DWill wrote:Hello, Robert. I'd go along with Prince Hamlet here: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Many discoveries of science were once themselves undreamt of. "Insufficient data" would be a good response to claims about the legitimacy of some part of traditional astrology.
I think it is more that astrology has a tendency to make highly exaggerated claims which have been easy to disprove, and which rest entirely upon intuitive guesswork and anecdote rather than any systematic evidence. That syndrome creates a reasonable suspicion among scientists that astrology is guesswork all the way down. Answering that suspicion has to first present a coherent explanation of how astrological claims could be possible, which tends to be rejected out of hand in scientific and religious circles. Once the possibility is explained, its plausibility requires astrologers to provide empirical evidence to back up the hypothesis that astrological effects are weak but real.
DWill wrote: People like Dawkins might come down hard on astrology, believing that it was a hinderent to the world discovering science sooner, but astrology has also been seen more favorably as paving the way for astronomy.
I had not seen that criticism from Dawkins. My reading of his criticisms has more been that he lumps all magical thinking together as examples of obsolete delusional method, more in terms of its current fantasy effect in contemporary culture than as a criticism of the past. It is widely recognised that astrology helped inspire astronomy, since much data collected by astronomers such as Galileo and Kepler and Tycho was for astrological forecasting purposes.
DWill wrote:
That said, it is nevertheless understandable that science would shun research into astronomy.
Assuming you meant astrology here, I personally do not find the lack of research at all rational. Rather, the situation is that anyone who expresses interest in astrology becomes an academic pariah, so professional researchers with career aspirations have to steer well clear of such topics.
DWill wrote:There is so much else to spend money on that answers to a real need or is on the cutting edge. The prejudices, as you call them, against such research stem from big challenges to the credibility of any aspect of astrology. But if some mogul decides to fund astrology research privately, that's a different story.
The history of astrology research reveals an intense bigotry on the part of critics, whose methods have been highly dubious, aimed at supporting their preconceived conclusion that astrology is bunk, while ignoring and distorting the positive findings of researchers like Gauquelin who have proved weak but real effects of planetary positions at birth.
I had a conversation about this with some astrologers recently. They were asking what birth chart features indicated mental illness. Since most astrologers are not scientific, they tend to think it is reasonable to use an ad hoc anecdotal method, examining the birth charts of a few people who are mentally ill and jumping to conclusions from whatever features seem to align with astrological convention. What is needed to generate anything reliable is large scale statistical analysis. Epidemiological study could examine the birth charts of thousands or even millions of people with mental illness to find if they have any recurring planetary patterns. If such research did find stable proof of factors with medical correlation, it would be an important and valuable scientific finding, potentially adding a new medical diagnostic tool. The ability of modern computing to crunch big data means such research is entirely possible. An example of rigorous statistical research using artificial intelligence machine learning of massive datasets to show apparent proof of more mistakes during Mercury retrograde, as predicted in astrology, is at
https://www.ayurastro.com/articles/non- ... trograde#/ by Renay Oshop.
DWill wrote:
Dawkins spoke of "speciesism" in a couple of the essays we talked about. Speciesism might be his primary objection to astrology. Why should we think that the cosmos revolves around humans in the way that astrology posits? Why wouldn't physical effects from planetary transits affect an orangutan or a naked mole rat, as well as human creatures?
No, I don’t think speciesism is a real issue here. Prof Frank Brown from Illinois proved in the 1950s that rats have a magnetic sense enabling them to tell without seeing when the moon is above the horizon, and that oysters have a similar lunar sense that enabled them to open when the moon is directly above even when all sensory input is removed and they were moved from New York to Chicago. These examples of a magnetic sense have clear adaptive evolutionary benefits, with rats using their magnetic sense to avoid predators who hunt by moonlight and oysters using magnetism to tell when the tide is high. Life is far more sensitive than we can easily tell. Marchant makes this the theme of Chapter Ten, which I have not read yet, so I hope we can return to it then. I found it by googling Brown, who I first encountered from Gauquelin’s
The Cosmic Clocks. The chapter was published in Wired Magazine -
https://www.wired.com/story/oysters-tha ... me-it-was/ where I found it by searching, not having read that far in the book yet.
It is actually reasonable to think the cosmos revolves around us, since any thinking must occur in a physically located perspective, and such a geocentric approach can examine the question of how we connect to the cosmos around us.
DWill wrote: Is there really anything at all in astrology that can be aligned with modern science? Astrology has developed such sophistication and a type of precision that some of its adherents are loath to admit that their fascinating hobby isn't science.
Again, the Brown case shows how much science has a pathological loathing of astrology. Marchant explains how Brown was made a pariah in his professional circles. My impression, extending from her description, is that this occurred simply because his findings reminded his critics of astrology, and they were in fear that such taint would wreck their own careers if they did not excommunicate him.
The scientific analysis of astrology is a separate topic from astrology itself as a traditional craft, which clearly has nothing to do with the scientific method. Those adherents who imagine astrology is a science are misinformed, because the intuitive mythological symbolism used to read birth charts has none of the systematic rigorous study of evidence required by science. But that does not imply there is no scientific basis for the intuition – it can often turn out that insights garnered from imagination later turn out to have a physical basis.