Astrology
Scientists have long been appalled by the general ready belief
in astrology. Some scientists have mounted
campaigns
to discredit
astrology, some merely ignore it. Both astrologers and
non-astrologers generally consider the garden variety daily newspaper
horoscope to be worthless, for different reasons. Astrologers believe the
daily horoscopes
are too superficial and don't delve into the crucial details, whereas
non-astrologers skeptically label all astrology as bunk. In 1975, 186
scientists,
including many Nobel prize winners, signed "
Objections to Astrology" in the magazine
Humanist, and an entire organization,
CSICOP, devoted to
debunking non-scientific claims, was
born.
Here, we take a different view. Like the mythical investigations of the pharmaceutical industry into shaman magic, we are going to try to derive the essential elements of astrology and biorhythms, and see if there is any possibility that there may be a plausible mechanism behind them.
Could astrology and biorhythms have scientific validity? On the surface, it does not appear possible. Even astrologers believe that new laws of physics would be necessary to incorporate the inner workings of astrology or biorhythms. Still, we are going to limit ourselves to the existing known laws of physics, without appeal to unknown effects of, for instance, quantum mechanics or general relativity. It is true that the frontiers of science are fabulous and mysterious in their own right, but we will avoid waving our hands and proclaiming that explanations for paranormal abilities are hidden in these frontiers.
Then, how could astrology be true, in any sense, within a modern understanding of science?
One of the earliest versions of astrology was a simple correlation of birth dates with personality. This is the basis of the daily horoscopes that have proliferated throughout our newspapers today. Few people seem to take them seriously, whether astrologer or scientist. Could there be some validity to them? Personality may have a genetic origin, but it does seem to have an environmental origin. How could the date of birth be correlated with personality type? The influence of environment extends over long periods of time, not just at the singular instance of birth.
Still, many parents are familiar with the impression that their children exhibited strong personality traits from the moment of birth. Was this a genetic result, or astrological? If it were genetic, we have little hope of correlating it with astrology. Could the signs of personality be a result of the infant's experience within the womb? This has been suggested many times (see Scientology), but there is an interesting astrological interpretation.
Personality induced by the fetal environment is certainly possible. Human embryo development follows a fairly regular schedule during gestation, and it is not unreasonable to assume that the fetus would be shaped by the shifting moods of the mother as the seasons change. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) can be severe, and the chemical imbalances induced by seasonal emotional changes of the mother might influence the development of the fetus. Thus, we have a possible correlation between personality type and the seasons, and so too with the calendar.
This gives us a scientific explanation of one aspect of astrology.
Why then has astrology consistently failed almost all scientific tests? The first, and most obvious, reason is that the seasons are not the same everywhere. In fact, they are reversed from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. This also explains why astrology might have developed in the first place--it was limited to a small region where the seasons were fairly regular. In the Nile basin, even the availability of food was fixed by the calendar, as the Nile river regularly flooded its banks and nourished the farmlands on a yearly basis. The expansion of the idea of astrology out of that region would destroy any all-inclusive correlation.
Secondly, not all babies are born in the exact same gestational period. Some are born months early. If a particular personality trait were associated with a seasonal effect at the fifth month of pregnancy, then a baby born two months early would exhibit that personality trait "normally" associated with a baby born months later. Thousands of years ago, such babies did not often survive. Thus, modern medicine and improvements in life expectancy would tend to destroy the correlations that may have been evident when the basic ideas of astrology were first established.
The effect of environment upon the fetus might be most extreme in the moments immediately following conception. Since the date of birth is approximately a constant offset from the date of conception (the gestation period), a correlation with seasonal effects at conception would translate into a correlation at birth, but only if the conditions of the seasons were the same and the child were to be born at term.
This suggests that a better time for the establishment of astrological sign is at conception. That would remove the effect of whether or not the child was born at term. Ptolemy, the father of astrology, actually considered this as the most reasonable approach, but there was no way to establish conception times. Even today, there are problems with doing so, especially in hindsight. If your parents did not closely monitor the signs of ovulation, and carefully record the times of sex, there is little hope of establishing your time of conception. (Ultrasound measurements of bone lengths might be regular enough to allow backwards computation of conception time.)
Our analysis of biorhythms actually seems to afford a method of doing just that.
