Mars effect
Encyclopedia
The Mars effect is a name often used to refer to a reported statistical correlation between athletic eminence and the position of the planet Mars
relative to the horizon at time and place of birth. This controversial finding was first reported by the French
psychologist
and statistician
Michel Gauquelin
who, in his book L'influence des astres ("The Influence of the Stars", 1955), the first rigorous study of astrological claims, suggested that a statistically significant number of sports champions were born just after the planet Mars rises or culminates
. Gauqelin divided the plane of the ecliptic
into twelve sectors
, identifying two "key" sectors of statistical significance
.
Gauquelin's work was accepted by the notable psychologist and statistician Hans Eysenck
among others but later attempts to validate the data and replicate the effect have produced uneven results, chiefly owing to disagreements over the selection and analysis of the data set
. Since the phenomenon in question depends upon the daily rotation of the Earth, the availability and accuracy of time and place of birth data is crucial to such studies, as is the criterion of "eminence". Later research explains the Mars effect by selection bias
, favouring champions who were born in a key sector of Mars and rejecting those who were not from the sample.
as it is practised in the modern west but he singled out "highly significant statistical correlations between planetary positions and the birth times of eminently successful people." This claim concerned not only Mars but five planets, correlated with eminence in fields broadly compatible with the traditional "planetary rulerships"
of astrology. However, partly because eminence in sport is more quantifiable, later research, publicity and controversy has tended to single out the "Mars effect".
errors” in its findings. Unpublished internal analyses contradicted this and one committee member, Luc de Marré, resigned in protest. In 1983 Abell, Kurtz and Zelen (see below) published a reappraisal, rejecting the idea of demographic errors, saying, “Gauquelin adequately allowed for demographic and astronomical factors in predicting the expected distribution of Mars sectors for birth times in the general population.”
's journal The Humanist published an article on astrology criticizing Gauquelin, to which the latter and his wife Françoise responded. Then Professor Marvin Zelen, a statistician and associate of the recently founded Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)), proposed in a 1976 article in the same periodical that, in order to eliminate any demographic anomaly, Gauquelin randomly pick 100 athletes from his data-set of 2,088 and check the birth/planet correlations of a sample of babies born at the same times and places in order to establish a control group, giving the base-rate (chance) expectation for comparison (The 100 random athletes later expanded into a subsample of 303 athletes).
In April 1977 CSICOP researcher George O. Abell wrote to Kurtz stating that Zelen's test had come out in the Gauquelins' favour. The Gauquelins also performed the test that Professor Zelen had proposed and carried out and found that the chance Mars-in-key-sector expectation for the general population (i.e., non-champions) was about 17%, significantly less than the 22% observed for athletic champions. However the subsequent article by Zelen, Abell and Kurtz did not clearly state this outcome but rather questioned the original data. In a rebuttal of the Gauquelins' published conclusion, Marvin Zelen analysed the composition, not of the 17,000 non-champions of the control group, but of the 303 champions, splitting this secondary subsample (which was already nearly too small to test 22% vs 17%) by eliminating female athletes, a subgroup that gave the results most favourable to Gauquelin, and dividing the remaining athletes into city/rural sections and Paris
ian/non-Parisian sections.
Before and after publication of Zelen's results astronomer and charter CSICOP member Dennis Rawlins
, the CSICOP Council's only astronomer at the time, repeatedly objected to the procedure and to CSICOP's subsequent reportage of it. Rawlins privately urged that the Gauquelins' results were valid and the “Zelen test” could only uphold this and that Zelen had diverted from the original purpose of the control test, which was to check the base rate of births with Mars in the "key" sectors. It appeared to him that the test had minimised the significance of the Mars/key-sector correlations with athletes by splitting the sample of athletes and that the experimenters, who were supposed to be upholding scientific standards, were actually distorting and manipulating evidence to conceal the result of an ill-considered test.
