| From: lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Is Gauquelin's Mars effect real?
Date: 25 Jan 1994 14:10 MST
Organization: University of Arizona
Lines: 151
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <25JAN199414101265@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu>
References: <2i2amk$jp4@harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41
In article <2i2amk$jp4@harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au>, quantum@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Damien Pope) writes...
:Hi, I'm sure this topic has been discussed before but I'm a bit new to
:skepticism and thus don't know much about it. What I would like to know
:is whether Gauquelin's Mars effect is real or not. I want to know
:whether there is a statistically significant correlation between the
:birth dates of champion athletes with energetic, aggressive, couragous
:personalities
:and the prominance of the planet Mars in the sky ( or it being on the
:rise or whatever astrology says a planet must be doing to influence
:people's personalities when they are born ).
I'm not going to answer whether or not there is a real effect, but it
is certainly true that a number of studies have found a statistically
significant correlation.
: I am also interested in CSICOP's testing of Gauquelin's claim. I
:have heard that they deliberately rigged the test so that it would not
:show Gauquelin's correlation. I have also heard that some committee
:members of CSICOP such as Dennis Rawlins resigned from CSICOP over there
:bad handling of the test. Is it true that CSICOP made mistakes in there
:testing of Gauquelin's claim? Were they deliberate or not?
Your information appears to be a bit confused. Here's a very brief
history of CSICOP and the Mars effect:
Pre-CSICOP:
1. _The Humanist_ published "Objections to Astrology" and an article
by Lawrence Jerome which contained criticism of Gauquelin. Jerome's
criticisms were in error. Gauquelin wrote a reply. At some point,
CSICOP Fellow Marvin Zelen suggested a means of testing the thesis
(put forth by the Belgian Comite Para) that the "Mars effect" in
both Gauquelin's data and in their own replication of Gauquelin was
the result of (a) Mars tending to be close to the Sun in the sky and
(b) the tendency for human beings to be born in the early morning
hours (around sunrise).
2. Gauquelin performed the test suggested by Zelen. The result:
the Comite Para's thesis was falsified. The results were published
in an article by Gauquelin in _The Humanist_ in Nov. 1977.
3. Marvin Zelen, Paul Kurtz, and George Abell wrote a reply to
Gauquelin which engaged in some post hoc sample splitting and analysis
which referee Elizabeth Scott of the UC Berkeley statistics department
characterized as misleading. In effect, their article tried to cast
doubt on whether or not the Zelen test was supportive of Gauquelin by
ignoring what the test was designed to do (check this particular
explanation of the "Mars effect").
I should say a bit more about the Zelen test. If the Comite Para
was right, then there should have been a "Mars effect" for everyone,
not just sports champions. So the Zelen test compared a huge sample
of non-sports champions to a subsample of Gauquelin's already collected
sports champions. So for the purposes of the Zelen test, it was taken
for granted that there would be a "Mars effect" in the sports champions,
and it was expected that the same effect would show up in the
non-champions. It didn't, and then Zelen, Kurtz, and Abell directed
all of their attention to the sample of sports champions and tried
to maintain that it didn't really show a "Mars effect" either.
Further note: all of the above took place in the pages of _The Humanist_,
a publication of the American Humanist Association, then edited by
CSICOP chairman Paul Kurtz. CSICOP's official position is that none
of it had anything to do with CSICOP. However, there are some published
statements in both _The Humanist_ and the _Skeptical Inquirer_ which
describe the Gauquelin test as a CSICOP project. CSICOP was formed
with the assistance of the AHA, the three authors of the response to
Gauquelin were CSICOP Fellows, etc. And once CSICOP made its big
break from the AHA (when Kurtz was "not reelected" as editor of _The
Humanist_), all the Gauquelin stuff was published in the _Skeptical
Inquirer_ instead of _The Humanist_.
CSICOP's test:
4. CSICOP Executive Council member Dennis Rawlins had done his own
calculations prior to the Zelen test, and had concluded that there
was no way that the Comite Para's explanation could be right. He
told Kurtz et al. that if Gauquelin's data was bad, the Zelen test
would come out in his favor, but he wasn't entirely clear about
his own calculations until after the Zelen, Kurtz, and Abell response
had been published.
