Re: Astrological Ideas in The Extended Phenotype
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 5:46 pm
Rebutted at The Mars Effect is GenuineInterbane wrote: Benski, C., et al. The Mars Effect. 1996, Prometheus Books.
Quality books. Great conversations.
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Rebutted at The Mars Effect is GenuineInterbane wrote: Benski, C., et al. The Mars Effect. 1996, Prometheus Books.
I'm sure it is, I haven't had the time to read it. You never answered my question about why professional hockey players are found to be born just after the winter solstice. Could this be a Solstice Effect? I believe this effect to be true.Rebutted at The Mars Effect is Genuine
My understanding is that in junior grades, older children within the year group have an advantage due to age, and so are statistically more likely to pursue a sporting career. It has nothing to do with astrology.Interbane wrote:You never answered my question about why professional hockey players are found to be born just after the winter solstice. Could this be a Solstice Effect? I believe this effect to be true.
That's my understanding also. There's a reason astrology isn't taken seriously, even if a test seems to have no alternative explanation such as the Mars Effect. There is no physical link between a planet's movement and life on Earth strong enough to cause an effect. The moon causes the tide and messes with Earth's magnetic field, so is only barely strong enough by extension of it's secondary effects. There are nearly unlimited factors 'stronger' than planetary gravity which would influence birth rates. That's even excluding parents who might lie about when their child was born.My understanding is that in junior grades, older children within the year group have an advantage due to age, and so are statistically more likely to pursue a sporting career. It has nothing to do with astrology.
You do appreciate, Interbane, that your quoted statement here is a contradiction in terms?Interbane wrote:..even if a test seems to have no alternative explanation such as the Mars Effect. There is no physical link between a planet's movement and life on Earth strong enough to cause an effect.
I think you might be getting ahead of yourself here, Robert. From what I've read of the Mars Effect, I don't see that correlation is yet firmly established. If the data showed an obvious correlation there wouldn't be a controversy. And even if a correlation existed, it's far from clear as to what would be causing it. Right? It could be statistical anomaly such as the hockey players born in January. So until someone comes up with a plausible hypothesis about this mechanism behind the so-called Mars Effect—how the position of Mars can possibly affect a person's sports ability—you really have nothing more than speculation at this point.Robert Tulip wrote: This is why Gauquelin's work is a momentous paradigm-shifting finding, and why scientific bigots resort to fraud, censorship and lies to deflect his work. It requires that people change their minds.
Actually, that's not what I'm saying. That's what you're assuming, that all other causes are ruled out. This is like saying you have no clue how your keys ended up locked inside your car, therefore it must be an invisible purple dragon that also resides in your garage. It is not at all impossible to believe that gravity from mars may lead to people becoming super athletes. It's a laughable notion, but not impossible to believe. It is not my resistance to this idea that is faulty, it's your ulterior motive in believing it to be true.You are saying that all other causes are ruled out
My model is an accurate four dimensional physical model of the solar system through time. I know that may sound complicated, but in fact it is quite straightforward and simple to understand. The sun orbits the galaxy at 220 kilometres per second, dragging the planets with it. The sun stays within one solar diameter of the centre of mass, the point that describes an exact mathematical arc around the galaxy. The planets form helical paths around the centre of mass. In my model, the Z axis, the path of the centre of mass, is severely truncated to squash the helix for ease of depiction. The XY axes, marked by the orbit of Neptune, are about nine billion kilometres across. The sun travels 7 billion kilometres per year around the galaxy, so the Z axis of my model would need to be a few hundred times longer to model the solar system helix over 179 years with accurate proportions between the axes. The fourth dimension, time, is shown in this model as the positions of the gas giants at any chosen date. Remember, this 179 year model is true virtually for ever, permanently repeating for the duration of the orbital stability of the solar system.Interbane wrote:There is no helical structure to time. You're mistaking a visual 2d model for something physical.
