Astrology isn't Science, But Your Horoscope is More Real Than you Think

People talk a lot about Astrology. We came up with astrology ages ago back when science meant looking up at the stars and making up stories.

astrology and science

• Astrology is not science, but it is something lots of people identify with and used to explain their feelings, their issues, their relationships, and astrology may even be more than that. Once upon a time astrology was really useful for science and maybe science could still learn a lot from astrology. 
• The ancient Babylonians were clever enough to notice that Stars moved in patterns, and they seem to affect daily life. The moon seemed to control everything from the tides to women's periods. It also just got really hot outside when the Sun was in a constellation that looked like a crab. The Babylonians figured they could resolve the chaos on earth because they understood the Stars better, so they started collecting data and using that data to tell stories.

• They actually became really good at predicting things like eclipses of course they thought eclipses were omens, and they only cared about predicting them, so they could protect their Kings from the angry gods.
• If the ancient Babylonians wanted to trick a God out of killing their king they'd hide the king appointed fake King in his place then sacrificed the fake King. The real King survived. The truth is the ancient Babylonians were doing incredible astronomy.
• 2,000 years later ancient people in Greece and maybe India discovered the Earth revolves like a gyroscope. This movement is called precession, and it happens incredibly slowly but astrology required such precise observations.

• These people were able to notice that the earth is in fact revolving on a cycle that takes tens of thousands of years to complete. They noticed this is pretty incredible. A lot of these astrologers probably understood astronomy better than most of us do today and the discovery of precession changed astrology.
• Western astrology started correlating Sun signs to the seasons instead of the stars. Your Sun Sign is tied to the time of year you were born that means if you were born in the beginning of summer you'd be a cancer regardless of where the crab constellation actually is in the sky.
• Astrology had evolved with science but astrology had a problem. Astrology was all built around the idea that the Sun, the planets, and all the stars revolved around Earth and as science started suggesting otherwise. The astrologers made a bad bet and doubled down astrologers started ignoring science.
• The scientific revolution with new tools like telescopes scientists were redefining the way we understood the universe. But not everyone was on board for years.

Europe's last official court astrologer tried to defend astrology. It didn't go well it got so bad he started openly predicting the deaths of former friends.

• Scientists made him a public laughingstock to convince the rest of Europe that astrology wasn't real science around the same time a college student named Isaac Newton went to the local fair and picked up an astrology book.
• It didn't make sense to him. but he wanted to understand it better, so he started studying mathematics and eventually discovered that physics could explain the connections between earth and the stars far better than astrology.
• Astrology is still something scientists like to make fun of but astrology is still a popular way to understand the universe more than 40% of Americans think.
• Astrology is especially well-suited to the way we communicate on the internet from memes to horoscopes to personality quizzes. Astrology has taken over web culture. It's also taking over the apps on phones. A new social astrology app takes NASA data on stars and planets, and turns them into personalized predictions based on algorithms tuned by professional astrologers.
• People don't love astrology because it's scientific they love it because it's a powerful social tool but maybe astrology can describe more than our emotional well-being and how do we relate to others actually some scientists are trying to figure out exactly how much of astrology is grounded in physical reality, and they're doing some legitimate research.

• Dr. Russell Foster is a circadian Neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, and he says there's something about astrology that is actually pretty scientific at its basic level.
• Astrology is saying that when you're born will influence your biology. Foster has spent years studying how the seasons affect, who you are. It's one of astrology's core ideas, and he says there's real science to back it up.
• For instance, schizophrenia is more common for people born during January, February and March.
• Seasonal affective disorder is more common among people born in March.
• In April, it could be changes in your mother's physiology depending upon when you were conceived or the sort of signals that the mother gave you after birth as a result of feeding on breast milk.
• There is absolutely a statistical impact of when you are born on a whole range of our different parameters. When you're born can affect everything from your lifespan to your height and weight.
• Your birth season can influence your personality and even your likelihood of developing an eating disorder or mental illness.
• Astrologers have always believed some version of that the stars and our bodies follow natural rhythms, and actually that idea has made astrology an important medical tool for century.
• This story starts around 500 years ago. Astrology and medicine are interrelated.

• Dr. Loren Cassell a philosophy of science lecturer at the University of Cambridge studies from the earliest surviving medical case books written around the year. 1600 medical records written by doctors using astrology. At that time lots of doctors didn't actually write things down they would simply treat patients on the spot based on their most obvious symptoms.
• But doctors who used astrology did things differently.
• They had to draw astrological charts, and in the process they gathered lots of information about the patient, and they used all that information to make medical predictions.
• Medical predictions based on astrology probably didn't lead to the best health outcomes. The medical astrology led to some of the earliest surviving medical journals which methodically tracked patient symptoms, and that's a practice to modern medicine and there's another practice modern doctors might want to take from those medical astrologers.
• The 17th century doctors could treat patients using remarkable amounts of information from bodily functions to family histories to the positions of the stars.
• Today modern medicine is also learning to embrace complexity that's what's called individualized medicine where doctors study their patients down to the genetic level to design treatments for them.
• Specifically as we move into an individual medicine, there are lessons that it can learn from an older kind of medicine to actually say the complex number of factors that contribute to any single person's health and whatever illnesses they may suffer from rather than these blanket correlations.
• Your Sun Sign or whether Mercury's in retrograde won't actually affect you but that doesn't mean astrology has no value.

• Astrology can tell us a lot about how natural rhythms affect our health. It can help us reflect on our relationships, and on the way we make decisions.
• It can help people feel connected with ancient history in the universe. Astrology isn't science but maybe that's the wrong way to think about.