Today in my Introduction to Biology class, the professor, an engaging speaker who has boasted about winning two prestigious teaching awards, talked about science and pseudoscience; and his primary example of pseudoscience was astrology.
At the beginning of class he handed out a little questionnaire which was, to say the least, biased. It asked our sun sign and asked us to circle which of perhaps twenty statements we identified with. These were of the sort that you’d find on a newspaper horoscope, such as, “Others are getting ahead of me,” and, “I am generally negative about things, I need more up-and-at-’em.” The goal basically was to show how little correlation there was between our personally identified characteristics and the characteristics that our sun sign says we have, and hence astrology is bullshit. Read the full post
