From: wsadjw@rw7.urc.tue.nl (Jan Willem Nienhuys)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Fwd: Astrology: Scientific Research (Was Re: Doubters Of Astrology)
Date: 7 Oct 92 17:29:06 GMT
Reply-To: wsadjw@urc.tue.nl
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

>Anyone want to comment?

Yes but only to parts. The whole piece is too long.
>
>The so-called "Mars effect" is that *champion* athletes (not
>athletes in general) have Mars above the ascendant (i.e., just
>risen) or just past culmination (i.e., just past the planet's
>highest point in the sky) with a frequency greater than expected
>by chance.
>
>This Mars effect has been replicated now by two skeptics'
>organisations, one in Belgium (Belgian Committee for the
>Scientific Study of Paranormal Phenomena) and one in America. In
>the latter case, the group providing the replication was CSICOP
>(Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
>Paranormal). They originally published tainted results which
A lie.
>seemed to represent a failure to replicate, but after years of
>controversy they admitted to adding into the sample non-champion
A lie.
>athletes to dilute the originally positive result that they had
>obtained. In a recent issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (their
>mouthpiece), they published an article by Suitbert Ertel which
>showed that the American sample used in the CSICOP study does
>indeed show the Mars effect. As a result of the controversy
A lie.
>resulting from their cover-up of the originally positive finding
>in the Mars/athlete study, CSICOP has ceased conducting
>scientific investigations (and so their name is no longer
>appropriate).
Not a lie, at least when you equate "scientific" with "astrological".

The story is as follows.  Originally 128 champs showed a nonsignificant
Mars excess.  CSICOP and Gauquelin agreed that this was not enough.
The CSICOP has been (to my opinion) imprudent by adding more athletes
without consulting Gauquelin.  As they had started to select the very top
from the available data (but were unable to obtain all birth times
because of privacy regulations) they were caught in a double bind. 
If the results had turned out favorable the Gauquelins would have
applauded their results. In the other case they were prepared to
cry "dilution!".  Actually the second case happened.  The basic reason
was that the Gauquelins never bothered to explain how good a champion 
must be to be considered really good. Their original sample included
268 Italian aviators.  Not quite a strenuous sport for the millions,
more something for viscounts and dukes that can afford private airplanes.
Later Gauquelin collected data about 600 Italian first division soccer 
players. No result.  He then raised the norms: the 98 ones that had played
at least once in an international game "showed the Mars effect".
In the Belgian test the norm was raised to 20 international games.  What
not many people know (but Ertel, who has found this, does) is that *prior*
to the Belgian test the Gauquelins already had collected data about
Belgian soccer players; their files contained 76 ones that fell just
below the "20 internationals norm", and that showed a Mars effect of 
only 10 percent (17.2 expected).  I don't know how the Belgians got the
idea that "20 internationals" had to be the limit of excellency.

From the enormous number (198) of Belgian cyclists in the Belgian test
it might be concluded that even during the Belgian test the Gauquelins
were not too strict about how excellent a champion must be.  But *after*
the American test they raised the standards.  They complained that
the data base for basketball players was too large (1000 U.S. champions).
The reason? In their own data they had 33 basketball players of whom
only 3 were born in the appropriate Mars sector.  So they thought they
had reason to distrust basketball players. After the test they suggested
that only "Olympic gold medal winners" were champion level.

The results of Ertel clearly show that the Gauquelins biased their data.
(I don't think the bias was deliberate, because probably both of the
Gauquelins did not understand the difference between exploratory research
and testing.  Otherwise they would have been  ashamed  to commit their
post-hoc data selection after the American test).

Ertel's position is that the Gauquelin data still show a Mars effect, in
the sense that the effect is stronger in groups of more excellent 
athletes.  However, Ertel's analysis is poor.  I have reanalysed it,
and (a) the effect is absent if one only looks at the French champions
(b) the effect is present if one does not distinguish between champions
whose result were and weren't published by the Gauquelins.  As Ertel's 
sources were partly used by the Gauqelins themselves to establish who
was good and who was not (which gave a bias in their results) the 
Ertel eminence effect is very dubious. (c) Moreover, Ertel himself has since 
"discovered" that this eminence effect is "reversed" among the very high
top (after some more results I expect him to find a sinusoidal behavior...).
And even though Ertel knows the Gauquelin data are biased, he keeps 
forgetting the importance of the fact that the Gauquelins never bothered
to formulate what was a champion.  All along the Gauquelin's idea has
been that the effect only shows up if you take your champions good enough.

The story about "cover up" refers to the treatment of the outcome of
the Zelen test.  Originally this was a test to find a demographic 
explanation for Gauquelin's results.  The test came out as expected (by
Gauquelin), namely that this explanation didn't work.  No results were
"covered up", but responsible CSICOP people were kind of slow in 
recognizing the results.

The way Ertel gets "results" is by very carefully redefining what
he means by "key Mars sector".  There are many slightly different
definitions possible, and he takes the one that gives the best
answers.  All this is post hoc. 

Gauquelin's data originally comprised 2087 athletes. Expected number
of Mars athletes was 359, with a standard error of 17. Lots of physicists
don't think a deviation of less than 5 sigma merits serious investigation.
That would mean that an experimental finding of over 446 Mars athletes
starts to be interesting.  Initially Gauqulin found 452, but after
recomputation (Correlation 4, 1983) there were only 435.  The whole
effect is therefore so much at the border of significance that it hardly
woth so much effort.

Ertel thinks different.  For him is 1.65 sigma already significant.
In a recent publication he even translates that into "It is highly
probable that there exists a relation between the two phenomena"
(in that same publication it turns out to be a silly computational
mistake, but subtle or not so subtle errors in computation or 
experimental design apparently have no place in the minds of 
significance-fetishists).


More about this in the forthcoming Proceedings of the Third
EuroSkeptics Congress (Amsterdam 1991).

JWN
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic