>The proof about astrology is that is that many if not all the predictions are
>correct in some way.
The disproof of astrology is that most if not all the predictions are
demonstrably *incorrect* in almost every way.
How do I know this? Because I have read a number of well-designed
scientific (`falsifiable') tests of the predictions of various standard
astrological systems, and the success rates all turn out to be absolutely
what you'd expect if the predictions had been allocated at random rather
than by birth-dates.
danny, if you wish to learn more about this claim of mine, read the
open-minded study by the late Hans Eysenck and his associate D. K. B. Nias,
ASTROLOGY: SCIENCE OR SUPERSTITION. It's available in Penquin paperback,
or maybe from some other publisher in the USA.
If you're not prepared to read this book, by one of the most notable
statistically-oriented psychologists of the century, your own claims
deserve to be treated as worthless.
>Astrology is very old.
Exactly. Its current forms - and of course, the various doctrines differ
wildly, depending what culture's astrology you choose to look at - derive
essentially unchanged from pre-scientific speculations developed by people
who did not know the basic facts about the position, motion, composition or
age of the solar system and the universe, and whose grasp of genetics and
neuro-psychology was rudimentary. Why do you think this is a statement *in
favour of* the doctrine?!
>there's a tribe in africa (the
>dogon tribe) who have known about the star sirius b (sirius a's companion,
>the sirius constellation is what the pyramids of giza are aligned to)
>thousands of years before we had the technology to discover it.
This is an interesting claim, because it can be tested. Still, even if it
had turned out to be correct (which it didn't), what is the relevance to
astrology? It might conceivably be evidence that humans had been given a
disconnected nugget of information by alien space travellers, or time
travellers from the future, or a lost scientific civilisation, or through
the use of strange psychic powers, or once had really good night vision in
an environment without nocturnal optical pollution, but it has *zero*
impact on astrology one way or the other.
BTW, Sirius is not a constellation. The bright component of the binary is,
however, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major.
[this post is dedicated to Kennita the Good Hearted - grrr.]
Damien Broderick