• In total there are 3 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 3 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

#73: Nov. - Dec. 2009 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

At first I naively thought the claim was that the planetary influence must somehow influence the genetic makeup of a fetus. But I see now that time of birth is the only really significant thing and that genes have nothing to do with future athletic prowess. Two couch potatoes without an athletic gene in their bodies could produce an elite athlete. I'm puzzled at the seeming impermeability to this planet force of the mother's skin stretched over her abdomen. Somebody explain to me why the effect could only manifest at birth.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that prowess in athletics makes the supposed Mars effect a weak one, as Robert says. Why wouldn't the opposite be true, that just influencing whether a person is athletic would evidence a weak force (which in any case the ME doesn't predict), while the ME somehow revealing itself only in cases in which athletes were prominent would take a strong force. The determination of eminence is of course a big methodological sticking point for studies of this kind.
Robert Tulip wrote: What could this effect be? My view is that, like oysters which adjust to the position of the moon by gravity alone, human genes could well have ability to detect planetary positions to ‘choose’ time of birth. A set of genes for athletic eminence could well include ability to optimise time of birth, although of course why Mars would correlate with athletic eminence is a pure mystery. It just does, as Saturn equally correlates with medical eminence, Jupiter with political eminence, and the Moon with writing eminence.
This just doesn't make sense. If the individual already had genes for athletic eminence, what would be the sense of getting herself born when Mars is in a certain sector? Astrology and genetics is a weird marriage.

What we have in the Mars Effect is an anomaly. That much has to be granted the pro-astrology side, it seems to me from the information I've read. Gauquelin's results have been replicated. The ME is the one and only (as far as I could see) piece of so-far valid scientific evidence for astrology, and it is a slender thread by which believers continue to interpret random events as being under the influence (however vanishingly slight) of some of the planets. But even if the claimed effect were slight, yet it could somehow be established that the sector in which Mars was positioned at an individual's birth played any part whatsoever, I agree with Robert that this would be reason to consider a different science paradigm. It's just that there's now a spoonful of evidence on the pro-astrology side, and about a truckload on the anti side.

P.S. Another wrinkle in the data is that in several cases a planet had a negative corelation to eminence in a field.
Last edited by DWill on Tue Jan 19, 2010 1:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

I don't see there being anything valid to nonlunar gravity being a zeitgeber. Even lunar gravity is questionable. You mention oysters being affected by the gravity of the moon, but ignore the parsimonious explanation that it is instead Earth's electromagnetic field. Look at the following differences around the world in gravity, due only to elevation. These are massive changes compared to the infinitesimal influence of nonlunar bodies. Add environmental objects, motion, location on earth(centrifugal), and the variant location of nonlunar bodies to this, and you'll realize how stupid what you're suggesting actually is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_gravity

This is like saying light from distant stars is influential during daytime, or that the fart of a mosquito is influential during a hurricane. Literally. This is completely ridiculous. Explaining to you how weak the effects of gravity are that you're proposing is like explaining to a child the size of the universe. The words are there, but comprehension is lacking. You're blinded by your bias.

The Mars Effect is a thousand times more likely to be caused by parents fudging the account of their child's birth to coincide with their superstitious beliefs about the heavens. This doesn't mean there is no correlation between mars and eminent athletes. It means the gravity of mars is not the cause.

As for DNA, the shape of it is helical because monomers and polymers naturally form into that shape when combined. Emergent structures are also found with water as the building blocks, in the form of snowflakes. This is the reason DNA is helical. You're attempting to offer a competing reason which is so far fetched that I shouldn't be wasting my time explaining any of this to you.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