5. CSICOP decided to do its own replication with U.S. athletes. The
data was collected by Paul Kurtz and two assistants in Buffalo, and
the calculations were performed by Dennis Rawlins. The data was
sent to Rawlins in three batches, which showed a successive drop
in percentage of athletes with Mars in a key sector. Rawlins
argues that this could not have been done intentionally by Kurtz
because Kurtz, Zelen, and Abell were unable to do the necessary
calculations to determine Mars' position at time of birth. (In other
words, Rawlins himself rejects the claim that anything was fudged
about the U.S. test.) Suitbert Ertel, however, thinks that the
athletes which were selected in the successive batches were less
eminent, and has an unpublished article with analysis concluding
that's the case. (Rawlins thinks that's wrong, too, on the grounds
that Kurtz would only do that if he believed there were actually
a "Mars effect.")
6. The _Skeptical Inquirer_ published articles by Michel and Francoise
Gauquelin, Dennis Rawlins, and by Kurtz, Zelen, and Abell on the results
of the U.S. test. Rawlins had some very strong negative things to say
about everyone else, some of which were deleted from his article over
his objections. His home address was given in the article for readers
to write for the complete version, but the wording Rawlins requested
was changed. Rawlins felt that he was censored. My own opinion is that
the deletions were appropriate (the comments were essentially ad
hominems). Rawlins correctly noted that both the Gauquelins and the
CSICOP team engaged in post hoc sample splitting in their discussions
of the data, and in a footnote he complained about 3, above.
7. Things became very heated between Rawlins and the rest of the
CSICOP Executive Council about the way the Gauquelin stuff had been
handled. Rawlins ended up being "not reelected" to the Executive
Council, then he resigned from the _Skeptical Inquirer_ editorial
board (Rawlins says his resignation was conditional on publication
of his resignation letter, and that therefore he didn't really resign),
and then he was removed as a Fellow of CSICOP. Rawlins ended up writing
a very ad hominem article in _Fate_ magazine in which he charged CSICOP
with dishonesty. _Skeptical Inquirer_ editor Ken Frazier, in order
to show that CSICOP was not guilty of a coverup, gave Rawlins 5 1/2
unedited pages in the _Skeptical Inquirer_ to make his complaints.
(Rawlins essentially wasted the space with a barely comprehensible
rant--it takes a lot of background knowledge to completely understand
all the charges he makes.)
8. In 1983, after much stuff going on behind the scenes, Abell, Kurtz,
and Zelen published an article in the _Skeptical Inquirer_ admitting
most if not all of the errors/misrepresentations in the 1977 _Humanist_ article
and in their report on the U.S. test.
After 1983, CSICOP pretty much ignored the "Mars effect" until it
published Suitbert Ertel's reanalysis of the U.S. test data a little
over a year ago. Ertel concluded that when the athletes in the CSICOP
test are ranked by eminence (as measured by citation frequency in
encyclopedias and dictionaries of athletes), there is a trend of
increasing births with Mars in a key sector as eminence increases.
Paul Kurtz attempted a very weak one-page response that seemed to miss
the whole point of Ertel's analysis.
There is apparently more forthcoming in future issues, based on the
French Skeptics' (CFEPP) test of the "Mars effect."
The above is really only the briefest of summaries. I've put together
a chronology of publications, correspondence, phone calls, and other
events involving skeptics and the "Mars effect" from the 1950's to the
present which is far from complete. (I have a stack of documents about
three inches thick which still needs to be added.) I am willing to
send a copy to anyone who sends me a 3.5" diskette and some kind of
postage-paid mailer. I have it in Microsoft Word for the Macintosh, but
I can also put it in a number of PC formats.
: The impression I get from what I do know is that there still is
:some disagreement over the issue even though it has been around for many
:years.
You got that right.
