Quirkology by Richard Wiseman Read Free Book Online

or above; “noneminent clergy” consisted of everyone else. By chance alone, one would expect roughly the same percentage of both groups to be born on Christmas Day. In fact, significantly more eminent than noneminent clergy claimed to share a birthday with Christ, perhaps supporting the idea that the higher you go in the clergy, the more you feel the need to move closer to Jesus.
     
    Perhaps we are being a little harsh on the eminent folk involved in Harrison’s analysis. In much the same way as some parents change a child’s date of birth to save a few dollars, others may have been so eager to see their children excel in life that they deliberately misreported infants’ birth dates to make the events seem more auspicious. Modern-day hospital births make such misreporting problematic, but in days gone by, parents reported their children’s births verbally to local registry offices, making such deception much easier. The mother of the eminent mystery writer Georges Simenon confessed to this type of manipulation, reporting her son’s birthday as being a day earlier than Friday, February 13, 1903, because she considered the thirteenth to be “too hard a fate for her sweet newborn baby.” If this interpretation of the results is valid, then it would be wrong to conclude that high-ranking clergy are more likely to lie than low clergy. Instead, the evidence would suggest that it is the parents of high-ranking clergy who are especially deceptive. Perhaps this represents one of the few instances in which there is empirical evidence to support the biblical notion that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons.
     
    Some researchers now believe that parental lying may help account for a mystery that has baffled scientists for decades: a mystery that has come to be known as the “Mars Effect.”
     

THE MARS EFFECT
     
    In addition to sending out horoscopes based around the birth date of a mass murderer to innocent members of the public, Michel Gauquelin tested many aspects of astrology. According to astrological lore, being born when certain planets are high in the sky is a good omen, suggesting that the individual concerned will be eminent in his or her chosen career. In the 1950s, Gauquelin tested this notion by plotting the star charts of 16,000 people listed in a leading nineteenth-century French biographical dictionary. To his amazement, he discovered that certain planets were more likely to be above the horizon at the time of his chosen subjects’ births. For more than fifty years this evidence, which has come to be known as the Mars Effect, puzzled even the most skeptical of thinkers. One researcher remarked that “it is probably not putting it too strongly to say that everything hangs on it,” and Hans Eysenck noted that if the “results are ever shown to be spurious then, relatively speaking, the positive evidence that remains for astrology is weak.” 33 Then, in 2002, Geoffrey Dean, the researcher who carried out the “time twins” experiment, undertook a remarkable piece of scientific detective work. 34
     
    During the nineteenth century, many in the French upper classes held a strong belief in astrology and had ready access to popular almanacs that showed the exact position of the planets throughout each day. In addition, parents reported the times and dates of their children’s births verbally to local registry offices; the information was not officially and accurately recorded by doctors and midwives. Dean uncovered evidence to suggest that some parents deliberately misreported the dates of their children’s births to make the events seem astrologically “auspicious.” Such parents could have then subsequently provided their children with the schooling, and other resources, required to turn these alleged “heavenly predictions” into self-fulfilling prophecies. In short, Dean’s work suggests that the Mars Effect may have little to do with astrology and much more to do with a quirky