I get the impression you didn’t understand Dawkins’ point about the statistical averages of a slow wind. The solar system is the ultimate background climate for the earth. Everything in a climatic system responds to its initial conditions through emergent complexity.considering the impossible possible, the species would then have to be concerned with this infinitesimal background gravitational fluctuation that started 100 generations or more ago… It is cancelled out by local noise.
The 3D helical structure of DNA just coincidentally has similar morphology as the 4D helical structure of the solar system. My point is that initial conditions provide boundary limits for phenotypic variation, so the regular conditions of the 4D helix of the solar system are a foundation for the variation of life.You're also jumping between the helical structure of DNA, and an organism's phenotype. Which one are you referring to?
Disregarding your last flippant points, it is entirely meaningless to speak of life without its initial conditions. Earth could not exist except in the solar system. The helical structure I describe has been stable for four billion years.What would the phenotypic effect be without the 'initial conditions' that you're proposing? Can you hypothesize the difference? Would famous people stop dying every 2148 years seperate from other important events? Would we have developed a third eye?
By stacking up chunks of time around the axis of the SSB path we get a helix. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune reach a point 13/12 around the circle every 179 years. Stacking 144 of these models describes the ‘DNA’ of the Great Year.With regards to the DNA, the helix is a general response to the stacking up of single monomer units into a polymer, which means DNA can’t help being a helix. So the chain of causality must by necessity include an explanation for how infinitesimal gravitational variations dictated that life be composed of monomers and polymers. Not only this, but those infinitesimal gravitational variations would do this 'intelligently!', since they would want DNA to resemble the orbits their parent planets go through (not really, only in a reduced dimensional analogy) over the course of 179 years.
I’m not putting the meaning in, I am finding it as an objective fact described in the Bible. My claim that the Bible is in essence scientific is a challenge to scientific orthodoxy.Eh? What is the challenge to scientific orthodoxy? You're lining up ducks. No one would refute that there are patterns here. Well, maybe they would if you were wrong. But this is inconsequential. These patterns are meaningless. You are putting meaning into them.
Thanks Geo. If you read Ertel’s paper refuting the critics of the Mars Effect, you will see he found it with p value 0.005 in one of the Skeptics ‘massaged’ samples, and challenged the skeptics to respond to perceptions that CSICOP tampered with the data. As far as I know they have not responded, and appear caught red-handed, reliant only on ad hominem and bluster. One of Gauquelin’s three samples has p value 0.00004, a result grossly improbable except by a real planetary effect.geo wrote:From what I've read of the Mars Effect, I don't see that correlation is yet firmly established. If the data showed an obvious correlation there wouldn't be a controversy. And even if a correlation existed, it's far from clear as to what would be causing it. Right? It could be statistical anomaly such as the hockey players born in January. So until someone comes up with a plausible hypothesis about this mechanism behind the so-called Mars Effect—how the position of Mars can possibly affect a person's sports ability—you really have nothing more than speculation at this point.
Please, I am not talking about distant stars but about our solar system. As I commented earlier, these effects have nothing to do with the stars except as markers for local cycles. I regard Gauquelin as the equal of Galileo because the shift to a precessional paradigm, for which Gauquelin provides indispensible groundwork, is equally mind-bending as the shift from geocentric to heliocentric cosmology.While Dawkins may acknowledge certain "slow and relentless" forces that when all added up cause the cork to eventually move across the ocean, I don't think such small forces have been quantified or can be measured in any meaningful way. So that's all speculation too. It seems more likely that the gravitational tug of distant stars would be so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't see a correlation being firmly established yet much less a hypothesis that would explain it. And so even if we grant you that these forces might exist, it just might be premature to call Gauquelin the next Galileo.
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.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. The weakness of the effect is shown by the observation that it is only detectable among eminent individuals who had a natural birth at known time, and as Ertel notes, decreases statistically with decline of eminence in the study group.