The Kurtz-Zelen-Abell analysis had split the sample primarily to examine the randomness of the 303 selected champions, the non-randomness of which Rawlins demonstrated in 1975 and 1977. Zelen's 1976 "Challenge to Gauquelin" had stated: "We now have an objective way for unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation .... to settle this question", whereas this aim was now disputed. Rawlins made procedural objections, stating; "... 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".
CSICOP also contended, after reviewing the results, that the Gauquelins had not chosen randomly. They had had difficulty finding sufficient same-week and same-village births to compare with champions born in rural areas and so had chosen only champions born in larger cities. The Gauquelins' original total list of about 2,088 champions had included 42 Parisians and their subsample of 303 athletes also included 42 Parisians. Further, Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements
, different economic classes and ethnic groups typically inhabiting different arrondissements. The Gauquelins had compared the 42 Parisian champions (who had been born throughout Paris) to non-champions of only one arrondissement. If the 22% correlation was an artifact partly based on factors such as rural recordkeeping, economic, class or ethnic differences in birth patterns, this fact would be blurred by this non-random selection.
Such elaborate post-test public diversions appeared to mask CSICOP's results. The matter led to a bitter and protracted dispute within CSICOP between Rawlins, Zelen, Kurtz, Abell and Richard Kammann. Rawlins was shortly ejected from CSICOP at an unannounced and still obscure "election".
s, forceps assisted births and drug induced births, which began to rise dramatically from the middle of the 20th century and altered the "natural" time of birth).
It had been suggested that the Gauquelins might have selected their athletes knowing in advance they had Mars rising or culminating. Ertel indeed discovered a "Gauquelin bias" and sought to solve the problem of determining eminence by noting the number of times an athlete was mentioned in various sport periodicals, biographical dictionaries and sports encyclopedias. Ertel's use of this new standard suggested that Gauquelin bias actually masked the Mars Effect. According to Kenneth Irving, "...when the bias was corrected the Mars effect appeared even stronger than before.
In 1988 Ertel’s investigation was published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration and the next year Müller published a new analysis of 402 Italian writers that failed to replicate Gauquelin’s results showing a significant correlation with the position of the Moon but reported significant correlations for Jupiter together with the significant negative result for Saturn previously noted by Gauquelin with respect to journalists.
In 1992 an article by Ertel in The Skeptical Inquirer used the methods of his 1988 JSE article to demonstrate that the Mars effect is present in CSICOP’s own data and Ertel later contacted Kurtz asking about the way the Zelen test had been conducted. "Who was responsible for increasing emphasis on basketball players and what are the reasons for their increasing numbers?" Receiving no response, Ertel sent him another brief note; "Dear Dr. Kurtz, I hope you understand that fairness, not malevolence, has been guiding my correspondence." Kurtz's secretary then responded that Kurtz was reluctant to pursue the Mars effect any further; "This is not due to any desire to conceal 'misconduct'; it is simply due to his reasonable desire to be left to his work and writing." "But," observed Ertel, "Michel Gauquelin's 'reasonable desire' to have his discovery acknowledged, not smoke-screened by representatives of science, and society's expectation that scientists reveal all secrets of nature without pre-selection should be allowed simultaneous consideration."
In 1990 the CFEPP had issued a preliminary report on the study, which used 1,066 French sports champions, giving full data for the 1,066 as well as the names of 373 who fit the criteria but for whom birth times were unavailable, discussing methodology and listing data-selection criteria. In 1996 the report, with a commentary by J. W. Nienhuys and several letters from Gauquelin to the Committee, was published in book form as The Mars Effect – A French Test of Over 1,000 Sports Champions. The CFEPP maintained that its experiment showed no effect and concluded that the effect was attributable to bias in Gauquelin’s data selection, pointing to the suggestions made by Gauquelin to the Committee for changes in their list of athletes.
. Simplified and illustrative showcase argument is explained here: There are 10 celestial bodies and 12 sectors for them to be in. Furthermore, there are 132 combinations of sector pairs and thus 1320 different combinations of a planet with two sectors. There is about a 25% chance to find at least one such combination (of one planet and two sectors) for a random dataset of the same size as Gauquelin’s that would yield a result with apparent statistical significance like the one obtained by Gauquelin, as described in an article called "The Saturn-Mars Effect" published in Skeptic Magazine. This implies that after adjusting for multiple comparisons, the Mars effect is no longer statistically significant even at the modest significance level of 0.05 and is probably a false positive.