geo wrote: I'm not going to start studying Gauquelin's work because I just don't see that there's a lot there. I also don't have a background in statistics so I can't really comment on the data. However, on the face of it there seem to be a lot of problems, although there very well might be some kind of anomaly that is worth further study. A few comments however. Gauquelin started from the position of trying to find meaning in astrology. I find this highly suspect. I say be wary of those who come from a biased position especially in the field of statistics where data can be tweaked in subconscious and conscious ways.
Geo, the problem with Gauquelin’s data is that he found extremely weak real effects, not only looking at positions of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon at birth of eminent people but also at inheritability of planetary positions, for which he found strong, even compelling evidence in analysis of family birth data. Applied to Galileo, many people in the seventeenth century were ‘highly suspect’ about anyone seeking to apply a battering ram to the prevailing geocentric orthodoxy by ‘finding meaning’ through a telescope. The replication of Gauquelin’s findings under hostile peer review, and subsequent threadbare efforts to explain them away, shows that the bias here is in the suppression of new scientific findings, not in those findings themselves.
Your view that human genes could have the ability to detect planetary positions to ‘choose’ time of birth is very interesting, however, this is nothing more than a grand mind experiment at this point. Are these claims for athletic, medical, and political eminence backed up by reliable scientific data? Or does this proof rely entirely on a few small select and questionable studies? You might be satisfied with Gauquelin's work, but apparently most scientists aren't. You can't simply blame the lack of acceptance to bias in the scientific community. If this effect was real it could and should be verified by bigger, better studies. So where are they? CSICOP's blunderings, if true, are in the past and irrelevant. Also if CSICOP can tweak the data as alleged then so can Gauquelin. In fact, this has been suggested.
Birth time analysis is actually more than a mind experiment, given that Gauquelin has proved strong genetic determinance. The West-Mateus paper on the Gauquelin Controversy shows the tragic history of a great man stymied and driven to death by fools. Here is their comment on inheritance of planetary positions: “The Heredity Studies: During the 1960s, the Gauquelins conducted another massive study that examined astrological relationships between parents and their children. The 30,000 size sample of ordinary French citizens and their children revealed that when parents had certain planets in Sectors 1 and 4 of the charts, their children were also likely to have the same planets in the same sectors. The correlations between particular planets – such as the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were stronger in that order. The significance level was 1 million to 1. Induced or Caesarean births did not show this pattern.”

No resources are available for study of planetary effects because mainstream science has determined that anything that might give succour to astrology is outside the pale of acceptable research topics.
Wiki: However, correlation does not imply causation. The issue remains contentious and the debate is inconclusive. A more detailed study by Ertel (1988) appeared to show that there is an effect. Still, the explanation for this effect remains uncertain. A paper by de Jager (1990) suggested that humans may have an optimal reproduction period and that the orbit of Mars currently happens to coincide with this interval. Longer periods of observation are needed to settle the issue.[3] Another possibility is that the data may have been skewed by incorrect reporting of birth dates during the last half century. Examples of data-mining can be found in various studies related to acupuncture. Those who are biased in favor of acupuncture have either set up faulty studies, or have tweaked the data, or have simply denied the reality that acupuncture is no better than placebo. Several well-designed studies have completely debunked the efficacy of acupuncture, but its adherents continue to promote it. As such they are like members of the Intelligent Design community who simply deny scientific fact when it conflicts with their fixed ideological beliefs.
Wikipedia is dominated by people who are very conservative about ‘fringe’ claims. This text is an example of extreme bias. Gauquelin’s work does not admit of explanation by de Jager’s Mars orbital theory, as it is about the position of Mars each day – with eminent athletes more likely to be born when Mars is rising or culminating. Geoffrey Dean claims that doctors and parents in France in the early twentieth century may have colluded to write birth times with good Mars positions. Considering the lack of evidence and absurdity of this idea - can you imagine doctors agreeing to systematic astrologically motivated deception? - it can be readily dismissed.
Equating Gauquelin with Galileo still bothers me. Galieo had actual scientific data that conflicted with the geocentric model. AND he had a plausible heliocentric theory to explain the phenomenon. As far as I can tell Gauquelin simply does not provide an explanation for what could very well be statistical anomalies. You can't have a paradigm shift without reliable data and certainly not without a working hypothesis. I say wait for better studies to come along and then start formulating hypotheses. Until then you are putting the cart before the horse. You are jumping to conclusions.
Planets are the liminal edge of the climate of the earth, as the physical objects surrounding and protecting earth from the universe. They form an enveloping cyclic environment with real periodic effects. Ocean tides are about 2/3 from the moon, about 1/3 from the sun, and about 1% from the other planets combined. With the size of the ocean (about four billion cubic kilometres of water), one percent is really a lot as a permanent contribution to this base daily climatic factor for the earth.

