419 The case for and against astrology

One hobby of mine is skepticism ... and yesterday I delved right into a discussion with friends where I argued the case against astrology, making my point yet again that astrology is un-scientific and belief in it irrational. Like with all beliefs, it is very difficult - if not impossible - to sway believers, which turned out the case here too ... so, if you believe in astrology it is likely you will stop reading soon, since all of us are inclined to read what confirms our beliefs and ignore counter-arguments; but should you read to the end, I'd like to hear from you, tell me what you think about this blog. Anyway, I was offered a ‘reading’, but declined, saying if it was specific, I would be annoyed and if it was vague I would be annoyed too … a no-win situation.

Rationalists believe that astrology should not exist because it is not only baseless, but also harmful. “Astrology can lead to irrational decisions, postponement of a necessary action; furthermore, it can lead to actions that may be damaging ...”

From: The Scientific Case against Astrology (below)

So there ... no astrological readings for me.

Astrology is the study of relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on

human affairs and the natural world. Ancient observers of the heavens developed elaborate systems of explanation based on the movements of the sun, moon, and planets through the constellations of the zodiac, for predicting events and casting horoscopes. By 1700 astrology had lost intellectual credibility in the West.

After our talk I did some research, Wikipedia says: Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity, and as such, is regarded as pseudoscience. There is no proposed mechanism of action by which the positions and motions of stars and planets could affect people and events on Earth that does not contradict well understood, basic aspects of biology and physics.

Astrology, in its traditional form, is a type of divination based on the theory that the positions and movements of celestial bodies (stars, planets [except the one you are born on or those in other solar systems], Sun, and Moon) at the time of birth profoundly influence a person's life. The most pertinent critique of astrology is the twins objection - that with close birth times, personal outcomes can be very different - which was first stated by Cicero ... as early as 100BC.

Some forms of astrology claim terrestrial events such as natural disasters are predicted by various celestial arrangements or events. Given the innumerable relationships of celestial items, it would be surprising if one could not find some correlation between earthly events like tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, fires, etc., and an arrangement of planets in relation to the Sun or Moon. Correlation does not prove causality, but it is good enough for many astrologers. A classic example of this kind of reasoning was when a full solar eclipse viewable from China in July 2009 was followed by reports of earthquakes in Japan the next month, an astrologer asked: "Do you still think it is just a coincidence?" Indeed, yes, it’s called the post hoc falacy (the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs.)

In its psychological form, astrology is a type of New Age therapy used for self-understanding and personality analysis; in all forms, astrology is a manifestation of magical thinking. I think astrology has no relevance to understanding ourselves or our place in the cosmos. Modern advocates of astrology cannot account for the underlying basis of astrological associations with terrestrial affairs, have no plausible explanation for its claims, and have not contributed anything of cognitive value to any field of the social sciences (after an article in The Skeptic’s Dictionary)

I agree there are positives to astrology (as there are to religion and other beliefs):

The case for astrology (from astrology and science):

The case for astrology is that it is among the most enduring of human beliefs, it connects us with the cosmos and the totality of things, it provides a basic means of describing ourselves, and there is a wide range of approaches. In practical terms a warm and sympathetic astrologer provides low-cost non-threatening therapy that is otherwise hard to come by. You get emotional comfort, spiritual support, and interesting ideas to stimulate self-examination. And new ideas are always emerging that could raise spiritual awareness. In a dehumanised society an astrologer provides personal support at a very low price. Where else can you get this sort of thing these days? Much the same applies to sun sign astrology but at a more basic level -- and many people seem to want it. Or as historian and social critic Theodore Roszak says in his book Why Astrology Endures (Briggs, San Francisco 1980): "For a growing number of people, the rich imagery of these old traditions has become a more inspirational way of talking [about ourselves] ... than conventional psychiatry. The astrological universe is, after all, the universe of Greco-Roman myth, of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake. It has poetry and philosophy built into it."

The case against astrology:

The case against astrology is that it is untrue. It has not contributed to human knowledge, it claims the prestige of science without the methods of science, importantly, it has failed hundreds of tests*. It does not deliver benefits beyond those produced by non-astrological factors (hidden persuaders), and users do not usefully agree on basics such as which zodiac to use or even on what a given birth chart indicates. No hint of these problems will be found in astrology books, which is why some scientists see astrologers as misguided or even fraudulent. In fact, astrologers are mostly nice people who genuinely wish to help others. But the claim that astrologers repeatedly make (astrology is true because based on experience) is simply mistaken - what they see as its strength (experience) is actually its weakness (the experience is not assessed using switched data). They show little awareness of the factors such as the absence of accurate feedback that prevent learning from experience, or of the numerous hidden persuaders that give the illusion of such learning in its absence. Astrologers also show little interest in procedures that avoid the weaknesses of experience, and every interest in ignoring unwelcome evidence. Together these attitudes have created a case against that is longer and stronger than the case for.

