Donald Clarke: MP says doctors should examine heavenly bodies

Here is the news. Bong! TD claims tree spirits predict next election results. Bong! The tiny lady that lives in the radiator has hidden your keys again. Bong! Moon made of spinach and horseradish.

None of these things is actually true, but something equally remarkable is going on the other side of the Irish Sea. A British politician who is not a member of the Ukip has said something properly barmy.

David Tredinnick, Conservative Member of Parliament for Bosworth, was talking to the Astrological Journal – sold on the same shelf as Chicken Entrails Gazette I bet – when the conversation drifted towards the National Health Service.

“I do believe that astrology and complementary medicine would help take the huge pressure off doctors,” the Old Etonian said. “Astrology is a useful diagnostic tool enabling us to see strengths and weaknesses via the birth chart.”

Tolerance is a wonderful thing. No ill can come of an openness to new ideas and challenging philosophies. I positively seethe with the desire to reach across cultural divides. All that noted, we can still conclude, with no significant ambiguity, that this is baloney of the craziest order. Astrology is not “a useful diagnostic tool”. It doesn’t enable us to see “strengths and weakness”.

If you want proof of this you can look to the "Carlson experiment" from 1985. Published in Nature, the double-blind test, which asked astrologers to assess subjects' character traits, concluded that the stargazers' predictions were no more reliable than those generated by chance.

Of course they weren’t.

We greatly appreciate Dr Shawn Carlson's studious, disinterested analysis of this antique pseudo-science. It was admirable of Nature magazine to publish the results. But you have to wonder what sort of world we live in when such respectable researchers feel the need to waste their time with transparent balderdash.

No phenomenon cries out to be explained here. No great body of anecdotal evidence draws us to suspect any connection between human “strengths and weaknesses” and the heavenly bodies.

It should, for any humanoid sufficiently advanced to have mastered use of the fork, be blindingly apparent that there is no way in which any such connection could successfully operate.

Keep in mind that, at the time of a person’s birth, the gravitational pull of the obstetrician is immeasurably greater than that of even the moon.

Those who believe in astrology tend to make vague puffing noises when asked how the relative position of Gemini could reveal one’s future gambling addiction or taste for sexual role play.

The rest of us require evidence of effect and explanation of process to even consider belief in an invisible order.

The interview with Mr Tredinnick, chairman of the All-Party Group for Integrated Healthcare, is an essential document for those eager to debunk a philosophy that barely requires debunking. All the familiar straw men are there, but, clearly a creative individual, the politician has inserted a few rhetorical innovations of his own. His suggestion that opposition to astrology goes hand in hand with racism was particularly baffling.

“They are also ignorant, because they never study the subject and just say that it is all to do with what appears in the newspapers, which it is not, and they are deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced, which is troubling,” he said.

Away from the swivel-eyed assertions about racial prejudice, this paragraph gets to a favourite argument of astrological apologists: you fools think that astrology is all about fat frauds in turbans giving romantic advice in the pages of the Daily Trumpet. Those people aren't real astrologers. Real astrologers spend hours drawing geometrical patterns on large sheets of paper and consulting complex tables filled with actual numbers.

Big deal. It’s the distinction between creationism and intelligent design. Both are nonsense, but the latter is nonsense cloaked in the trappings of pseudo science.

Ditch the trimmings. If I’m being asked to swallow snake oil I prefer it delivered straight up. Give me Madame Ravioli in her starry carnival tent over the man with the slide rule any day.

Not that astrologers much fancy science. In a depressing aside, Mr Tredinnick complains about the BBC promoting “the science perspective”. And there we get to the truth of it. Such beliefs set themselves against logic. Science began with humans noticing that rain falls from clouds and plants grow from seeds. A thousand such logical deductions bring you to the discovery of the quark and an understanding of natural selection.

People are entitled to reject the “science perspective,” but anybody so determined should not be allowed to travel on airplanes, receive X-rays or otherwise benefit from the work of thinkers who have progressed beyond the worship of logs. A reasonable trade off, I think.