The parts censored by Correlation (60% of the word count) are shown in blue.

Suitbert Ertel's article "Gauquelin planetary effects - brought down to earth? On Geoffrey Dean's dealing with stubborn facts" in Correlation 23(1) has a revealing history. In 2003 Wout Heukelom, the Dutch publisher since 1986 of Astrology under Scrutiny (AuS), the journal that originally published my Gauquelin findings, was keen to have an exchange on my findings between Ertel and myself that was free of avoidable mistakes such as misunderstandings and missed references, and which would update the Ertel-Dean exchange in Skeptical Inquirer January/February 2003. He was also keen that issues raised by one side should not be evaded by the other side. His aim was a single definitive exchange that was to the point, free of mistakes, and free of evasion. The interests of his readers would come first.

So Heukelom asked Ertel and I to present our arguments and responses side-by-side in two columns, Ertel's on the left and mine on the right, for subsequent publication in AuS. Now according to Ertel's article in Correlation 23(1), Ertel would not be allowed to respond to my remarks and was even required to "renounce commenting on [Dean's] remarks in a last word". In fact Heukelom required us to recycle the exchange, changing whatever was required in response to the other, until it was as considered and as final as possible. Contrary to not being allowed to respond, Ertel was required to respond, and to keep responding, until the exchange stabilised, thus eliminating any need for last words. As Heukelom explained, "In this way a never-ending series of articles and counter-articles would be avoided. A welcome result for both publisher and readers!" I accepted immediately, Ertel less immediately, and a start was made about two years ago.

Concern for the reader
Unfortunately Ertel decided that responding to my comments was intolerable (no matter that responding to each other's recycled comments was the whole idea), and insisted that the format should be his article, then my response, then his last word. This of course would allow the very things (avoidable mistakes, evasion, endless counter-articles) that Heukelom wished to avoid. So Heukelom said no, the interests of his readers came first. Ertel's response to that decision was a series of emails claiming there was a conspiracy against him and that it was his right to have the last word. No matter that the format was equally fair to both sides, and that it was the publisher's right to specify the format for his own publications. The following excerpts from Heukelom's emails to Ertel illustrate what Heukelom was up against:

26 October 2004: "Your e-mails of 14 October 2004 and subsequent days give me a feeling of deep dismay. ... At first it was yes [to the two-column format with recycling] in the first months of 2004 ... then no, next an almost-yes, and after that again a no. ... Your changing points of view and your e-mails written to third parties indicate that I can hardly trust your statements". 3 December: "In fact, now you are not agreeing at all, notwithstanding your repeated statements that you have agreed already. ... it is your response that is preventing the start of a new project". 4 December: "You are discussing my conditions instead of meeting them. Without meeting my conditions there will be no new project. Your discussion does not succeed in changing my conditions". 6 December: "It was you who rejected my offer. ... it appears that you are only able to meet your own conditions, despite the fact that you have repeatedly stated that you had agreed with my conditions". 7 December: "It is you who is making serious problems, for the second time, now. ... my conclusion has to be that you do not like a result of a discussion with Geoffrey at all".

Readers can see for themselves how entirely fair the two-column format is, and how it puts their interests first, by emailing [Wout Heukelom via this website] and asking for a pdf file of the completed part of the exchange (three A4 pages with Ertel's recycled text on the left and my recycled response on the right).

Avoidable mistakes
The end result of Ertel withdrawing from the exchange has been the publication in Correlation 23(1) of more or less the same article that was previously on Ertel's website and which in turn was a revision of an earlier article (with the slightly different sub-title of "On Geoffrey Dean's outmanoevering stubborn facts") that was the starting point for our exchange in early 2003. This repeat in Correlation 23(1) fills twenty-seven pages despite Ertel having already filled fifty-five Correlation pages on the same topic, and despite the editor saying in 21(2) that "As space is restricted in the journal, this debate will be extended to the Correlation pages of the Astrological Association website when necessary". The latest article perpetuates a multitude of avoidable errors that were being corrected in the exchange. It also misrepresents my position, ignores crucial findings, and fails to address the whole picture just as a sun sign reading fails to address the whole chart. Ironically almost all the issues it does raise have been raised (and answered) before, so it contains little that is new. In other words the result is precisely the disregard for readers that Heukelom wished to avoid.

Figure 1. How Rob Pudim, cartoonist for the Skeptical Inquirer, saw the exchange between Ertel and myself in the January-February 2003 issue pages 57-59 and 65. The cartoon is on page 57. The ball is labelled GN for Gauquelin. Player no 1 is Ertel, 02 is Dean, 55 (after 1955, date of Gauquelin's first book) is Tampering.