* moreover, it has failed 100% of all scientific tests! Skeptics - like myself - would like to have just one scientific test that proves the veracity of astrology pointed out; yet, whenever astrologers are invited to be tested scientifically, they decline.

I remembered an article I had read a while ago, making the scientific case against astrology. It goes like this:

The Scientific Case against Astrology

Long before Rudolf Smit became a turncoat, and was still a believer in the predictive powers of astrology, having even set up a professional association of astrologers in Holland, he had a meeting with a client whom he names Ms Johnson. He was reading what the stars had in store for her. It was a good reading, and she was often interrupting him to exclaim how right he was. At one point, Smit said something along the lines of, “Well, Ms Johnson we…’ when she interjected, “Sorry, my name is Petersen, not Johnson.” It wouldn’t have mattered too much, except that the horoscope that Smit had before him was Johnson’s. He was reading the wrong person and she had been in wholehearted agreement with him. Being a man of integrity, the question bothered him: how could he have made a correct reading with the wrong person’s charts?

This was not the only thing about his chosen profession that disturbed Smit. Around that time, the late 1970s, the first home computers made their appearance. Using a software developed by a friend, Smit began to test out assertions made in astrological text books. Smit recounted his experience in an article: "For example, I tested the statement that in the charts of people who had died an accidental death, there would be a remarkable incidence of Progressed Ascendant to Mars, or of Progressed Mars to the Ascendant. Sure, there were a few (but the word says it all: a few), hence not an overwhelming number which could confirm the textbook statement." His faith was being tested, but it would take some more years before he finally understood how he had been deluded.

The world of astrology is a trisect - there are believers, there are non-believers and then there are those who really don’t care until they are asked to marry a tree before their marriage to a human and do so without flinching. Dr Jayant Narlikar, India’s most famous astrophysicist, is squarely in the second category. In 2008, he decided to put his non-belief to scientific test. It was not an original idea. He was aware of a test conducted by Bernie Silverman, a US doctoral student, published way back in 1971. Silverman had taken the horoscopes of 2,978 happily married couples and 478 divorced or separated couples. The horoscopes of the couples were cast and two astrologers were asked to decide whether they were compatible. When astrological compatibility was compared with real life compatibility, it didn’t match. “I wanted to have a similar work under similar conditions,” says Narlikar.

But Narlikar and his co-researchers couldn’t replicate Silverman’s test for two reasons: India didn’t have as many broken marriages as the United States and the experiment needed a large number of couples. So they decided to test another claim of astrology - the prediction of a person’s mental capabilities.

In 2008, volunteers of a Satara-based rationalists’ association, Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti, collected birth details of 100 children who had been certified intellectually bright by teachers and 100 mentally retarded children from special schools. The former would be group A and the latter group B. Using the birth details, an ex-astrologer from among them prepared the charts of these students. Since they were all convinced that astrology was bunkum, they made the experiment a double blind so that the experimenter’s bias did not creep in. A code number was therefore assigned to each chart to identify who it belonged to, but neither the experimenter nor those participating in the experiment could identify the case from the code number.

The next step was to organise a press conference and ask astrologers to participate in the study. Twenty-seven took up the challenge. They were given 40 random charts and birth details and asked to say whether they belonged to group A or B. They didn’t have to get each one correct. Even if any of the astrologers got 28 of the 40 charts correctly identified, the rationalists would grant that astrology had some basis. But the best performance was 24 correct identifications. The average score was only 17.5. This was far worse than tossing a coin. Astrology had not worked.

“The common reaction of leading astrologers was that those who participated were incompetent, hence the test is inconclusive. However, we had one astrology society participate and they also failed the test. Surely, a society of professionals cannot be incompetent,” says Narlikar.