Those who have sought to prove that Gauquelin’s findings are ‘statistical anomalies’ are now in a similar position as the climate scientists of the Hadley Centre in Britain, having been asked by Ertel for data to support their claims but refusing to supply it. The data supports Gauquelin. The studies which rubbished him refused to accept his methodological insistence that only eminent natural born people be included in the study. Amongst this cohort, the anomaly is that more of them are born with outer planets on the eastern horizon than in the general population, indicating genetic sensitivity to the outer planets.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Tue Jan 19, 2010 4:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

DWill wrote:At first I naively thought the claim was that the planetary influence must somehow influence the genetic makeup of a fetus. But I see now that time of birth is the only really significant thing and that genes have nothing to do with future athletic prowess. Two couch potatoes without an athletic gene in their bodies could produce an elite athlete. I'm puzzled at the seeming impermeability to this planet force of the mother's skin stretched over her abdomen. Somebody explain to me why the effect could only manifest at birth.
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.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that prowess in athletics makes the supposed Mars effect a weak one, as Robert says. Why wouldn't the opposite be true, that just influencing whether a person is athletic would evidence a weak force (which in any case the ME doesn't predict), while the ME somehow revealing itself only in cases in which athletes were prominent would take a strong force. The determination of eminence is of course a big methodological sticking point for studies of this kind.
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. The force here is not new, but rather arises from the evolution of the earth within a steadily pulsing field, with all the planets including Mars circling the sky ever day over the trillion days of life on earth. The mechanical repetition of the tiny tidal and gravitational effect is apparently enough for genes to use this small difference as a selection factor.
Robert Tulip wrote: What could this effect be? My view is that, like oysters which adjust to the position of the moon by gravity alone, human genes could well have ability to detect planetary positions to ‘choose’ time of birth. A set of genes for athletic eminence could well include ability to optimise time of birth, although of course why Mars would correlate with athletic eminence is a pure mystery. It just does, as Saturn equally correlates with medical eminence, Jupiter with political eminence, and the Moon with writing eminence.
This just doesn't make sense. If the individual already had genes for athletic eminence, what would be the sense of getting herself born when Mars is in a certain sector?
If the Mars-in-the-east birth decision of a baby is a phenotypic expression of a gene, it indicates the deep harmonic relation between Earth and Mars. It could be that a Mars gene is just found together with a bunch of genes for athletic eminence. Sure Mars is a long way away, but it has followed the same pattern with respect to the earth since before life began. The signal of Mars rising as the trigger for operation of a gene for birth time is not really more mysterious than many surprising genetic facts found in plants and animals. A gravitational sense exists in life, and this is how it manifests in people. This planetary link at birth could be the tip of an iceberg of subtle planetary effects.

Astrology and genetics is a weird marriage. What we have in the Mars Effect is an anomaly. That much has to be granted the pro-astrology side, it seems to me from the information I've read. Gauquelin's results have been replicated. The ME is the one and only (as far as I could see) piece of so-far valid scientific evidence for astrology, and it is a slender thread by which believers continue to interpret random events as being under the influence (however vanishingly slight) of some of the planets. P.S. Another wrinkle in the data is that in several cases a planet had a negative corelation to eminence in a field.
Combining astrology and genetics, the visible outer planets all create observed and proven statistical trends in individual charts and family inheritance. However, Gauquelin found no evidence for the sun signs of zodiac astrology, despite looking. The lack of scientific evidence of the signs is a problem for astrology.
But even if the claimed effect were slight, yet it could somehow be established that the sector in which Mars was positioned at an individual's birth played any part whatsoever, I agree with Robert that this would be reason to consider a different science paradigm. It's just that there's now a spoonful of evidence on the pro-astrology side, and about a truckload on the anti side.
The paradigm shift here is from an essentially three dimensional spatial model of the solar system into a four dimensional spatiotemporal model. Gauquelin provides a step towards this model by looking for trends on the basis of terrestrial alignments to the outer planets at different times, to find patterns in time. My claim is that I have built such a model of time and it can be seen in the photograph in my paper on the Gas Giant Planets, the Holy City and the Great Year.

