo-woo. As in, “A new study now shows…”, as if to imply that all of history to this point lived benighted in error, the new work said “Let there be light” and all those who support the idea reign forever in the kingdom of the righteous.
Sometimes, new work can radically alter thinking in a particular subject, particularly at the edge of knowledge in a new field.
The problem here is that we are not at the leading edge of a new field. We are not confirming the existence of the Higgs boson against a background of enormously well-established work over decades in particle physics, set against competing guesses as to what is just out of view.
We are still bogged down in the most basic question - does astrology work? Any new work on this basic question has to compete with all the old work done on the same basic question showing it doesn’t work.
How many of you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers? He has several examples where success and birth month are heavily correlated. Happily, there’s a common sense reason why that has nothing do with astrology.