It could be argued that a test involving 200 children is really small if you want to disprove a whole stream of knowledge. How about a sample size of an astounding 20 million? That was what Dr David Voas of the University of Manchester looked at when he conducted the largest astrology test (the paper was published in March 2007) ever on a phenomenon every teenager has wasted her time on - love signs or the idea that couples will be more compatible depending on their zodiac - the Linda Goodman universe. As a senior research fellow with the University’s Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research, Voas had data for the 2001 Census of Britain and Wales. He looked at the marriages of 10 million couples. But to devise a test about love signs, he had a problem - there was no unanimity among astrologers on the compatibility of the signs, so what was he going to test?

Voas worked around it. He wrote in his paper, "In this research I look for evidence that any combination of signs is found more or less often than would be expected to occur by chance." Having sifted through the data, there was not a single combination which was greater or less than chance. "If there is even the smallest tendency for Virgos to fancy Capricorns, or for Libras to like Leos, then we should see it in the statistics," he wrote. The only conclusion to be made was that astrological signs had no bearing on people getting or continuing to remain married.

The tests need not always be as large or rigorous to make a point. It could use a gimmick, and that too has been done in the sceptic’s offensive against astrology. In the 1960s, a French psychologist and statistician Michael Gauquelin mixed the charts of ten murderers who had been hanged with ten average citizens, and invited astrologers to identify them from the charts. Predictably, the few astrologers who took up the challenge failed miserably. But in another test, he showed how people are desperate to believe in astrology.

He sent 500 people what they thought was a reading of their charts and asked for their response. About 95 per cent of those who replied said that the chart was in agreement with their life and character. But what they had read was actually the reading of the horoscope of Marcel Petiot, a serial killer. Twenty years later, an ABC anchor pulled a similar trick in public. He invited a noted astrologer and gave her a serial killer’s charts. The astrologer’s descriptions included “enormously bright… great charm… a sense of moral propriety …” The anchor then passed on the reading to 20 students from whom he had collected charts earlier and said this was their reading. All felt that the astrologer had got it spot on.

In the annals of turncoat astrologers who used science to refute their former profession, the most renowned is Geoffrey Dean. Once one of Australia’s foremost astrologers, he is now the critic of first recourse, having for over three decades conducted studies which usually question the basis of astrology. He did a study which had for its premise a simple question: if the arrangement of the stars influence the traits of human beings, then the lives of twins born just a few minutes apart should be alike. "Time twins are thus the definitive test of astrology because errors or uncertainties of birth chart interpretation are avoided," he and his co-author wrote in a paper. They used the data of another study, unrelated to astrology, which had kept track of 2,101 twins born, on an average, 4.8 minutes apart in March 1958. The children had then been measured again at the ages of 11, 16 and 23 for 110 variables which included IQ, anxiety, height, weight, music, sports, occupation, marital status—characteristics which birth charts claim to predict. The results showed that ‘time twins’ were not more alike than expected by chance.

But if astrology is scientifically impossible to prove, then why do people believe in it? Because it gives them a crutch against the unknowns. But why do honest astrologers practice it? Rudolf Smit’s great moment of truth came in the mid-1980s when he met Geoffrey Dean and was given to read the draft of an article that the latter was writing on using astrology as an instrument of counselling. As Smit read through it, he realised that he was so good at his job because he was unconsciously using non-verbal cues from the client to tell them exactly what would make them happy. Dean had listed 34 such factors of ‘personal validation’, which included: watching eyes and hands for signs of agreement, being a good listener, flattering and telling only what the other person wants to hear. Smit believes that the majority of astrologers, at least in the West, are like him - men who delude themselves but have no intention of cheating.

Rationalists believe that astrology should not exist because it is not only baseless, but also harmful. “Astrology can lead to irrational decisions, postponement of necessary action and action that may be harmful to individuals,” says Narlikar. Narlikar is among the many quoted by Bhagwanji Raiyani, a Mumbai-based rationalist, who has filed a public interest litigation that seeks, among other things, the banning of all astrological predictions in public.

In January, an ashram in Mumbai celebrated its annual day by inviting astrologers. Raiyani decided to attend. After the speeches, he announced a challenge. “I said you give me 12 predictions for every month-end about the movement of the Sensex, of inflation as per the price index, and the quantum of rain [in some of the main cities of India].” Predictably, no one responded. But challenges and scientific studies will do nothing to shake a believer’s faith. Voas, who did the love signs study, commented after the publication of his paper: “I’m under no illusion that these findings will undermine astrology’s popularity. The enthusiasm for zodiac-based personality profiling seems undiminished by hundreds of previous studies debunking astrology.” Science can go far, but never far enough to test faith.