The model demonstrates the helical patterns of the solar system through time. These patterns are only visible through inter-temporal comparison, freezing the path of the helix. Unlike comparison between the rungs of a 3D DNA double helix, to see the 4D rungs, such as the Jupiter Saturn 60 year ladders shown in my model, requires that 3D models of the solar system be set in motion, including along the Z axis of the sun’s movement around the galaxy. The resultant helix provides the model to enable comparison of regularities through time. This is where we find the 179 year gas giant cycle as in harmony with the Zodiacal Age and the Great Year. As the Zodiac Ages march along the same path as the year in reverse, they establish a twelve-fold pattern which I suggest is the physical basis of the signs of the zodiac. The implication is that the Great Year causes the twelve signs of the zodiac through its harmonic resonance with the solar system centre of mass, mapped on the topology of the annual cycle of the solstices and equinoxes.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Jan 20, 2010 12:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

Interbane wrote:I don't see there being anything valid to nonlunar gravity being a zeitgeber. Even lunar gravity is questionable.
http://www.astrozero.co.uk/astroscience/koll1ge.pdf gives this example: “”in 1994, Ertel had commented on the French sceptics’ treatment of their data. They had diligently assembled birth-data on over a thousand sportsmen, and were loudly proclaiming that no Mars-effect could be found in this data. He made the rudimentary observation that, using some well-known French reference-books such as Stars du Sport and La Fabuleuse Histoire du Sport, the data-set divided into half: those sportsmen mentioned in these books, and those not. The former were the eminent group, the latter were not. The former showed a clear Mars-effect, the latter showed none. One would have thought this was fairly simple.”
You mention oysters being affected by the gravity of the moon, but ignore the parsimonious explanation that it is instead Earth's electromagnetic field.
Frank Brown did a series of experiments which revealed lunar effects in oysters, rats and hamsters. See http://www.booktalk.org/post56782.html#p56782 for a summary of Brown’s work.
Look at the following differences around the world in gravity, due only to elevation. These are massive changes compared to the infinitesimal influence of nonlunar bodies. Add environmental objects, motion, location on earth(centrifugal), and the variant location of nonlunar bodies to this, and you'll realize how stupid what you're suggesting actually is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_gravity
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.
This is like saying light from distant stars is influential during daytime, or that the fart of a mosquito is influential during a hurricane. Literally. This is completely ridiculous. Explaining to you how weak the effects of gravity are that you're proposing is like explaining to a child the size of the universe. The words are there, but comprehension is lacking. You're blinded by your bias.
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.
The Mars Effect is a thousand times more likely to be caused by parents fudging the account of their child's birth to coincide with their superstitious beliefs about the heavens. This doesn't mean there is no correlation between mars and eminent athletes. It means the gravity of mars is not the cause.
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.
As for DNA, the shape of it is helical because monomers and polymers naturally form into that shape when combined. Emergent structures are also found with water as the building blocks, in the form of snowflakes. This is the reason DNA is helical. You're attempting to offer a competing reason which is so far fetched that I shouldn't be wasting my time explaining any of this to you.
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.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Jan 20, 2010 12:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

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.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

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).
Last edited by DWill on Wed Jan 20, 2010 9:05 am, edited 4 times in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

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.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Jan 20, 2010 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

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.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype

Unread post

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.
Post Reply

Return to “The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene - by Richard Dawkins”