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Frank Brown did a series of experiments which revealed lunar effects in oysters, rats and hamsters. See post56782.html#p56782 for a summary of Brown’s work.

Right, the moon affects the tides. The tides affects the electromagnetic field. The oysters attune to the electromagnetic field. Gravity is not the zeitgeber.

Planets compensate for weakness by regularity. The steady pulsing nature of planetary gravity produces effects on earth as the initial conditions and enveloping framework for life.

There is only perceived regularity. All variables in closer proximity eliminate this regularity. Do a localized experiment. Anywhere on Earth, at any given time, the pull will be 9.5 to 10 m/s2, fluctuating continuously. Even more so if you move at all. The moon doesn't pull us up. It only lessens the downward pull by a fraction. The net effect is that we are unable to distinguish a change in elevation from the rising of the moon. Any attenuation to celestial gravity(planets, moon, sun, etc) would require us to know the 'position' of the body in question. If the moon were off on the horizon, would it be pulling us sideways? What if the sun were opposite it, would they negate, causing us to feel no net effect? Nearby objects have mass and thus gravity. Standing next to mountain, the moon on the opposite horizon would be negated(although you'd need to be positioned next to a cliff of the mountain). The motion of your own body would interfere with your 'sense' of gravity, even your heartbeat, due to inertia. This would also include the buffeting of wind when outdoors. Your distance from the equator affects gravity as well from Earth's centrifugal force, and different positions on Earth would have completely different influences from the celestial bodies at any given time of day, changing continuously as the Earth rotates. How China is affected now will be different from how I'll be affected when the Earth spins me into that position, since the position of all celestial bodies will have shifted in that time.

Claiming gravity as a zeitgeber is not parsimonious for any hypothesis.

Gravity from the outer planets is enough to cause 1% of earth’s tides. This is more than nothing, especially since it has been the same for billions of years.

That 1% would only only manifest in full if all the planets aligned perfectly. Even then, it would only affect your position on Earth for a few hours before the Earth rotated away.

I find it hard to imagine French doctors colluding in such deception and it escaping any historic notice. The genetic link with Mars is far more parsimonious.

The doctors would be around for most of the C sections and induced births. I also doubt they would collude in such deception. I see no reason for parents not to do this, especially to chidlren not born in a hospital. This is most definitely the more parsimonious explanation. You're deluded if you think otherwise.

Can we make a scientific instrument that's capable of detecting the rising of mars by it's gravity alone?

No, I am not offering a reason why DNA is helical, I am simply pointing out the helix in our genes presents a 3D analogy for the 4D shape of the solar system.

Only if you plot the time dimension as a physical dimension(reduced dimension analogy). I'll grant you it's an analogy. I'd thought you mentioned this as something more than a quirky similarity.

Robert Tulip wrote:Bill, if the Mars Effect is inherited, it indicates a geneplex whose phenotype includes athletic prowess and being born when Mars is rising. It is not beyond possibility, but rather is in fact the only possible answer from the data.

But no, Robert, if you're making the statement above based on anything Gauquelin documented, you're way beyond the mandate his very limited and peculiar finding allows. All the rest is your own creation. Gauquelin himself, as you well know, in effect debunked several astrological beliefs. His finding gives no latitude at all to consider Mars' influence on genes.

The weakness of the effect is indicated in the observation that it is only statistically detectable among eminent individuals, and drops steadily in correlation with drop of eminence of the cohort. If Mars had a stronger effect on human genetics, such refinement of the selection would not be needed.

Here I think you're trying to softpedal the strength of the effect to make others more likely to concede that it exists. The comparison with Dawkins' weak force, present over millions of years and affecting millions of generations of diverse organisms uniformly, is not not apt here. Here we're dealing with a force that acts over a very short time frame, in a specific way on individuals of a single species. Any effect produced on human individuality could not be the result of a weak force as you've described it.

The peculiarity of Gauquelin's finding is that no planet was found to have an influence on the occupation an individual would pursue. Yet, if the talent area happened to be athletics, and the athlete was judged to be eminent, then there was a very small positive correlation. The oddity of this and the small effect size makes this anomaly the weakest of evidence for astrology, vs. the evidence against (some of it, again, established by Gauquelin).