According to Geoffrey Dean at eSkeptic Magazine, the skeptic's assertion that "the highest mean total is nonsignificantly different from the observed total for Mars in sectors 1 and 4" is falsified by the fact that "right from the start it was known that planetary effects (not just Mars effects) replicate—a point stressed in three of the references Panchin cites. Replication requires profession, planet and sectors to be specified in advance, so counting any planet in any two sectors for any profession is not relevant, especially when you assume that planets move independently (they don’t), that expectancies in each sector are equal (they aren’t), and that demography doesn’t matter (it does)."http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/ As of 2007 there are eight independent studies and nearly thirty of Gauquelin's that have successfully replicated The Mars Effect to the degree that results "could not be explained by artifacts of astronomy, demography, bias, data selection, or fraud".http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/
In the same issue of eSkeptic Magazine a reply was given. "To falsify the claim that the observed Mars Effect is an artifact induced by multiple-comparisons a single reference is sufficient. It must be a well-designed peer-reviewed study that would replicate the Mars Effect at a decent significance level involving a non-biased selection of eminent athletes (eminence being defined before the data is analyzed) and performed in a way that insures the complete independence of the athlete sample from the sample available at the time the Mars Effect was first described as eminent athletes being born more often under planet Mars in sectors 1 and 4". "...available studies allegedly replicating the Mars Effect fail to match some or all of the mentioned requirements. For example Geoffrey Dean states that the Mars Effect is supported by the 303 sports-champions CSICOP test. But these 303 sports-champions were a subsample randomly chosen from Gauquelin’s sample. One may call this is an independent study, but it is not a study performed on an independent sample. Such studies cannot be used to exclude errors introduced by multiple-comparisons". "While Geoffrey Dean claims that the Mars Effect can be replicated he mentions that Gauquelin failed to “observe a consistent Mars effect for sports champions born after 1950” – which seems to be an argument against the previous statement. However, this is in agreement with certain studies, such as the U.S. study performed by Paul Kurtz and colleagues that failed to replicate the Mars Effect".http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
relative to the horizon at time and place of birth. This controversial finding was first reported by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
and statistician
Statistician
A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...
Michel Gauquelin
Michel Gauquelin
Michel Gauquelin was a French psychologist and statistician. Along with his first wife Françoise Schneider-Gauquelin , he conducted statistical research in an attempt to develop a scientific basis for astrology.-Early interest:Although he was highly critical of certain areas of the art, Gauquelin...
who, in his book L'influence des astres ("The Influence of the Stars", 1955), the first rigorous study of astrological claims, suggested that a statistically significant number of sports champions were born just after the planet Mars rises or culminates
Culmination
In astronomy, the culmination of a planet, star, constellation, etc. is the altitude reached when the object transits over an observer's meridian....
. Gauqelin divided the plane of the ecliptic
Plane of the ecliptic
The plane of the ecliptic is the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It is the primary reference plane when describing the position of bodies in the Solar System, with celestial latitude being measured relative to the ecliptic plane. In the course of a year, the Sun's apparent path through...
into twelve sectors
Circular sector
A circular sector or circle sector, is the portion of a disk enclosed by two radii and an arc, where the smaller area is known as the minor sector and the larger being the major sector. In the diagram, θ is the central angle in radians, r the radius of the circle, and L is the arc length of the...
, identifying two "key" sectors of statistical significance
Statistical significance
In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. The phrase test of significance was coined by Ronald Fisher....
.
Gauquelin's work was accepted by the notable psychologist and statistician Hans Eysenck
Hans Eysenck
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-British psychologist who spent most of his career in Britain, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas...
among others but later attempts to validate the data and replicate the effect have produced uneven results, chiefly owing to disagreements over the selection and analysis of the data set
Data set
A data set is a collection of data, usually presented in tabular form. Each column represents a particular variable. Each row corresponds to a given member of the data set in question. Its values for each of the variables, such as height and weight of an object or values of random numbers. Each...
