Dragon Babies, Astrology and Other Nonsense

The upcoming Chinese New Year will mark the end of the year of the dragon on the Chinese lunar calendar. As most people who have had much contact with Chinese culture – or who eat frequently at Chinese restaurants in the West – know, twelve years constitutes a cycle in the Chinese calendar, with an animal representing each of the twelve years (the animals are also associated with different months, days and even hours, but these complexities don’t concern me here). Because of the coincidence in number, this cycle and the animals that make it up are often called the “Chinese zodiac”, even though they have nothing to do with constellations or the apparent path of the Sun through the sky. People born in the year of a particular animal are believed to share certain characteristics, a belief that leads to all sorts of absurdities, particularly in a year like the one that is now ending.

Of the twelve animals in this so-called “Chinese zodiac”, the dragon is the only mythical one. More to the point, the dragon is associated with great power and fortune, and was historically the symbol of the Chinese emperors. Because of these positive associations, children born in the year of the dragon have been held by the superstitious to be lucky and destined for greatness. As a result, birth rates skyrocket in years of the dragon. The local media is complicit in perpetuating the idea that children born in these years are special, as in their celebrity gossip news they will report that such and such a celebrity is “pregnant with a dragon fetus”, whereas in other years news of celebrity pregnancies rarely if ever refer to the animal in whose year the baby will be born. This phenomenon seemingly repeated itself in the past year. While I haven’t seen any definitive statistics, I recall reports from during the year that mentioned a dramatic rise in births, and many anecdotal reports (plus the evidence of my own eyes) that there were a lot more pregnancies than usual.

Of course many women who gave birth in the past year got pregnant for reasons unrelated to it being the year of the dragon. At least two women I know who also happened to give birth in the last year themselves told me that they would rather not have given birth in the year of the dragon because of all the other people who were doing so. But one can safely assume that the majority or at least a large number of the “additional” pregnancies, that is the ones over and above the usual average, were due to a desire to have a “dragon baby”. Of course the real result is that children born in this year will face more crowded classrooms and greater competition than children born in other years. And the idea that all “dragon babies” could be destined for great things is laughable, considering that they make up a twelfth (or more) of all people. It’s like the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the Three Wise Men have gone to the wrong stable and mistaken the baby Brian for the baby Jesus:

Mandy (Brian’s mother): So, you're astrologers, eh? Well, what is he?
Wise Man 2: Hmm?
Mandy: What star sign is he?
Wise Man 2: Capricorn.
Mandy: Capricorn, eh? What are they like?
Wise Man 2: He is the son of God, our Messiah.
Wise Man 1: King of the Jews.
Mandy: And that's Capricorn, is it?
Wise Man 2: No, no, that's just him.
Mandy: Oh, I was going to say, otherwise there'd be a lot of them.

This brings up the Western version of superstitions about times of birth and their supposed relationship to personalities, which takes the form of astrology. There are numerous reasons that show astrology has as little to do with reality as the Chinese birth animals (that is to say none at all). Most of them are very well summed up by Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy blog. In addition to the points he makes in that article, in another entry, he mentions the fact that due to precession of the Earth’s axis, the astrological dates do not match the times the Sun is actually in the constellations of the zodiac, so that most of those who according to the standard astrological dates are Virgos were actually born when the Sun was in Libra.

I would also add that of course the “constellations” are merely the groupings which the Greeks imagined the stars to be in. Different cultures saw entirely different groupings. What’s more, the groupings themselves are just accidents of perspective. The stars in any given constellation are for the most part not at all close to each other; they only appear that way because from our perspective they lie along the same line of sight. For instance, Castor and Pollex, the two chief stars of Gemini (“the Twins”) are not particularly close to each other, as Castor lies 17 light years further away from us than Pollex. The three stars in the belt of Orion are even further apart, with the farthest about 600 light years further from us than the closest. If we travelled to other star systems few or none of Earth’s constellations would be visible. Finally, though to an ordinary observer the constellations don’t change even over many human lifetimes, the stars are all moving and in tens of thousands of years the constellations will all have changed. So claiming that these accidental, non-permanent groupings of stars as imagined by one culture in human history have some sort of influence over the lives of any of us is as silly as saying the same about ephemeral shapes formed by clouds as seen by a random observer.

Unfortunately Chinese birth animals and astrology are not the only ridiculous ideas given wide credence. Another example is the bizarre belief centered in Japan but also seen elsewhere in East Asia that a person’s blood type has something to do with their personality. This idea was ultimately derived from fallacious, racist pseudoscience adopted by the Nazis and then the militarist-era Japanese (who used it to “explain” the difference between the rebellious Taiwanese aborigines and the “submissive” Ainu people) and then revived in the 1970s by a Japanese writer with no scientific background. Despite the lack of any scientific basis, the belief that blood type influences personality is still widespread in Japan.

Several points made by Plait in his essay are relevant to all these irrational ideas about predicting a person’s fate or personality and worth reiterating here. One is that there is absolutely no evidence that any of these claims has any scientific validity. Any perception that there is a correspondence between predictions based on these ideas about people’s personalities or what happens to them and reality is purely a matter of selective perception (people notice the seemingly correct predictions – interpreting events in a manner that fits them – and ignore the incorrect ones). Also, the assertion that these concepts are merely harmless fun is also wrong. People waste large amounts of money and time on such nonsense, and such waste is not harmless. The other day I was eating at a restaurant and a woman at the next table was listening to a long spiel from a fortune teller, from the look of things hanging on his every word. It’s not harmless if people decide whom they should date or hang out with – or even when to give birth to a child – based on completely erroneous ideas. The sooner these inaccurate and outdated notions are abandoned the better off those who still hold to them, and the people around them, will be.