Interbane wrote:the moon affects the tides. The tides affects the electromagnetic field. The oysters attune to the electromagnetic field. Gravity is not the zeitgeber.

Brown conducted a controlled experiment moving oysters from Long Island Sound to his lab at Evanston in Illinois. The oysters initially opened when the moon was above Long Island, but after a few days changed their pattern to open when the moon was above Evanston. If this somehow involved an electromagnetic sense, it was one driven solely by the gravity of the moon.

There is only perceived regularity. All variables in closer proximity eliminate this regularity. Do a localized experiment. Anywhere on Earth, at any given time, the pull will be 9.5 to 10 m/s2, fluctuating continuously. Even more so if you move at all. The moon doesn't pull us up. It only lessens the downward pull by a fraction. The net effect is that we are unable to distinguish a change in elevation from the rising of the moon. Any attenuation to celestial gravity(planets, moon, sun, etc) would require us to know the 'position' of the body in question. If the moon were off on the horizon, would it be pulling us sideways? What if the sun were opposite it, would they negate, causing us to feel no net effect? Nearby objects have mass and thus gravity. Standing next to mountain, the moon on the opposite horizon would be negated (although you'd need to be positioned next to a cliff of the mountain). The motion of your own body would interfere with your 'sense' of gravity, even your heartbeat, due to inertia. This would also include the buffeting of wind when outdoors. Your distance from the equator affects gravity as well from Earth's centrifugal force, and different positions on Earth would have completely different influences from the celestial bodies at any given time of day, changing continuously as the Earth rotates. How China is affected now will be different from how I'll be affected when the Earth spins me into that position, since the position of all celestial bodies will have shifted in that time. Claiming gravity as a zeitgeber is not parsimonious for any hypothesis.

This all ignores the point I have made several times that the slow pulse of planetary gravity forms perfectly regular long term cycles, within which all the DNA of earth has evolved. Immediate fluctuations with terrestrial causes lack the long term regularity of planetary effects. You use the term ‘know’ as if the planetary effect was conscious. It is part of the background environment, like a slow wind, forming the context for phenotypic adaptation.

Gravity from the outer planets is enough to cause 1% of earth’s tides. This is more than nothing, especially since it has been the same for billions of years.

That 1% would only only manifest in full if all the planets aligned perfectly. Even then, it would only affect your position on Earth for a few hours before the Earth rotated away.

But it has happened every day with clockwork regularity for one trillion days. You just don’t seem to get the idea of cycles in time as producing accumulative effects in the evolution of life.

I find it hard to imagine French doctors colluding in such deception and it escaping any historic notice. The genetic link with Mars is far more parsimonious.

The doctors would be around for most of the C sections and induced births. I also doubt they would collude in such deception. I see no reason for parents not to do this, especially to chidlren not born in a hospital. This is most definitely the more parsimonious explanation. You're deluded if you think otherwise.

There is no evidence for Dean’s birth time fraud theory, it is solely a matter of clutching at straws to respond to the scientific evidence Gauquelin provided of the Mars Effect. If parents of eminent athletes arranged with nurses and doctors to change birth times on official certificates based on astrology, surely this would have been detected by some evidence other than Dean’s speculation which is solely directed towards discrediting Gauquelin?

Can we make a scientific instrument that's capable of detecting the rising of mars by its gravity alone?

I don’t know, but in principle we could detect the micron tides of Mars in the ocean through extremely accurate long term measurement.

No, I am not offering a reason why DNA is helical, I am simply pointing out the helix in our genes presents a 3D analogy for the 4D shape of the solar system.

Only if you plot the time dimension as a physical dimension(reduced dimension analogy). I'll grant you it's an analogy. I'd thought you mentioned this as something more than a quirky similarity.

The helical shape of the solar system in space-time can only be seen by plotting time as a physical dimension. This is key to a new paradigm which sees the solar system as moving rather than as static, as in the prevailing three dimensional model which does not show movement over time.