Jim Lippard Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Date: Fri, 27 May 94 00:23:00 UTC
From: k.irving1@genie.geis.com
Subject: the "dumb defense"
To: lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Message-id: <199405270050.AA1627317372@relay2.geis.com>
X-Envelope-to: lippard
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
X-Genie-Id: 3789690
X-Genie-From: K.IRVING1
Jim:
Re your recent post to sci.skeptic on the Mars effect and CSICOP,
your mention of what might be called the "dumb defense" (Rawlins'
statement that Kurtz couldn't have fudged because he was not up
to the calculations) struck me. At that date there were dozens of
companies around offering computer-calculated horoscopes (i.e.,
just the chart, no interpretation) for as little as $1 in batch
processing. Since Gauquelin's key sectors are, for all practical
purposes, the 9th and 12th houses of a horoscope done with
Placidus houses (which would have been standard issue at that
time from any computer service), it would have been very easy to
have had the last two batches done before sending them to
Rawlins. This comparison of the key sectors with the houses was
noted in several of Gauquelin's books and might even have been
mentioned in Humanist articles preceding the CSICOP test.
For an argument to be made that this kind of "pre-calculation"
was a possibility, there would have to be some "missing" data,
which there was in a sense--for example, Kurtz's contention that
he got no replies from Texas, which Gauquelin said was one of his
best sources. I don't actually _think_ Kurtz did this (at least
this scenario is not at the top of the list), but Rawlins's "dumb
defense" isn't much of a defense against the possibility.
The "nonbeliever" defense appended to the dumb defense (Kurtz
would have had to have _believed_ the Mars effect were true in
order to go to such lengths) isn't much either. For one thing, in
Gauquelin's comment appended to Curry's article, he notes that it
was Kurtz who first commented on a possible "problem" for
basketball players with the Mars effect. The fact that his
sampling loaded basketball players into the last two groups just
seems to follow along with that. Maybe he didn't "believe," but
if not, there was all kinds of cognitive dissonance in play,
since if a particular athletic group shows a consistent weakness
in regard to Mars, this would indicate that the consistent
strength in other groups is not simply a methodological
artifact.
I tend to agree with Suitbert that Kurtz simply followed the
leads that took him away from the apparent Mars effect in the
first batch by grabbing names without regard for their
performance as athletes from sources that gave poor results (the
team-sport directories) and dropping sources that gave good ones
(Lincoln Library), not to mention those basketball players. But
the possibility of discarding data still remains, and always
will.
Ken Irving
PS--Don't let them killer bees get you! Saw something about this
on CNN.
[lost msg, but I agreed with Ken]
To: IN%"k.irving1@genie.geis.com"
Subj: RE: the "dumb defense"
Enter your message below. Press CTRL/Z when complete, or CTRL/C to quit:
One more thing. Lawrence E. Jerome, "Planetary 'Influences' versus
Mathematical Realities," _The Humanist_ vol. 36, no. 2, March/April
1976, pp. 52-53:
p. 52:
Contrary to Gauquelin's basic assumptions, people are _not_ born
with Mars simply in one of twelve sectors. (His sectors are
actually the same as the astrologers' Placidean houses numbered
in reverse.)
So you were right about that.
Jim
% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Received: from inet-gw-3.pa.dec.com by us4rmc.pko.dec.com (5.65/rmc-22feb94) id AA29754; Wed, 8 Jun 94 15:14:24 -040
% Received: from Violet.CCIT.Arizona.EDU by inet-gw-3.pa.dec.com (5.65/27May94) id AA12511; Wed, 8 Jun 94 10:06:41 -070
% Received: from CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU by CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU (PMDF V4.2-15 #2381) id <01HDANKY49XC8Y54UD@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>; Wed, 8 Jun 1994 10:05:45 MS
% Date: Wed, 08 Jun 1994 10:05:45 -0700 (MST)
% From: "James J. Lippard" <LIPPARD@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>
% Subject: Re: Request for CSICOP post
% To: dwovax::stark
% Message-Id: <01HDANKY49XE8Y54UD@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>
% X-Envelope-To: stark@dwovax.ENET.dec.com
% X-Vms-To: IN%"stark@dwovax.ENET.dec.com"
% Mime-Version: 1.0
% Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
|