Early in 2005, when the exchange was still taking place, albeit slowly due to Ertel's resistance to Heukelom's conditions, Ertel's website announced that his article would be submitted to Correlation. So Heukelom emailed Nick Campion, intellectual head of the AA, asking "whether there is some kind of misunderstanding in by-passing Astrology under Scrutiny in this way". He pointed to potential problems for Correlation, such as the article's avoidable mistakes and evasions: "from what I have seen so far of Geoffrey's responses, Suitbert's arguments against Geoffrey's findings (for example that there is no evidence for Gauquelin-like beliefs) can highly be questioned. ... more worrisome, Suitbert's article contains many ad hominems against Geoffrey, as the sub-title, now slightly changed to 'On Geoffrey Dean's dealing with stubborn facts', shows immediately. I think the outcome for Suitbert (and for Correlation if it reprints his article, and no doubt also for Astrology under Scrutiny) could be embarrassing. I suspect Geoffrey ... might even sue the Astrological Association for defamation, it being presumably easier for him to sue a British publisher than a German website. ... I would like to solve this problem as soon as possible. One way out might be for Correlation to join Astrology under Scrutiny in jointly publishing the Suitbert-Geoffrey exchange". On Campion's advice, Heukelom passed his concerns to the Correlation editor, where they evidently fell on deaf ears.

I appreciate that readers might be thoroughly confused, if not thoroughly bored, by what is now a total of more than eighty Correlation pages (almost two whole issues!) devoted to avoidable mistakes about my findings, given that I reported my findings not in Correlation but in journals unlikely to be read by the ordinary Correlation reader. My problem here is that Ertel's article is flawed well beyond sorting it out in a letter for readers unfamiliar first-hand with my findings. The best I can do is identify some of the flaws and then refer interested readers to a website where they can find the information and freedom from distortion so conspicuously missing from Ertel's article.

Untruths

but to no avail. Equally to no avail was my pointing out the same untruth in a one-page letter eventually published two issues late in Correlation 21(1), despite which the editor Pat Harris continued to repeat in 21(2) that I am trying "to explain all positive [Gauquelin] results". By contrast

We might presume that SI has every interest in explaining away the Mars effect, yet its editor had no trouble getting it right.

Not only are these statements untrue, the correct state of affairs is clearly indicated in my cited articles. For at least two years it has been there in black and white.

Sun sign columns have long been discredited but to my knowledge none of the Jonathan Cainers, Russell Grants, and Shelley von Strunckels of this world have shouted "Wow, we have been found out! "

When someone declines to listen to what you are saying there is clearly little incentive to participate (which of course is just one more of the situations that Heukelom's approach was designed to avoid).

Two whole pages are devoted to duplicating abstracts of five Ertel papers previously published in Correlation 3-4 years earlier with scarcely any mention of my published responses that identified fatal flaws in each.

If I was as dishonest, incompetent, and deaf to criticism as the article claims, readers might wonder why so many reputable people were willing to provide help and comments - a total of eighteen, most of them leading players in the field, are acknowledged in my AuS and SI papers. If nothing else the ad hominems insult these people by implying that they too are self-deceived and proceeding improperly.

As it happens, my AuS draft of July 1999 was sent to numerous colleagues including Ertel. Their comments were always acted upon, as the editor Rudolf Smit will verify. However, I could not act on Ertel's comments because he declined to respond. Ertel also declined to correct errors in his AuS response when I pointed them out (Dean 2000:86). The situation is described by Smit in his letter to Ertel of January 2001: "rather than act on [Geoffrey's comments], in the sense that you would indeed rectify your mistakes, you did nothing important ... not even after our asking again. You said (email of 14 October 2000): 'No, I did not make changes. Of course not. I do not approve of making changes to one's advantage (except correcting simple errors)'." Smit saw this as meaning "changes to Geoffrey's advantage". Smit adds: "What I also am very unhappy about is the way you wrote your critique. I got you so far that you were willing to replace 'abortive attempt' by 'erroneous attempt', but that did not take away the fact that there were still quite a few sneering remarks in Geoffrey's direction ... whereas Geoffrey in his rebuttal remained courteous and complimentary".

Overall picture
As if avoidable mistakes were not enough, Ertel's article becomes even more reader-unfriendly when it fails to describe the tests it dismisses, and when it ignores crucial results such as my heredity findings (half my total findings!), my cluster analyses, and the astonishingly close match to every one of the many Gauquelin puzzles. All of the above flaws -- avoidable mistakes, misrepresentation, wrong statements, obscurity, and crucial omissions -- would have been glaringly apparent to anyone familiar with my articles. That the editor and referees allowed these flaws to escape into print is curious.