. Since the phenomenon in question depends upon the daily rotation of the Earth, the availability and accuracy of time and place of birth data is crucial to such studies, as is the criterion of "eminence". Later research explains the Mars effect by selection bias
Selection bias
Selection bias is a statistical bias in which there is an error in choosing the individuals or groups to take part in a scientific study. It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The term "selection bias" most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the...
, favouring champions who were born in a key sector of Mars and rejecting those who were not from the sample.
Reception and replication
Gauquelin's work was not limited to the Mars effect: his calculations led him first to reject most of the conventions of natal astrologyNatal astrology
Natal astrology, also known as genethliacal astrology, is the system of astrology based on the concept that each individual's personality or path in life can be determined by constructing a natal chart for the exact date, time, and location of a their birth...
as it is practised in the modern west but he singled out "highly significant statistical correlations between planetary positions and the birth times of eminently successful people." This claim concerned not only Mars but five planets, correlated with eminence in fields broadly compatible with the traditional "planetary rulerships"
Planets in astrology
Planets in astrology have a meaning different from the modern astronomical understanding of what a planet is. Before the age of telescopes, the night sky was thought to consist of two very similar components: fixed stars, which remained motionless in relation to each other, and wandering stars, ,...
of astrology. However, partly because eminence in sport is more quantifiable, later research, publicity and controversy has tended to single out the "Mars effect".
Belgian athletes – the Comité Para
In 1956 Gauqelin invited the Belgian Para Committee (Comité Para) to review his findings but it was not until 1962 that Jean Dath corroborated the statistics Gauqelin had presented and suggested an attempt at duplication using Belgian athletes. By this time Gauqelin had published Les Hommes et Les Astres (Men and the Stars, 1960), offering further data. The 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, suspecting that the results might have been an artifact, withheld its findings for a further eight years, then cited unspecified “demographicDemography
Demography is the statistical study of human population. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space...
errors” in its findings. Unpublished internal analyses contradicted this and one committee member, Luc de Marré, resigned in protest. In 1983 Abell, Kurtz and Zelen (see below) published a reappraisal, rejecting the idea of demographic errors, saying, “Gauquelin adequately allowed for demographic and astronomical factors in predicting the expected distribution of Mars sectors for birth times in the general population.”
The Zelen test
In 1975 Paul KurtzPaul Kurtz
Paul Kurtz is a prominent American skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism." He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for...
's journal The Humanist published an article on astrology criticizing Gauquelin, to which the latter and his wife Françoise responded. Then Professor Marvin Zelen, a statistician and associate of the recently founded Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)), proposed in a 1976 article in the same periodical that, in order to eliminate any demographic anomaly, Gauquelin randomly pick 100 athletes from his data-set of 2,088 and check the birth/planet correlations of a sample of babies born at the same times and places in order to establish a control group, giving the base-rate (chance) expectation for comparison (The 100 random athletes later expanded into a subsample of 303 athletes).
In April 1977 CSICOP researcher George O. Abell wrote to Kurtz stating that Zelen's test had come out in the Gauquelins' favour. The Gauquelins also performed the test that Professor Zelen had proposed and carried out and found that the chance Mars-in-key-sector expectation for the general population (i.e., non-champions) was about 17%, significantly less than the 22% observed for athletic champions. However the subsequent article by Zelen, Abell and Kurtz did not clearly state this outcome but rather questioned the original data. In a rebuttal of the Gauquelins' published conclusion, Marvin Zelen analysed the composition, not of the 17,000 non-champions of the control group, but of the 303 champions, splitting this secondary subsample (which was already nearly too small to test 22% vs 17%) by eliminating female athletes, a subgroup that gave the results most favourable to Gauquelin, and dividing the remaining athletes into city/rural sections and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
ian/non-Parisian sections.