DWill wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:Bill, if the Mars Effect is inherited, it indicates a geneplex whose phenotype includes athletic prowess and being born when Mars is rising. It is not beyond possibility, but rather is in fact the only possible answer from the data.

But no, Robert, if you're making the statement above based on anything Gauquelin documented, you're way beyond the mandate his very limited and peculiar finding allows. All the rest is your own creation. Gauquelin himself, as you well know, in effect debunked several astrological beliefs. His finding gives no latitude at all to consider Mars' influence on genes.

Gauqelin provides not only latitude but necessity to consider planetary effect on genes. You may not have read the comment I quoted above about inheritance, where Gauquelin did a major study comparing parent and child birth times and found planetary effects with a likelihood of a million to one by chance. The only basis for such inheritance of planets at birth time is genetic.

The weakness of the effect is indicated in the observation that it is only statistically detectable among eminent individuals, and drops steadily in correlation with drop of eminence of the cohort. If Mars had a stronger effect on human genetics, such refinement of the selection would not be needed.

Here I think you're trying to softpedal the strength of the effect to make others more likely to concede that it exists.

No, this is the precise point at issue between Gauquelin and his critics. They, in their blundering fashion, could not see that Gauqelin had found a planetary effect that is very weak, so they insisted on including noisy extraneous data to hide the detected signal, which is only seen among eminent people who are naturally born.

The comparison with Dawkins' weak force, present over millions of years and affecting millions of generations of diverse organisms uniformly, is not apt here. Here we're dealing with a force that acts over a very short time frame, in a specific way on individuals of a single species. Any effect produced on human individuality could not be the result of a weak force as you've described it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Nowhere is there a basis to say the Mars Effect “acts over a very short time frame”. If, as appears the only explanation, eminent athletes carry a gene for birth as Mars is rising, and eminent doctors a gene for Saturn rising, then this is part of the deep structure of evolution, a weak force present over millions of years uniformly.

The peculiarity of Gauquelin's finding is that no planet was found to have an influence on the occupation an individual would pursue. Yet, if the talent area happened to be athletics, and the athlete was judged to be eminent, then there was a very small positive correlation. The oddity of this and the small effect size makes this anomaly the weakest of evidence for astrology, vs. the evidence against (some of it, again, established by Gauquelin).

Regarding “evidence against astrology” what we have is an absence of evidence, rather than evidence of absence. Gauquelin found that if sun signs exist, they are too weak for statistical detection by the methods he used. This is not a proof that sun signs do not exist, only that their effect is far weaker in human life than is claimed in popular astrology. How I see it is that the planets form a cosmic structure of time which is like the combination lock of a safe. If we attune ourselves to planetary patterns it is like opening the lock of time.

If this somehow involved an electromagnetic sense, it was one driven solely by the gravity of the moon.

Correct, via the tides. This means the gravity of the moon is not a zeitgeber. Water that spans the surface of the Earth is susceptible to the small amount of gravity from the moon, but organisms are unable to sense any celestial gravity.

But it has happened every day with clockwork regularity for one trillion days. You just don’t seem to get the idea of cycles in time as producing accumulative effects in the evolution of life.

I understand very well how such weak forces could influence the evolution of life over exceptionally long spans of time. There are two problems stemming from you piggy backing on Dawkin's phrase. The first is that, the gravity you're hoping has some influence doesn't have a direction. Exceptionally weak wind, if it were to blow a cork across the ocean, has direction. The gravity has no constants. The regularity of planetary motion is offset by the immediate variables and the fact that the Earth rotates. This is random background gravitational noise, not a directional 'wind'.

The second problem is that just because there is a weak force does not mean life will be influenced by it. There are likely billions of weak 'forces' that could push the evolution of an organism in one direction or another, but are ignored since they have no bearing on the survivability of that organism. For what reason should creatures care about the cycles of the stars? I could see reasons certain plants could care about incredibly slow wind, but not incredibly weak gravitational fluctuations that aren't local or lunar.

