Mars effect

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The Mars effect is the name given to a controversial claim made by the French psychologist and statistician Michel Gauquelin in his book L'Influence des Astres (1955), and later publications and lectures, regarding a statistical analysis of the position of the planet Mars at the moment of birth among "successful" athletes. Specifically, the claim is that sports champions tend to be born when the planet Mars is either rising or culminating in the sky, more often than it does for ordinary people. The claim, however, is not limited to sports champions: Gauquelin claims to have discovered "highly significant statistical correlations between planetary positions and the birth times of eminently successful people."

This claim of the effect's existence has drawn the attention of scientists and astrologers alike, since, if true, it would seem to provide a certain amount of scientifically-verifiable evidence in support of one of the precepts of astrology. A great deal of controversy surrounds the topic, however: the scientific veracity of the studies used to discover the effect seems suspect to many experts, many attempts to validate or disprove the effect have produced uneven results, and the above has cast significant doubt as to whether the effect exists at all.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

The claim of the "Mars Effect" is based on some of the statistical analyses of Michel Gauquelin, who devoted much of his life to trying to determine whether astrology had any scientific validity. Of all the many analyses performed by Gauquelin, all failed to conclude that astrology had any such validity — with the exception of the diurnal motion of the planets, which corresponds to the astrological houses. Although Gauquelin discovered diurnal "effects" for five planets and twelve associated professions, the correlation of Mars to sports champions is the one that has been most tested by other researchers and has become the most well known. Mars is traditionally associated with warriors and athletes, as can be seen in any astrology text, but critics have pointed out the distribution of Mars in the results is anomalous with a long standing astrological tradition and because of this, the Mars effect has been the subject of considerable controversy. While some claim that the Mars effect is unknown within astrology (i.e. prior to the statistical finding), there is actually a long tradition that goes back to the earliest strata of horoscopic astrology which holds that planets in the angles (i.e. rising, culminating, setting, and anticulminating) are said to be more active and signify the prominence of the specific archetype or form which is associated with the planet in question, Mars being one of them.

[edit] Controversy

A critical paper on this subject was published in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer, the journal of the Committee on Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Astronomer and charter CSICOP member Dennis Rawlins responded to this article by claiming that authors Kurtz, Zelen, and Abell deliberately misrepresented the purpose of the Zelen test. Defenders of the trio contend that Rawlins' criticism was in part based on a misunderstanding of the CSICOP article and that the controversy that followed was just a typical academic squabble, that CSICOP did no deliberate wrong, and that those who study the articles on Gauquelin and the Mars effect will conclude that misunderstandings and miscommunications on almost everyone's part were the order of the day (leading to some heated arguments, fights, broken friendships, published attacks, and tarnished reputations). CSICOP's critics contend that the skeptics' Challenge to Gauquelin was clearly understood by all parties until the test backfired and only then did prominent CSICOP Councillors begin to claim misunderstandings and, when the intra-CSICOP dispute over testing became public, to start a defamation campaign against Rawlins, the CSICOP Council's only astronomer at the time of the papers in question, who had repeatedly objected to the original test before its publication and to CSICOP's subsequent reportage on it. Thirty years later, CSICOP's postings continue staunchly to maintain its integrity and sanity throughout the affair and are at pains to argue Rawlins's lack of either.

[edit] Criticism

[edit] Comité Para and Zelen test

The Belgian Para Committee (Comité Para) tested the Mars effect in 1967 and replicated it, though most of the data (473 of 535) were still collected by Gauquelin himself. The Committee suspected that the slightly skewed percentages may have been an artifact.

To test this suspicion and eliminate possible demographic anomaly, Professor Marvin Zelen proposed in a 1976 article in Paul Kurtz's Humanist that Gauquelin randomly pick 100 athletes from his group of 2,088 and check the birth/planet correlations of all the other babies born at the same times and places. CSICOP now cap-emphatically contends that this was NOT a test of the Mars effect, but a test of the base-rate (chance) expectation. (The 100 random athletes later evolved into a subsample of 303 athletes.)

Rawlins thought the above test not worth doing. In 1975, he sent Kurtz an article for publication making the same cautionary point which CSICOP published later (long after committing to a test which ignored it): "... we find an inverse correlation between size and deviation in the Mars-athletes subsamples (that is, the smaller the subsample, the larger the success) — which is what one would expect if bias had infected the blocking off of the sizes of the subsamples" (The Zetetic (Skeptical Inquirer) 2, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1977, p. 81). He also feared that observers would correctly perceive that the Zelen test was indeed a test of the Mars effect, using the base rate as a contextual control, since Zelen's 1976 "Challenge to Gauquelin", published by later CSICOP Chairman Kurtz, states: "We now have an objective way for unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation .... to settle this question".

Gauquelin and his wife Francoise performed the test that Professor Zelen proposed, and found that the chance Mars-in-key-sector expectation for the general population (i.e., nonchampions) was indeed about 17%, rather than the 22% observed for athletic champions.

[edit] Criticism of Kurtz, Zelen and Abell

In his rebuttal to the Gauquelins' published conclusion, Marvin Zelen analyzed the composition, not of the resulting 17,000 nonchampions, but of the 303 champions. He split this secondary subsample (which was already nearly too small to test 22% vs 17%) by eliminating the women and by dividing the remaining athletes into city/rural sections and Parisian/non-Parisian sections. (His rebuttal was also signed by non-scientist Paul Kurtz [senior author] and astronomer George Abell.)

