Friday's Urban Legend: False
CURRENT MOON
Last weekend I was in Ottawa and I read an article in The Ottawa Citizen claiming there was a link between a full moon and crime rates. This silly myth has been around for decades and it's disappointing that newspaper reporters are still promoting it. It's relatively easy to find sites that debunk all of the studies claiming to find a correlation between the phases of the moon and crime, sex, traffic accidents, and emergency room admissions.
Check out The Bad Astronomer for his latest rant [Full Moon Effect Debunked Again] or go directly to The Skeptics Dictionary for all the gory details [full moon and lunar effects].
3 comments :
Gah, I can't even count how many times I've had to correct people (nicely, of course, without offending their silliness and lack of intellectual curiousity) when they say, "Well, hospital emergency rooms get WAY busier when the moon is full, Mike. Explain *that*."
Some days I just want to go fishing and be alone.
While my wife was being prepped for the delivery of my daughter, I chatted up the CRNA who mentioned that he bumped his schedules for labor and delivery staff by as much as 20% during full moon phases.
I sometimes wonder what it is about some claims that trigger that mental “superstition suspicion” alert. At what point does a claim start to look like ‘superstition’? To use the chess analogy: a seemingly impossible gambit might be possible using an imaginative application of standard rules, or perhaps the application of rules we have yet to learn, or perhaps we are faced with a new game altogether. Given the creative scope in theoretical structures that can potentially be used to explain unexpected ‘gambits’ that nature might throw at us, it is difficult to find water-tight criteria that allow us to readily identify superstition without resort to empirical checks. The “lunatic effect” is interesting because it is borderline; its astrological feel might only be apparent because given that the full moon is easily visible to the human eye and that it is an object with a prestigious history in human affairs (e.g. the hunters & harvest moons, calendars) standard psychological mechanisms might conceivably kick in to produce the effect – however, the empirical study you quote suggests not and therefore that a more fruitful line of enquiry would be to sociologically explain why an apparently false belief (=superstition) persists. Astrology itself rings even louder alarms – it seems to be at the very least a ‘new game’ altogether, if not incoherent. However, the candidates with the strongest claim to superstition are perhaps those notions that have little chance of surfacing into the world of experience or are completely unintelligible. “Not even wrong” as they say. Some pundits have claimed that about “String Theory”.
Post a Comment