Also, you say 'it' has happened every day for a trillion years. Do you mean the planets all aligning? Every planet in our solar system aligns every single day on our side of the sun? I won't investigate this unless you claim that's true, otherwise I'll think you simply made a mistake.

This all ignores the point I have made several times that the slow pulse of planetary gravity forms perfectly regular long term cycles, within which all the DNA of earth has evolved.

Actually, you missed the point. These long term cycles are most certainly not regular here on Earth. They are haphazard and impossible to distinguish from the background noise. I challenge you to prove my point for me by finding an accurate instrument and measure local gravity. If you don't have access, contact your local university perhaps. Or search for other similar experiments that have done this.

You use the term ‘know’ as if the planetary effect was conscious.

The only time I used the word in that paragraph was in reference to us fellow humans. What I meant in that sentence is that if you personally were to undertake the experiment I mentioned, the only way you could guess the positions of the planets(not the moon and sun), is if you knew where they would be beforehand. You'd get nothing from the readings on gravity.

There is no evidence for Dean’s birth time fraud theory, it is solely a matter of clutching at straws to respond to the scientific evidence Gauquelin provided of the Mars Effect.

What kind of evidence do you think would surface? Parents admitting decades later that they smudged the birth hour of their children? Also, I already said that doctors and nurses most likely didn't lie about the times. The fact that C sections and inducements weren't above chance shows this is a practical conclusion. Only natural births, which in many cases would happen outside the hospital and away from doctors, had the statistical anamoly.

What you're saying is that parents in such situations most certainly would not lie. Not even a small percentage of them would lie. They would accurately tell the hospital(after the fact) precisely what minute their child was born. Every single parent. C'mon Robert, you know people better than this. This is the parsimonious explanation, and if you can't see it you most certainly don't understand people as well as you should.

I don’t know, but in principle we could detect the micron tides of Mars in the ocean through extremely accurate long term measurement.

Actually, you couldn't. Atmospheric pressure differences change water levels in a far greater amount than the gravity of Mars. There is always atmospheric pressure, and it is always changing. In order to detect the influence of Mars on water levels, you'd have to also know the atmospheric pressure very accurately at every place within hundreds of square miles and compensate for it. You have to have the surrounding pressures by which to judge whether or not the pressure in your region is higher or lower than them. Less atmospheric pressure here, and greater pressure a few miles away, and the water level will rise ever so slightly in your area.

I was thinking about this on the way home. The entire construct, from an ancient book hinting at celestial patterns, to the patterns themselves, to the stars affecting the evolution of life. It's a great core concept for the plot in a sci-fi or alternate reality book. I don't mean this in an insulting way. The idea is elegant, it's fun and believable.

I was also sitting there trying to feel the gravity around me. The jostling of my car and my own motion of course struck home immediately. I got to thinking, what if my son had a mutation which made him hypersensitive to gravity. On a subconscious level, a biological level. If he were to have this mutation, and sit down perfectly still, with no wind or nearby large objects, and slowed his heartbeat enough so that the motion it gave would possibly be paused for a fraction of a second at a time, maybe he could sense the gravity of the moon. His body would need to know where the sun was at, so it wouldn't interfere. If he was able to do this, what benefit would he gain? What would it be that would set him ahead of other people?

If he were able to take a 'sampling' in such a moment with all other variables minimized, his subconscious would need to remember it. He would have to sample in such a manner continuously, at the same place on Earth, at the same time of day, with the sun in the same position, in order to gain a sense of lunar gravity. Yet, that mutation that made him hypersensitive would need to be beneficial enough to warrant passing along to his children. Even then, his children would have to also gain a sense of all of his previous 'samplings', otherwise they wouldn't live long enough for the slow celestial motions to make themselves clear.

The very same concept that this is a long term, weak effect also derails this train of thought. While the steady pressure of wind doesn't require other samplings to have an effect, the gravity of celestial bodies does. Any organism with such a mutation would have to live long enough to sense the entire cycle. Otherwise the mutation is useless. This scenario applies to any organism, not just my son. He wouldn't live long enough to sense the pattern. In fact, aside from some species of trees and perhaps turtles, there is no replicator on Earth that lives long enough to sense an entire 179 year cycle.