Before and after publication of Zelen's results astronomer and charter CSICOP member Dennis Rawlins
Dennis Rawlins
Dennis Rawlins is an American astronomer, historian, and publisher.-Polar controversies:While studying historical magnetic declination data in polar regions, Rawlins was surprised to find that there were no such data from the 1909 expedition of Robert E. Peary, eventually leading him to become...
, the CSICOP Council's only astronomer at the time, repeatedly objected to the procedure and to CSICOP's subsequent reportage of it. Rawlins privately urged that the Gauquelins' results were valid and the “Zelen test” could only uphold this and that Zelen had diverted from the original purpose of the control test, which was to check the base rate of births with Mars in the "key" sectors. It appeared to him that the test had minimised the significance of the Mars/key-sector correlations with athletes by splitting the sample of athletes and that the experimenters, who were supposed to be upholding scientific standards, were actually distorting and manipulating evidence to conceal the result of an ill-considered test.
The Kurtz-Zelen-Abell analysis had split the sample primarily to examine the randomness of the 303 selected champions, the non-randomness of which Rawlins demonstrated in 1975 and 1977. Zelen's 1976 "Challenge to Gauquelin" had stated: "We now have an objective way for unambiguous corroboration or disconfirmation .... to settle this question", whereas this aim was now disputed. Rawlins made procedural objections, stating; "... 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".
CSICOP also contended, after reviewing the results, that the Gauquelins had not chosen randomly. They had had difficulty finding sufficient same-week and same-village births to compare with champions born in rural areas and so had chosen only champions born in larger cities. The Gauquelins' original total list of about 2,088 champions had included 42 Parisians and their subsample of 303 athletes also included 42 Parisians. Further, Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements
Arrondissements of Paris
The city of Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements municipaux administrative districts, more simply referred to as arrondissements . These are not to be confused with departmental arrondissements, which subdivide the 101 French départements...
, different economic classes and ethnic groups typically inhabiting different arrondissements. The Gauquelins had compared the 42 Parisian champions (who had been born throughout Paris) to non-champions of only one arrondissement. If the 22% correlation was an artifact partly based on factors such as rural recordkeeping, economic, class or ethnic differences in birth patterns, this fact would be blurred by this non-random selection.
Such elaborate post-test public diversions appeared to mask CSICOP's results. The matter led to a bitter and protracted dispute within CSICOP between Rawlins, Zelen, Kurtz, Abell and Richard Kammann. Rawlins was shortly ejected from CSICOP at an unannounced and still obscure "election".
U.S. athletes – CSICOP
At the same time CSICOP began a study of U.S. athletes in consultation with Zelen, Abell and Rawlins. The results, published in 1979 showed a negative result. However it emerged that several procedures had contradicted Gauquelin's definition of the effect. His previous experiments had demonstrated that basketball was a sport where there was little or no Mars effect and he therefore suggested that no basketball players be used in the study; yet, 32% of CSICOP's athletes were basketball players. According to Gauquelin, "It is Kurtz himself who pointed out to me at our meeting in Buffalo that in my original sample basketball shows the lowest effect among other sports specialties. I was aware of this, of course, and I suggested to Kurtz it would be preferable to avoid basketball in case of a new test in the USA. This would give a better chance to replicate the Mars effect. But Kurtz did exactly the contrary... He chose for his test an entire Who's Who in Basketball." Gauquelin also contended the KZA group clearly demonstrated an overall preference for mediocre athletes and ignored his criteria of eminence. The Lincoln Library of Sports Champions had been discarded as a source for birth data of outstanding athletes when its "yield strongly supported Gauquelin's hypothesis." Furthermore, 8% of CSICOP's sportsmen were born after 1950, contrary to the advice of Dr. Gauquelin who saw the Mars effect disappear in top athletes born after that year (Gauquelin thought this was due to Caesarean sectionCaesarean section
A Caesarean section, is a surgical procedure in which one or more incisions are made through a mother's abdomen and uterus to deliver one or more babies, or, rarely, to remove a dead fetus...
s, forceps assisted births and drug induced births, which began to rise dramatically from the middle of the 20th century and altered the "natural" time of birth).