At this point I could cite many more escaped flaws but enough is enough. Suffice to say that, had Heukelom's recycled two-column format been followed, this space-wasting time-wasting lunge and riposte -- all accurately predicted by Heukelom -- could have been avoided. That it was not followed suggests that the editor and publisher of Correlation do not share Heukelom's concern for the reader.

Kollerstrom's article
Kollerstrom's article "How Ertel rescued the Gauquelin effect" starts by referring to me as "doyen of US sceptics", which might be true of people like Carl Sagan but certainly not of me, and then entirely ignores my Gauquelin articles despite their pointed relevance to his theme. For example my 2002 SI article concludes from new evidence (ironically the same evidence that Ertel's article wishes to dismiss as "untenable") that "the Gauquelins had found a real effect" and that "data selection and fraud can be rejected", which conclusions received none of the usual negative reactions whenever Gauquelin is vindicated, not even from hostile critics such as Dommanget, Kurtz, Nanninga, and Nienhuys, a situation so at odds with previous experience that one wonders why Kollerstom should ignore it.

Similarly my AuS article, for the first time in any publication, lists the effect sizes for all planetary effect replications, which information was also presented as a graph (actually a meta-analysis of 35 studies of planetary effects) by me and Arthur Mather at the 2004 Kepler Day attended by Kollerstrom. We noted that: "Most of the 35 effect sizes lie outside the 80% confidence limits, so we are dealing with an effect genuinely different from zero. The mean absolute effect size is 0.044, which translates to a hit rate of 52.2% (as opposed to a chance hit rate of 50%) for the 0.006% of the population who are eminent. Applied pro rata to the general population, the hit rate is 50.0001%. You might like to wonder why 25% of all Correlation articles since it began in 1981 and 30% of this conference time should be devoted to a hit rate of 50.0001%". Readers might also wonder how a hit rate of 50.0001% justifies Kollerstrom's suggestion that all articles on planetary effects be re-published together, and how it justifies his description of planetary effects as "a scientific demonstration of human destiny". At Kepler Day we also showed how global consideration of Gauquelin puzzles is essential to any understanding of planetary effects, but no hint of this appears in Kollerstom's article.

Figure 4. The meta analysis presented at the 2004 Kepler Day. Right: 35 studies of planetary effects as described in the text. Left: 62 Gauquelin studies of signs and aspects show a different picture with no excess of effect sizes outside the 80% confidence limits.

Kollerstrom speculates on the reasons for Gauquelin's suicide. Four months before his suicide, Gauquelin, Ertel and I stayed for two days with Rudolf Smit at his house in the Netherlands. Rudolf and I were privy to private and personal Gauquelin matters, and it has long been clear to us that there are more plausible reasons for Gauquelin's suicide than skeptics' accusations of cheating.

Douglas's article
Douglas's article "Replication of a Saturn Effect with firstborns" provides various hurdles for the reader. For example the text description of Figure 1 does not correspond to Figure 1, the key sector totals easily read from Figure 1 do not correspond with the total cited in the text, the reference "Douglas (2004)" refers to a Correlation article that seems not to exist, his sample size of 277 does not have the power to reliably detect effect sizes typical of planetary effects, nor is it large enough to justify the use of approximations for expectancies. Thus when I took the Gauquelin data for 15,942 professionals and subdivided it into samples of N=277, the mean Saturn expectancy by Gauquelin's exact combinatorial method was 60.4 sd 8.1. The approximation gives 58.8, but the killer of course is the high sd.

Douglas bases his approach on birth-order differences uncovered by Sulloway's heroic Gauquelin-style research reported in his 1996 book Born to Rebel. In a world where siblings compete for attention, siblings quickly learn what to do even when parents try to treat them alike. These learned strategies affect the rest of their lives. Thus laterborns who have learned to question parental authority in order to disadvantage a firstborn tend to end up as adventurous and rebellious adults. Sulloway estimates that typical mean correlations between birth order and the Big Five personality dimensions can reach up to 0.2 (with IQ it is near zero), but only when the effects of social class and sibship size are controlled. If they are not controlled, as in Douglas's study, the correlation disappears. Which may explain why Gauquelin's own (uncontrolled) studies of birth order reported in his 1988 book Planetary Heredity led to his conclusion that "planetary heredity is not affected by birth order".