The only possible way to be receptive to any non-Earth gravity is vicariously, through tides and perhaps the electromagnetic field. Lunar gravity affects the Earth's oceans perceptibly because the very weak effect that it has is spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. The oceans, in this way, act as an amplifier for the detectability of lunar gravity. The rising and falling of tides is also a discrete effect, like wind. It either blows or it doesn't, it's either high or it's low. The same with the electromagnetic field. With gravity, the effect is in all directions and influenced by a thousand variables that make it undetectable unless spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles. The moon doesn't pull 'upwards', it only lessens the effect of Earth's gravity by varying degrees depending on where in the sky it is. If it is only just risen, the effect would be much less. If it's opposite the sun during a full moon, a majority of the influence would cancel out.

There is no evidence for Dean’s birth time fraud theory, it is solely a matter of clutching at straws to respond to the scientific evidence Gauquelin provided of the Mars Effect.

You have this backwards. With the Mars Effect being the last bastion of hope for astrology, it is the astrologers who are fervently grasping at straws to find some celestial link. After reading a lot about it, I no longer doubt the Mars Effect. Kudos to Gauquelin, it's terrible that he committed suicide. I also think it's almost criminal for the CSICOP to have been fraudulent in their examinations. The key problem is that although there is an effect, there is no evidence that it is from the gravity of Mars. Just like the hockey players mostly being born in January, cause and effect in such cases is exceptionally hard to pin down. Correlation does not equal causation.

Reread the first chapters of EP where Dawkin's talks about genetic determinism. He disclaims, disambiguates, and apologizes the entire time how he isn't an advocate of genetic determinism. We can't possibly know all the variables that affect people beyond their genes. To say that there is a 'gene' for eminent athletes goes against what Dawkin's is saying. Perhaps there are many genes which in combination increase the odds of someone being more athletic. However, they may only increase the odds, and even then doesn't guarantee them eminence. This is also a question of what happens during birth. Would some obscure sensitivity to gravity outweigh all other factors that contribute to when birth takes place?

Gauquelin's study can be repeated. As it stands, the current parsimonious explanation to the Mars Effect is that parents who gave birth away from hospitals(thus not having medical staff around to write down the time of birth) would fudge the time of birth. People lie about such things, it is human nature. If astrologers have any hope of rectifying Guaquelin's study, it should be repeated. I would be of a different mind if there were many other studies that also found correlations between planetary movements and biological processes. As it stands, this is the only one.

If a thousand studies are done, what are the chances that one of them would find a correlation that is 1,000 to 1 above chance? This is not me merely playing devil's advocate, it's the nature of how complex our world is. Any scientific hypothesis must be repeatable, otherwise it is useless. Repeating Gauquelin's study with the same test subjects is not what I mean, that correlation has been reexamined thoroughly. New test subjects should be used. If this is done, and there is yet again a correlation, and it rules out parsimonious causes, I will revisit your ideas. However, right now, the chance that gravity other than the sun and moon affects life on Earth is relegated to that special place right next to impossible. I'm not biased against this idea, I think it's wonderful and elegant. On the other hand, you're biased for this idea, so are blinded to the massive hurdles.

Interbane wrote:

If this somehow involved an electromagnetic sense, it was one driven solely by the gravity of the moon.

Correct, via the tides. This means the gravity of the moon is not a zeitgeber. Water that spans the surface of the Earth is susceptible to the small amount of gravity from the moon, but organisms are unable to sense any celestial gravity.

If the earth’s electromagnetic field or ocean tide transmits a gravitational signal from planets to organisms, then the planets are indeed the time givers, to translate your German term zeitgeber. An organism does not need to ‘sense’ celestial gravity to be affected by it, as such effects are entirely subconscious. The oysters were away from the tide in Chicago, with no sensory input except gravity. What of Brown’s findings that rats are more active while the moon is down and that hamsters switch between a lunar day and a solar day when in laboratory conditions, with the oyster, rat and hamster experiments carefully designed to remove external stimuli? Are these scientific findings also electromagnetic? If so, it shows that earth’s electromagnetic field follows a pulse driven by systemic gravity of planetary cycles. Speaking of parsimony, it looks to me more simple to postulate a gravitational/tidal effect on the genetic phenotype, rather than one mediated by electromagnetism.