Ertel and Müller
In 1986 Arno Müller, a clinical psychologist, graphologist and astrologer, and Dr. Suitbert Ertel, a professor of psychology, published their investigation of the Gauquelins’ work. Müller had replicated the Mars effect (but not that of Saturn) for prominent German physicians (also predicted by Gauqelin) while Ertel presented an overview of Gauquelin’s work, with analysis of some of Gauquelin’s data.It had been suggested that the Gauquelins might have selected their athletes knowing in advance they had Mars rising or culminating. Ertel indeed discovered a "Gauquelin bias" and sought to solve the problem of determining eminence by noting the number of times an athlete was mentioned in various sport periodicals, biographical dictionaries and sports encyclopedias. Ertel's use of this new standard suggested that Gauquelin bias actually masked the Mars Effect. According to Kenneth Irving, "...when the bias was corrected the Mars effect appeared even stronger than before.
In 1988 Ertel’s investigation was published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration and the next year Müller published a new analysis of 402 Italian writers that failed to replicate Gauquelin’s results showing a significant correlation with the position of the Moon but reported significant correlations for Jupiter together with the significant negative result for Saturn previously noted by Gauquelin with respect to journalists.
In 1992 an article by Ertel in The Skeptical Inquirer used the methods of his 1988 JSE article to demonstrate that the Mars effect is present in CSICOP’s own data and Ertel later contacted Kurtz asking about the way the Zelen test had been conducted. "Who was responsible for increasing emphasis on basketball players and what are the reasons for their increasing numbers?" Receiving no response, Ertel sent him another brief note; "Dear Dr. Kurtz, I hope you understand that fairness, not malevolence, has been guiding my correspondence." Kurtz's secretary then responded that Kurtz was reluctant to pursue the Mars effect any further; "This is not due to any desire to conceal 'misconduct'; it is simply due to his reasonable desire to be left to his work and writing." "But," observed Ertel, "Michel Gauquelin's 'reasonable desire' to have his discovery acknowledged, not smoke-screened by representatives of science, and society's expectation that scientists reveal all secrets of nature without pre-selection should be allowed simultaneous consideration."
CFEPP test
In 1994 the results of a major study undertaken by the Committee for the Study of Paranormal Phenomenon (Comité pour l’Étude des Phénomènes Paranormaux, or CFEPP) in France found no evidence whatsoever of a "Mars Effect" in the births of athletes. The study had been proposed in 1982 and the Committee had agreed in advance to use the protocol upon which Gauquelin insisted. The CFEPP report was “leaked” to the Dutch newspaper Trouw.In 1990 the CFEPP had issued a preliminary report on the study, which used 1,066 French sports champions, giving full data for the 1,066 as well as the names of 373 who fit the criteria but for whom birth times were unavailable, discussing methodology and listing data-selection criteria. In 1996 the report, with a commentary by J. W. Nienhuys and several letters from Gauquelin to the Committee, was published in book form as The Mars Effect – A French Test of Over 1,000 Sports Champions. The CFEPP maintained that its experiment showed no effect and concluded that the effect was attributable to bias in Gauquelin’s data selection, pointing to the suggestions made by Gauquelin to the Committee for changes in their list of athletes.
Statistical explanation
Some researchers argued that Gauquelin did not adjust the statistical significance of the Mars Effect for multiple comparisonsMultiple comparisons
In statistics, the multiple comparisons or multiple testing problem occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously. Errors in inference, including confidence intervals that fail to include their corresponding population parameters or hypothesis tests that incorrectly...
. Simplified and illustrative showcase argument is explained here: There are 10 celestial bodies and 12 sectors for them to be in. Furthermore, there are 132 combinations of sector pairs and thus 1320 different combinations of a planet with two sectors. There is about a 25% chance to find at least one such combination (of one planet and two sectors) for a random dataset of the same size as Gauquelin’s that would yield a result with apparent statistical significance like the one obtained by Gauquelin, as described in an article called "The Saturn-Mars Effect" published in Skeptic Magazine. This implies that after adjusting for multiple comparisons, the Mars effect is no longer statistically significant even at the modest significance level of 0.05 and is probably a false positive.
