The study was simple: six astrologers were given 23 birth charts and had to match them to 23 people, for whom they had photos and answers to a long questionnaire the Federation had itself generated. The result? Each astrologer made from zero to three correct matches the average was one.
This lack of concern on the part of astrologers had already led philosopher of science Paul Thagard to declare astrology a pseudoscience in It was that its community had more or less refused to face the music.
It had made less progress than alternative theories, like psychology, over a long period of time. But for many modern fans of astrology, all of this is a misguided discussion. Astrology has no scientific pretension, they say. It is a tool for introspection. There too, however, there are problems.
Some of the passages were dead-on; others were laughably inappropriate; and there were many contradictions within this nearly 5,word essay. I was at once an extreme traditionalist and a rebellious force of nature, a witty intellectual with a serious personality and an intuitive psychic with great belief in the unproven.
These sorts of general pronouncements full of escape clauses are known as Barnum statements after P. I have more than once given the same fake astrological personality description to high school students who believed they were receiving a horoscope tied to their Zodiac sign, and almost all of them raised their hand when I asked them if they saw themselves in the text.
I do understand the appeal of modern-day astrology. By focusing on self-reflection, it has attached itself to the ever popular self-help movement. It provides the social beings that make up its fandom with a sense of community and it can feel empowering for minorities who have been oppressed by long-standing institutions. In fact, there is evidence that people drawn to astrology are religiously oriented but unaffiliated to a major religion.
But the truth, however annoying, is that astrology played an important role in the history of science. A new book by American data scientist Alexander Boxer , who has a doctorate in physics, aims to shift that view. A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science explores how astrology was a regular part of what was then called natural philosophy, at least until the time of the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century that Kepler and Galileo heralded.
The extraordinary detail and accuracy of the astronomical observations of scholars such as the Greek mathematician Hipparchus , in the second century BC, were due at least in part to a conviction that only with excellent data could astrological forecasts and diagnoses be reliable. Astrological calculations by the ancient Babylonians led them to make new discoveries in geometry.
The importance of observing and measuring the heavens helped stimulate the development of accurate instruments such as the astrolabe — a treatise on the subject by Geoffrey Chaucer was the standard reference work throughout the middle ages.
The exquisite astronomical data collected by the Dane Tycho Brahe used partly for drawing up those horoscopes for Rudolf II was essential to the discoveries of his protege, Kepler.
Boxer is understandably nervous about how his book will be received by his peers. So will it undermine his credibility as a hard-headed data analyst? If astrology is garbage, how do we know? It seemed to me that a lot of these questions are data questions. Astrology proved amazingly resilient as science evolved. You might imagine it would have been dealt a sucker punch when Copernicus rearranged the heavens in the early 16th century by replacing the Earth with the sun at the centre of the cosmos, relegating our home to a mere planet.
That idea remained much disputed until the early 17th century, but the observations and arguments put forward by the likes of Kepler and Galileo, and later Isaac Newton, helped to make the Copernican model generally accepted by the end of the century.
And what did astrology do? In the few cases where astrology has been used to generate testable expectations and the results were examined in a careful study, the evidence did not support the validity of astrological ideas. However, one of the hallmarks of science is that ideas are modified when warranted by the evidence.
Astrology has not changed its ideas in response to contradictory evidence. Leads to ongoing research? Scientific studies involving astrology have stopped after attempting and failing to establish the validity of astrological ideas. So far, there are no documented cases of astrology contributing to a new scientific discovery.
Researchers behave scientifically? Scientists don't wait for others to do the research to support or contradict the ideas they propose. Instead, they strive to test their ideas, try to come up with counterarguments and alternative hypotheses , and ultimately, give up ideas when warranted by the evidence.
Astrologers, on the other hand, do not seem to rigorously examine the astrological ideas they accept.
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