There are two problems stemming from you piggy backing on Dawkin's phrase [the slow wind]. The first is that, the gravity you're hoping has some influence doesn't have a direction. Exceptionally weak wind, if it were to blow a cork across the ocean, has direction. The gravity has no constants. The regularity of planetary motion is offset by the immediate variables and the fact that the Earth rotates. This is random background gravitational noise, not a directional 'wind'.

Of course gravity has direction and constants! It pulls towards the source with constant force. The weaker the force, the more difficult to separate it from the background noise. Rotation is part of earth’s regularity. Immediate terrestrial variables lack permanent patterns. The collected picture of the cycles of constant planetary forces provides the wave function of terrestrial gravity, seen in the ocean tides. Gauquelin showed that your ‘random noise’ is not random but has predictable phenotypic effects.

The second problem is that just because there is a weak force does not mean life will be influenced by it. There are likely billions of weak 'forces' that could push the evolution of an organism in one direction or another, but are ignored since they have no bearing on the survivability of that organism. For what reason should creatures care about the cycles of the stars? I could see reasons certain plants could care about incredibly slow wind, but not incredibly weak gravitational fluctuations that aren't local or lunar.

Again, this has nothing to do with stars, unless you are equating stars and planets as a form of insult. Planets are close, stars are distant. Planets affect the earth, stars have not been shown to have any effect here. If it is proven that planetary positions at birth can be inherited, this opens the path to a productive scientific research program. By analysing all the birth charts of a social group or family, planetary relationships in the group that depart from population average can be found. For example, in his book Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas finds Sun-Uranus aspects in birth charts of transformative innovators in history. Systematic study of such groups could reveal many factors that are more common in select groups than in the general population.

Also, you say 'it' has happened every day for a trillion years. Do you mean the planets all aligning? Every planet in our solar system aligns every single day on our side of the sun? I won't investigate this unless you claim that's true, otherwise I'll think you simply made a mistake.

When the planets all align, their 1% of tidal influence all pulls in one direction. Usually this total is distributed around the ecliptic, but adds to the same total. Your statement “that 1% would only manifest in full if all the planets aligned perfectly” is wrong, except in so far as when such an alignment occurs we could expect tides about 1% bigger. As it is, there are micron average bumps in the tide which follow each planet twice around the earth every day, as the planets spin around our sky once every day, as a result of the earth’s rotation.

I have just re-checked the numbers on planetary gravity effect on earth which I earlier cited. Gravity follows the inverse square law, so the sun has the biggest effect, 123 times that of the moon. Combined planetary gravity effect on earth is 1.7% of the moon’s gravity. However, tidal gravity effect follows an inverse cube law, meaning the moon’s close distance makes it dominant, causing 2/3 of the tides, with the sun almost all the rest. My earlier claim that the planets cause 1% of tides was wrong – in fact they only cause 0.006% of our tides.

Measured in nanometers, on a base of lunar tide of 0.6 meters, gives the following average daily tidal effects in the oceans of the earth:

30364.2 Venus
3672 Jupiter
573.6 Mars
194.4 Mercury
124.8 Saturn
1.8 Uranus
0.6 Neptune
0.00002 Pluto

This all ignores the point I have made several times that the slow pulse of planetary gravity forms perfectly regular long term cycles, within which all the DNA of earth has evolved.

Actually, you missed the point. These long term cycles are most certainly not regular here on Earth. They are haphazard and impossible to distinguish from the background noise. I challenge you to prove my point for me by finding an accurate instrument and measure local gravity. If you don't have access, contact your local university perhaps. Or search for other similar experiments that have done this.