According to Geoffrey Dean at eSkeptic Magazine, the skeptic's assertion that "the highest mean total is nonsignificantly different from the observed total for Mars in sectors 1 and 4" is falsified by the fact that "right from the start it was known that planetary effects (not just Mars effects) replicate—a point stressed in three of the references Panchin cites. Replication requires profession, planet and sectors to be specified in advance, so counting any planet in any two sectors for any profession is not relevant, especially when you assume that planets move independently (they don’t), that expectancies in each sector are equal (they aren’t), and that demography doesn’t matter (it does)."http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/ As of 2007 there are eight independent studies and nearly thirty of Gauquelin's that have successfully replicated The Mars Effect to the degree that results "could not be explained by artifacts of astronomy, demography, bias, data selection, or fraud".http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/
In the same issue of eSkeptic Magazine a reply was given. "To falsify the claim that the observed Mars Effect is an artifact induced by multiple-comparisons a single reference is sufficient. It must be a well-designed peer-reviewed study that would replicate the Mars Effect at a decent significance level involving a non-biased selection of eminent athletes (eminence being defined before the data is analyzed) and performed in a way that insures the complete independence of the athlete sample from the sample available at the time the Mars Effect was first described as eminent athletes being born more often under planet Mars in sectors 1 and 4". "...available studies allegedly replicating the Mars Effect fail to match some or all of the mentioned requirements. For example Geoffrey Dean states that the Mars Effect is supported by the 303 sports-champions CSICOP test. But these 303 sports-champions were a subsample randomly chosen from Gauquelin’s sample. One may call this is an independent study, but it is not a study performed on an independent sample. Such studies cannot be used to exclude errors introduced by multiple-comparisons". "While Geoffrey Dean claims that the Mars Effect can be replicated he mentions that Gauquelin failed to “observe a consistent Mars effect for sports champions born after 1950” – which seems to be an argument against the previous statement. However, this is in agreement with certain studies, such as the U.S. study performed by Paul Kurtz and colleagues that failed to replicate the Mars Effect".http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/11-04-06/
Further reading
- George O. Abell, Paul KurtzPaul KurtzPaul Kurtz is a prominent American skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism." He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for...
, and Marvin Zelen (1983). The Abell-Kurtz-Zelen "Mars Effect" Experiments: A Reappraisal, Skeptical Inquirer Vol 7 #3, Fall 1983, 77–82.
- Michel GauquelinMichel GauquelinMichel Gauquelin was a French psychologist and statistician. Along with his first wife Françoise Schneider-Gauquelin , he conducted statistical research in an attempt to develop a scientific basis for astrology.-Early interest:Although he was highly critical of certain areas of the art, Gauquelin...
(1969). The Scientific Basis for Astrology. Stein and Day Publishers. New York, 1969. Paperback version: Natl Book Network, 1970 ISBN 0-8128-1350-2.
- Michel Gauquelin (1991). Neo-Astrology: A Copernican Revolution, The Penguin Group, London, ISBN 0-14-019318-9
- Paul Westran (05-09-2008). The Mars Effect as an artifact of Dynamic Astrology, Positive Astrology Article, Online Article
- Paul KurtzPaul KurtzPaul Kurtz is a prominent American skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism." He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for...
, Marvin Zelen, and George O. Abell (1979). Response to the Gauquelins, Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 4 #2, Winter 1979/80, 44–63.
- Paul KurtzPaul KurtzPaul Kurtz is a prominent American skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism." He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for...
, 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
- John Anthony West (1973). The Case for Astrology, (Goes deeply into the Gauquelin controversy).
External links
- Is there really a Mars effect?, by Michel Gauquelin.
- Skeptics and the "Mars Effect": A Chronology of Events and Publications, by Jim LippardJim LippardJames Joseph Lippard is an American skeptic and activist freethinker who has written and spoken widely.Lippard works for Global Crossing as its head of information security....