Gauquelin maintains that the correlation between birth frequencies of eminent people and the position of planets at the time of their births arre due to some hereditary readiness. According to this view specific responsiveness of professions to the planets is associated with character dispositions, in support of which M and F Gauquellin provided empirical evidence by extracting trait expressions from biographies. Using more rigorous controls, the author, with help from a research student, tested for trait variation in biographies among groups of professionals having different planets in sensitive zones. Trait extractors did not know the planetary positions of the perosnalities to which the biographies were devoted. The character trait hypothesis was not supported. Previous positive rsults reported by M and F Gauquelin might be explained by not having excluded extraction bias arising from astrological knowledge and expectancies.

In this article the author points to an unmet requirement in any theory of inheritance of astrological planetary placings in diurnal space. For any characteristic to be heritable it must confer a selective advantage on the organism carrying it. While it seems difficult to understand why children should acquire greater survival ability from inheriting personality traits from their parents the picture is very different when the modern concept of inclusive fitness is used in combination with a systemic view of the family group. With these more advanced concepts a new hypothesis is derived relating astro-inheritance to the new parameter of birth order of each sibling in a family. Some preliminary testing with a small data sample provides some confirming results, and unusually for astro-research the hypothesis can be tested without a null hypothesis. Contribution of further data samples are invited.

A critical examination and replication of an experiment by Ertel on Gauquelin’s character trait hypothesis (CTH) is reported. Ertel and co-workers re-analysed the same US birth data used by Gauquelin in a previous report of positive results to test for bias by Michel Gauquelin in extracting the traits from biographies. Ertel reported negative results, concluding that CTH positive findings were due only to Gauquelin bias. The present study closely followed Ertel’s procedure, using the same material once again, but the extractions were made by two students at the University of California at Fresno under the authors’ supervision. The results confirm Gauquelin’s former positive results, contradicting Ertel’s conclusions, and suggest a Gauquelin bias insufficient to affect the main results significantly in favour of CTH. Possible reasons for the differences between the results of the present study and Ertel’s are discussed.

Studies linking phases of the full moon to violence have provided mixed findings, and the most recent studies have failed to show any connections. In this study inpatients admitted over 5 years to a psychiatric hospital in Northern Sydney were studied, and degree of violence was measured daily by a standardised schedule. No significant link was found beteen violence and aggression, and any phase of the moon, despite the fact that many health workers continue to believe that such a link exists.

Reviewing literature published in the past 50 years, the authors find no support for the traditional idea that moon phases are associated with psychiatric dusturbance. The authors propose that modern findings can be reconciled with traditional beliefs through the mechanism of sleep deprivation which was caused by brilliant noctural light during the full moon. Today’s populations are largely shielded from this lunar effect by modern housing and lighting conditions. But the partial sleep deprivation caused by the brilliance of the moon would, according to modern neuropsychiatric studies, have been sufficient to precipitate mania in people with this underlying disposition, and seizures in individuals with the vulnerability fo seizure disorder. The authors proposed experimental possibilities for the validation of their sleep deprivation hypothesis.

The medical astrologers of ancient Greece: the iatromathematici, and the later European physician-astrologers, assumed a correlation between events in the heavens and those on earth that was relevant for both health and diseases.
Some of the early practitioners of modern scientific medicine did the same under the aegis of what we might term, proto-cosmobiology, though none would provide an adequate mechanism to explain the nature of the link they believed existed between the skies and ourselves.
Within the discovery and elucidation of the pineal gland’s functions in the mid twentieth century, which are discussed in detail, we can now to a greater extent explain in conventional scientific terms how those influences of the sun, moon and planets and other celestial phenomenon studied by the early iatromathematici and early cosmobiologists can, and do, affect us.

From the conclusions on KI-37, after reviewing a variety of studies which have attempted to disprove Gauquelin’s findings:

“So forty years after Michel Gauquelin first announced the discovery of his planetary effects to the world, and twenty seven years after the beginning of the Mars effect controversy, we see Gauquelin’s findings are essentially as he specified them in his first two books. The sideshow of the controversy continues even as I write this, but the voice of the debunker hustling his own version of the truth is like a carnival barker and beginning to crack.”

Studies of astrology with univariate statistical designs have yielded inconclusive results. This thesis proposes the use of a multidimensional statistical model to examine astronomical concomitancies of human behavior

Birth data for the study were obtained from Alcoholics Anonymous members (n = 53) and a sample of the general population of Michigan (n = 217). The model was evaluated with these data using Discriminant Function Analysis. Hypotheses derived from the model were supported for group centroids (p < .00001) and group covariances (p < .03). The resulting function correctly classified 80.7 percent of the data from which it was derived (p < 10-16). The function also correctly classified 72.2 percent of a second sample (n = 230) of Michigan births (p < 10-10). By comparison, T-tests using the same data found 9.4 percent of the variables significant at the .05 level (p < .05). The findings support the use of a multidimensional model to evaluate astrological hypotheses about human behavior.

From the Conclusion on p. SE46:

“The Mars effect, having shaken off three skeptics’ attacks, needs to be reassessed by those who failed to disarm it. For the skeptic committees this should not pose much of a problem. They merely need to live up to their own principles of ‘methodological skepticism’ … The present study has shown that the results do survive all rechecks. Are the researchers now ready to accept planetary correlations as an objective for science?”

Ertel’s argument is that when the new studies by the skeptics are carefully considered and interpreted, Gauquelin’s original findings are supported.

“Of all the astrological problems which beckon to us from the future there is one which must excite the thoughtful astrologer more than any other. It is also the problem the solution of which may prove to
be of greatest practical scientific value to mankind. This is the question of how astrology and genetics are to be related and, specifically perhaps, how the genetic code is expressed astrologically.
To put the matter in a nutshell, we know that there are laws of heredity by which natural characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation; we also know that the natural characteristics of each person are described by the horoscope
calculated for his date, time and place of birth. It therefore follows – and we must be clear about this, it does inevitably follow – that the astrological code, by which the horoscope is interpreted, must be in agreement from one generation to the next …
On the most basic scientific level Michel Gauquelin has demonstrated the existence of an astrological relationship between the nativities of parents and children in a massive scientific experiment involving the horoscopes (all calculated for the time of birth) of some 25,000 parents and children.”