As an example, when these controls are in place, laterborns tend to be less anxious and less conforming than firstborns. Nevertheless, in one of the largest studies ever made of birth order effects, Eysenck and Cookson found negligible correlations between birth order and EPI scores in 4000 eleven-year-olds, even though they controlled for sibship size but not social class. Their study (not cited by Sulloway) is in British Journal of Educational Psychology 40, 117-131, 1969. They used the EPI rather than the traditional parent or teacher ratings because ratings can give spurious effects due to stereotyping, a point unaccountably not mentioned by Sulloway. To be sure, Sulloway uncovers many areas other than personality where birth order effects can be substantial, even dramatic, albeit with the same proviso about confounds, leading to his generalisation that laterborns are "born to rebel". But caution is still needed. Thus Eysenck himself, whose autobiography is Rebel with a Cause, was not a laterborn. Unless we impose the controls specified by Sulloway, we might do worse than attend to Ernst and Angst's 1983 book Birth Order (a review of more than 1000 birth order studies), which concluded that differences in personality due to birth order are of "little general importance, although birth order still may be an important environmental factor for some individuals".

Wackford's article
Readers should heartily endorse Mike Edwards's "a very large THANK YOU" to Mike Wackford for his scholarly sorting out of what Donald Bradley aptly called the "vexed question" of house division. Nevertheless the traditional interpretation of these now unvexed houses remains at odds with the Gauquelin planetary findings endorsed by Ertel, Kollerstrom, and Douglas. Hopefully we might look forward to further scholarly articles by Wackford that address this further vexed question.

Brady's article
On pages 68-69 there is a letter from me about Brady's article "The Australian parent-child astrological research project" in Correlation 20(2), which research had been stimulated by Gauquelin's heredity work. An accompanying note from the editor says that no response from Brady has so far been received but "may be available for a future issue". The note fails to mention that I sent the letter to Correlation in August 2002, over three years ago, and that various chunks have been censored. The usual reason for deletion is lack of space, but this cannot apply here because the letter is followed by almost a full blank page. There was also censoring of an earlier 1999 critique by me of Bagley's eight-page article in Correlation 18(1) in which I concluded it was uninformed and said nothing that could not be said more clearly in half a page. Although the editor had invited my critique, it was nevertheless censored (Bagley was then her supervisor at Southampton University). Incidentally, when as a referee I had pointed out serious flaws in Bagley's paper, none were corrected, nor did Bagley reply to my emails. As for Brady's article, judge for yourself. Here are the main censored bits, all of which would easily fit within the blank space:

A word on utility. Even though signs are probably the most disconfirmed factor in astrology, and would be immediately dismissed out of hand by whole-chart purists, Brady's eight hypotheses are so restrictive that they could not possibly be useful. Indeed, according to Dr Patrice Guinard's Astrology: The Manifesto, glowingly reviewed in the same issue, they are not even believable. Dr Guinard asserts that astrology arises from the psychic state of the person and is therefore not open to statistical enquiry. So statistical studies (such as Brady's) are "a caricature of any truly respectable psychological research", and their authors are incompetent "know-it-alls in lab coats" who represent "just one more species in the roster of parasites on astrology" (quotes are from his CURA website). Curiously, no hint of these anti-Correlation sentiments appeared in the glowing review. But back to utility. ... Even these best effects [of Brady's] are of no practical use whatever ... which did not stop the front cover claiming they could be "the stuff of which astrologers' dreams are made". ... In passing, readers might note that the statistical errors would have been spotted by any first-year statistics student, which hardly reflects well on the expertise of Correlation's referees, or on the editorial claim that the results are "a potentially important finding for astrology".

When a scientific journal promotes on its cover an article that, as it stands, is essentially meaningless (and this despite Correlation's editorial in 19(1) announcing that Brady had provided the Research Group for the Critical Study of Astrology at Southampton University with copies of her raw data "so that the group could subject it to different tests which would give further insight into the results she had discovered so far"), then I think something is wrong. (The editor was of course also RGCSA's administrative assistant.) I think it is clear that censorship in both cases was not on scientific grounds but on political grounds. That is, while criticisms of articles are said to be encouraged, criticisms of referees, editors, editorial policy, and anything involving vested interests, will be censored.

The issue of the resulting poor intellectual standards was aired in a joint letter submitted to Correlation in late 2000 by myself, Rudolf Smit and Wayne Spencer, all of us professional editors, and published early in 2002 in 20(1). We pointed out that the AA's policy on referee recommendations is that "the author is not bound to follow them" (this was stated in an email to us from the editor in late 2000), which policy would seem to allow the semblance of rigour without the actual rigour, and that "conspicuously lower standards [in Correlation] were now a reality". The editor welcomed the letter, at least in public, and announced changes such as making referees anonymous (which also makes referees publicly unaccountable, hardly a progressive change), and how "factual errors must obviously be corrected". But in the five years since then, no improvement in standards seems to have occurred. If they had then Ertel's article in its present form, and arguably Kollerstrom's and Douglas's articles in their present form, should have been returned for improvement.