The regularity of the planets is purely mathematical and empirical. The issue is how to detect a signal in a noisy environment. If there is a signal, we need to ignore the noise to detect it. Like Gauquelin’s critics, you insist on swamping the signal with noise. You would have to measure local gravity for years to collect enough data to show how the slow orbits of the outer planets combine their gravitational affect. Remember, the time scale I have proposed starts with the 179 year regular conjunction period of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, and extends to the 25,765 year cycle of the earth’s Great Year. It is fairly easy to calculate the differential gravity over this time period, but measuring it physically can only be done over short periods.

You use the term ‘know’ as if the planetary effect was conscious.

The only time I used the word in that paragraph was in reference to us fellow humans. What I meant in that sentence is that if you personally were to undertake the experiment I mentioned, the only way you could guess the positions of the planets (not the moon and sun), is if you knew where they would be beforehand. You'd get nothing from the readings on gravity.

If you had 1000 years of data, regular blips could be detected for all the planets, theoretically enabling detection of their location. Obviously easier for Venus than Neptune, but in principle the same.

There is no evidence for Dean’s birth time fraud theory, it is solely a matter of clutching at straws to respond to the scientific evidence Gauquelin provided of the Mars Effect.

What kind of evidence do you think would surface? Parents admitting decades later that they smudged the birth hour of their children? Also, I already said that doctors and nurses most likely didn't lie about the times. The fact that C sections and inducements weren't above chance shows this is a practical conclusion. Only natural births, which in many cases would happen outside the hospital and away from doctors, had the statistical anamoly. What you're saying is that parents in such situations most certainly would not lie. Not even a small percentage of them would lie. They would accurately tell the hospital(after the fact) precisely what minute their child was born. Every single parent. C'mon Robert, you know people better than this. This is the parsimonious explanation, and if you can't see it you most certainly don't understand people as well as you should.

I’ve checked this - http://genealogy.about.com/od/france/a/ ... stry_2.htm says “Births were usually registered within two or three days of a child's birth, usually by the father. These records will typically provide the place, date and time of registration; the date and place of birth; the child's surname and forenames, the parents' names (with mother's maiden name), and the names, ages, and professions of two witnesses. If the mother was single, her parents were often listed as well. Depending upon the time period and locality, the records may also provide additional details such as the age of the parents, the father's occupation, the birthplace of the parents, and the relationship of the witnesses to the child (if any).”

You are saying that parents who hoped their son would become an eminent doctor were more likely to fraudulently alter the actual time of birth to the time when Saturn is rising in the east. My impression is that such druidic type custom would have been vanishingly rare in twentieth century France, especially among the professional class of doctors who are among the most scientific and rationalist group. Two witnesses would need to collude in the fraud, making the astrological secret harder to conceal.

I don’t know, but in principle we could detect the micron tides of Mars in the ocean through extremely accurate long term measurement.

Actually, you couldn't. Atmospheric pressure differences change water levels in a far greater amount than the gravity of Mars. There is always atmospheric pressure, and it is always changing. In order to detect the influence of Mars on water levels, you'd have to also know the atmospheric pressure very accurately at every place within hundreds of square miles and compensate for it. You have to have the surrounding pressures by which to judge whether or not the pressure in your region is higher or lower than them. Less atmospheric pressure here, and greater pressure a few miles away, and the water level will rise ever so slightly in your area.

Statistical measurement is about controlling for variables. If years of data can be measured with nanometer accuracy, and controlling for variance in pressure, there is no reason why the bigger planetary tides, from Venus and Jupiter, could not be measured.

Gravity follows the inverse square law, so the sun has the biggest effect, 123 times that of the moon.

My calculations have it at 179 times that of the moon.

Also, I posted above in case you missed it. I'll be gone all weekend. Adios.

Edit - perhaps we were both wrong. I was overcome by curiosity so looked it up.

I am inquiring about the difference between the pull the Sun has on the Earth and the pull the Moon has on the Earth. I am hoping you could show me the calculations physicists use to determine how many times greater the Sun's pull is compared to the Moon's pull.

