Review #11 of 2024: Astrology: Science or Superstition
Some science, but lots of superstition from some unexpected sources
Over the past decade of my life (or really since the end of highschool, which is functionally equivalent), I've become increasingly disillusioned with the materialist worldview that has become a governing doctrine for so many here in the West. I've taken various approaches to try and combat this. In college, I practiced both buddhist meditation and stoic philosophy, which while helpful on a personal level, did little to help me actually overcome this materialist attitude. More recently, I've converted to Catholicism, which while I find the dogmatism and excessive rationality of scholasticism frustrating, has at least began to inoculate a faith in a realm beyond the material in me. I've also continued by exploration of philosophy, finding McGilchrist's Master and his Emissary especially illuminating. Most recently, I've become interested in explicitly esoteric spiritual practices, like astrology and the tarot. While I'm not sure if there's anything materially behind either, they at the very least serve as powerful tools to interrogate my own psychology.
But is this really all astrology has to offer? In the past few months, I stumbled upon this book by German psychologist Hans Eysenck, on the blog of substack author Neoliberal Feudalism, that suggests otherwise.
Scientific astrology?
In this book, Eysenck, who is a psychologist/social scientist by training, does an extensive survey of scientific literature testing the claims that traditional astrology makes about the role of the planets in shaping our personalities, life events, and biological processes. He largely finds nothing, with most astrologers refusing to engage with the scientific process, and those that do conducting poorly designed and statistically insignificant studies. There are three interesting findings that Eysenck does identify however: potential links between planetary alignments and sunspot activity (and in turn links with sunspot activity and weather/mood), the gravitational influence of the moon on marine circadian rhythms (and potentially our own), and strange correlations between the position of planets in the sky at the time of birth, and particularly strong character traits in eminent people (note that these are character traits rather than destinies). Out of these three, only the last was replicated sufficiently to Eysenck’s satisfaction: the studies were done by the meticulous Michael Gaquelin1 (and his wife), who has extensive astrology knowledge from his youth, but also extensively trained skepticism and statistical talent from his time at the Sorbonne in Paris. Unfortunately for astrologers, it seems like few of these correlations have any predictive power. For example, the 30% increase in likelihood to be born under an ascendent Mars only applies to eminent sportsman, not to their less professional colleagues. And any insights that could be gained by such facts are better addressed by fields such as psychoanalysis.
Superstitious scientists?
This book was published in 1982, so hopefully in the 40 years since Eysneck wrote this book, more replications have been done to strengthen or discredit the claims of astrology highlighted in this book. I will do some digging over the winter holidays to see if I can find anything worth reporting on. However, from the evidence presented here, I doubt that any finding will massively change my attitude towards astrology primarily as a psychological, rather than a predictive tool. Rather, I think my biggest take away from this book is that institutionalized science, and dogmatic scientistism adopted by most of the population in the West, is no more objective and scientific than the dogmas of astrologers or those of the Catholic church (in fact much less so because the church does not claim that its metaphysical propositions can be proven by experiment). To be a scientist is extremely difficult: it requires that you change your beliefs based on evidence, rather than stick preestablished “rules” based on faith alone. Real scientists would have not scoffed and refused to publish Gaquelin’s data, which was, according to Eysneck, conducted with the utmost scientific rigor. You can see similar bias in many other areas of science: economics is probably the field most rife with this kind of dogma, but also in biology, and other fields that I’m too afraid to name here.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a problem limited to modernity: low openness to new ideas is common across all eras, and many domains of life outside of science. It’s just disappointing that an institution and education system that is supposed to inoculate this open attitude towards the acquisition of knowledge so totally fails to do so. The situation is not helped by our funding system. In the past, most science was done by eccentric rich people, or funded by eccentric rich people. Now most research money, at least in biology, comes from the government. To obtain this money you have to write grants, which are evaluated on how closely they conform to the current dogma of the field, and their novelty. This kind of system fails to encourage replication, which is something Esyneck harps on continuously in this book, which is the real reason we have a replication crisis (rather than the nebulous “social science is not science” shtick that some people on the right love to claim).
How I will be changing my life as a result of this book: Esyneck confirms my suspicions about astrology being mainly useful psychologically, but it is exciting to see that there may be rough physical basis underlying the archetypal forms common in astrology. As I stated earlier, I find the comments on science to be perhaps even more valuable than the astrological wisdom present here, and I think I need to redouble my efforts in statistics to be able to differentiate the wheat from the chaff.
If you enjoyed this article, you can sign up for my mailing list here. I blog about language learning, biology, the science and art of learning, and many other things
Josh
However, it is telling (even in the wikipedia article) how biased the scientific establishment is against this being true. The wikipedia article states that Gaquelin failed to correct for mutliple comparisons when a). he clearly did and b). Follow-up studies focused only on the Mars effect, making multiple comparisons unnecessary
Needs more reads. Good article.
Solid and well written review, Joshua. I like how you focus on the element of bias that Eysenck highlights regarding official science’s biases and dogmas. Well done.