It was this sample-splitting that so shocked Dennis Rawlins and numerous other critics. It appeared that Zelen diverted from the original purpose of the control test, which was to check the base rate of 17,000 regular folks. It appeared also that he was trying minimize the significance of the Mars/key-sector correlations with athletes by invalidly splitting the subsample of 303. Rawlins who was a prominent figure in the organization said that the debunkers, who were supposed to be upholding the scientific standards, were actually distorting their studies and manipulating evidence to cover for their own impetuous error of running an ill-considered test. Rawlins's objections were responded to by unsubtle threats of exile, and he was shortly ejected from CSICOP at an unannounced and still obscure "election".

The Kurtz-Zelen-Abell rejoinder split the sample not to examine the Mars effect, but primarily to examine the randomness of the 303-champions subsample of the original larger sample of 2,088, for which Rawlins had already demonstrated unrandomness in 1975 and 1977. The CSICOP trio now belatedly contended that the Gauquelins had not chosen randomly. As they admitted, they had trouble finding sufficient same-week and same-village births to compare with champions born in rural areas, so they chose only champions born in larger cities. (If the 22% correlation was an artifact partly based on, say, rural recordkeeping, this would be blurred in such a nonrandom selection.)

Further, the Gauquelins' original total list of about 2,088 champions included exactly 42 Parisians. Their subsample of 303 athletes included exactly 42 Parisians. Paris is divided into 20 sections, called arrondissements, and different economic classes and different ethnic groups inhabit different arrondissements. The Gauquelins compared the 42 Parisian champions (who had been born throughout Paris) to nonchampions of only one arrondissement. (If the 22% correlation was an artifact partly based on, say, economic, class, or ethnic differences in birth patterns, this would be blurred in such a nonrandom selection.)

Such elaborate post-test public diversions masked the CSICOP Gauquelin-challenging trio's private disbelief that, with a sample of 17000 ordinary citizens, the percentage of Mars hits in 2 sectors out of a possible 12, would actually result in a score of 2/12 = 1/6 = 17%.

[edit] CFEPP test

A major study was undertaken by the Committee for the Study of Paranormal Phenomenon (Comité pour l’Étude des Phénomènes Paranormaux, or CFEPP) in France. The protocol used was one agreed to in advance by Gauquelin before his untimely death in 1991. The results of the study, published in 1993, were that there is no evidence whatsoever of a "Mars Effect" in the births of athletes (Benski, et al. 1993:13, 15).

[edit] Criticism of Gauquelin methodology

Jan Willem Nienhuys (Nienhuys, 1997) published a paper showing that Gauquelin's data was biased.[1] However, using Nienhuys' methodology, Nick Kollerstrom showed in 2005 that a negative Mars Effect crept back when combining three skeptics' studies' datasets, and that the similar "Saturn Effect" for physicians was even stronger, using a stronger criterion for inclusion (namely membership in the prestigious French Academy of Medicine).[2]

Gauquelin's definition of eminence has been criticized as being very flexible. If you are allowed to draw the line between eminence and non-eminence within a group of sportsmen at an arbitrary place, you can easily get "evidence" for an eminence effect by choosing the optimum place for the division independently in every subgroup. Kurtz, Nienhuys, and others say that is what Gauquelin did and Ertel still does. Thus, basketball players turned out to be not eminent at all whatever their achievements Example source: Nienhuys posting. That is the most famous example, but there are other examples of subgroups with arbitrary borders that can add up to such an effect, such as 268 Italian aviators (which are all excellent) and Italian soccer players (which need to have played in an international game to be famous) Example source: Dobyns posting.

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reference

  • Suitbert Ertel and Kenneth Irving (1996). The Tenacious Mars Effect, Urania Trust, London, ISBN 1-871989-15-9
  • H.J. Eysenck & D.K.B. Nias, Astrology: Science or Superstition? Penguin Books (1982)
  • Michel Gauquelin and Françoise Gauquelin (1979). Star U.S. Sportsmen Display the Mars Effect, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4 #2, Winter 1979/80, 31-43.
  • Michel Gauquelin (1991). Neo-Astrology: A Copernican Revolution, The Penguin Group, London, ISBN 0-14-019318-9
  • Nick Kollerstrom (2005). How Ertel Rescued the Gauquelin Effect, Correlation, vol 23 (1), 2005. online pdf
  • Paul Westran (05-09-2008). The Mars Effect as an artifact of Dynamic Astrology, Positive Astrology Article, Online Article
  • Paul Kurtz, Marvin Zelen, and George O. Abell (1979). Results of the U.S. Test of the "Mars Effect" Are Negative, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4 #2, Winter 1979/80, 19-26.
  • Paul Kurtz, Marvin Zelen, and George O. Abell (1979). Response to the Gauquelins, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4 #2, Winter 1979/80, 44-63.
  • Paul Kurtz, Jan Willem Nienhuys, and R. Sandhu (1997). Is the "Mars Effect" Genuine?, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol 11, # 1, Spring 1997, 19-39.
  • Jan Willem Nienhuys (1997). The Mars Effect in Retrospect, Skeptical Inquirer, vol 21 #6, Nov 1997, 24-29. available online
  • Dennis Rawlins (1979). Report on the U.S. Test of the Gauquelins, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4 #2, Winter 1979/80, 26-31.
  • John Anthony West (1973). The Case for Astrology, (Goes deeply into the Gauquelin controversy).

[edit] External links