The equation for gravitation acceleration is G x M / r2, where G is the gravitational constant (6.67 x 10-11 m3kg-1 sec-2).

The mass of the Sun is 2 x 1030 kg, and the distance is 1.5 x 1011 meters.

The Moon is 7.3 x 1022 kg, and the distance is 3.8 x 108 m.

You then find that the acceleration from the Sun is .0059 m/s2 (meters per second squared) and from the Moon is .000034 m/s2 or 176 times smaller.

Dr. Eric Christian

Interbane wrote:

Gravity follows the inverse square law, so the sun has the biggest effect, 123 times that of the moon.

My calculations have it at 179 times that of the moon.

I stand corrected. Don't know where I got that misprint of 123 times. I just checked via wiki data and got 178.73. Will have to check all my numbers Ah well, the order of magnitude in this sun-moon gravity error is only 50%, but my rough guess on planetary tides was wider of the mark. I guessed from memory planet tides were about 1% of lunar tides and when I checked I had mixed up tides and gravity - my calculation said the planets produce about 0.006% of ocean tides compared to the moon, so my rough guess of 1% was out by about 17,000%. The tidal effect of planets is far weaker than my 1% rough figure, and can be measured in nanometers.

All this can be readily checked by simple Newtonian equations: gravity = mass divided by distance squared; tide = mass divided by distance cubed.

Interbane wrote:You have this backwards. With the Mars Effect being the last bastion of hope for astrology, it is the astrologers who are fervently grasping at straws to find some celestial link. After reading a lot about it, I no longer doubt the Mars Effect. Kudos to Gauquelin, it's terrible that he committed suicide. I also think it's almost criminal for the CSICOP to have been fraudulent in their examinations. The key problem is that although there is an effect, there is no evidence that it is from the gravity of Mars. Just like the hockey players mostly being born in January, cause and effect in such cases is exceptionally hard to pin down. Correlation does not equal causation.

Reread the first chapters of EP where Dawkin's talks about genetic determinism. He disclaims, disambiguates, and apologizes the entire time how he isn't an advocate of genetic determinism. We can't possibly know all the variables that affect people beyond their genes. To say that there is a 'gene' for eminent athletes goes against what Dawkin's is saying. Perhaps there are many genes which in combination increase the odds of someone being more athletic. However, they may only increase the odds, and even then doesn't guarantee them eminence. This is also a question of what happens during birth. Would some obscure sensitivity to gravity outweigh all other factors that contribute to when birth takes place?

Gauquelin's study can be repeated. As it stands, the current parsimonious explanation to the Mars Effect is that parents who gave birth away from hospitals(thus not having medical staff around to write down the time of birth) would fudge the time of birth. People lie about such things, it is human nature. If astrologers have any hope of rectifying Guaquelin's study, it should be repeated. I would be of a different mind if there were many other studies that also found correlations between planetary movements and biological processes. As it stands, this is the only one.

If a thousand studies are done, what are the chances that one of them would find a correlation that is 1,000 to 1 above chance? This is not me merely playing devil's advocate, it's the nature of how complex our world is. Any scientific hypothesis must be repeatable, otherwise it is useless. Repeating Gauquelin's study with the same test subjects is not what I mean, that correlation has been reexamined thoroughly. New test subjects should be used. If this is done, and there is yet again a correlation, and it rules out parsimonious causes, I will revisit your ideas. However, right now, the chance that gravity other than the sun and moon affects life on Earth is relegated to that special place right next to impossible. I'm not biased against this idea, I think it's wonderful and elegant. On the other hand, you're biased for this idea, so are blinded to the massive hurdles.

For me, this is good enough to be the last word, not that I think saying that will stop the discussion! Interbane has been able to make much better points than I have, so my hat is off to him. He attacks the problem with amazing patience and clearly revels in the process of dialogue. Robert is no slouch, either. The only part I disagree with above is that I would call Robert's system beautiful but not elegant. It seems more baroque to me.

DWill wrote: It seems more baroque to me.

Do I detect a double entendre? Maybe unintentional, but if the shoe fits?