Biorhythms
Our "scientific" interpretation of astrology depended upon the assumption that
seasonal environmental effects would influence the development of the fetus.
Biorhythms have no such component, as they are said to be independent of the
seasons, and are fixed by the date of birth. The biorhythms are the same
for everyone, regardless of the season of birth, starting at the date of birth.
Critical points at the cycles' period and half-period are important in biorhythm
theory, and coincident critical points are considered even more important.
Is there any possibility of an explanation for biorhythms?
Biorhythms are usually considered to have three components: physical, emotional and intellectual. The physical rhythm has a 23 day period, the emotional a 28 day period, and the intellectual a 33 day period. The 28 day emotional period is approximately the same as the length of the month, as well as the length of the human menstrual cycle. Thus, the often-discussed emotional aspect of the menstrual cycle is taken as evidence for the reasonableness of biorhythms.
The variability of the menstrual cycle is taken as evidence against biorhythms. Many women have different length cycles, and certainly not all have regular cycles. The debate about menstrual cycles and personality is often strident, and is not resolveable here.
Instead, we will argue for the reasonability of the cycles themselves. Cycles are evident in much of human behavior. Circadian (circa dies, about a day) cycles are extremely strong in the human body chemistry and physiology. It is only natural that such cycles should have arisen in humans, as they adapted to their environment. Is it possible that longer cycles have established themselves? Yes. Certainly, the menstrual cycle is an example of such.
What is the most reasonable periods that we can expect, and why? A simple assumption is that they be harmonically related. What does this mean? A harmonic period is an integer multiple, or division, of another period. High C in music is exactly twice the frequency of Middle C, and Low C is half the frequency. Circadian rhythms have subdivisions that are one half of a day, and are considered subharmonics. Longer rhythms should be multiples of one day. Our socially established week of seven days is such an example.
Besides the day, the other environmental cycle that has a major influence upon humans is the year, obviously. Can we satisfy both? That is, can we have harmonics of a day that is also a subharmonic of the year? That is clearly impossible, since the year is not exactly an even multiple of days itself (~365.24 days, the extra .24 making leap years necessary so that we can make the years into multiples of days). But we can come close, as in the example of the week. 52 weeks is just 1.24 days from being exactly one year. What other harmonics of one day come close to being sub-harmonics of one year?
If we look at all numbers from 15 to 60, the harmonics that come closest, in order, are for periods of length 28, 26, 52, 33, 23, 16, and 46. The periods of the biorhythms are the best candidates, except for the periods of length 26 and 52 days. This way of deriving the length of biorhythms was not utilized in the original theory. Thus, possibly, the length of the biorhythms could have been selected by a pressure to find natural harmonics of the day and subharmonics of the year.
What about the theory advanced in the previous section about astrology, that suggested the natural origin of astrology would be conception time instead of birth? Analysis of the biorhythms periods has a surprising correlation there, also.
The human gestation period is usually set at 265 days (there is a great deal of variance associated with this number, obviously). Working backwards from the date of birth, we find that 265 days is within one day of a critical point for all three cycles! We can perform the same analysis upon the period 265 that we performed upon 365, to see which periods would produce the closest critical points for 265 days. Of the periods from 15 to 60, the closest, in order, are 53, 23, 59, 33, 28, 48, 44, 38, 24, 22, 19, and 16. Again, the biorhythms periods are among the best matches.
How can this make sense? Can we work backwards in time from the date of birth? Philosophical discussions about the arrow of time aside, we usually have casuality proceeding in the other direction. A simple and satisfactory fix is to have the biorhythms start at conception, as we would have liked to do with astrology. Reversing the logic, the gestation period comes at a close-triple critical point, and the cycles from then on mimic cycles that start at birth!
This discussion is mere speculation, of course, but it is scientifically-based explanation in that it does not appeal to unknown physical laws. Of course, individual cycles are rarely regular. Daily sleep cycles fluctuate wildly sometimes, as do menstrual cycles. But over the long run, the pattern is reestablished and a predictable regularity can be maintained. Perhaps it is the same with biorhythms. And perhaps the reason that biorhythms do not work for everyone is one of the same reasons given for astrology: conception time should be the baseline instead of birth time.