Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [96]
This leads to an interesting possibility. Would it not seem that many more deaths occur at these points in the human life-span? With physical, emotional, and intellectual levels at zero simultaneously, surely the individual is extremely vulnerable to these conditions. I see, in the books, numerous charts showing the deadly influences on the lives of the famous deceased—but not one of them falls on one of these triple-criticals!
Biorhythm "science" manages to overlook one important possibility: that the interpretation of the charts is entirely dependent on pre-knowledge of the events and their placement in time. Reading significance into the charts is easy when we know the time of some deadly event and see the curves before us. Or is this only a naïve and prejudiced opinion of mine? I have before me the biorhythm charts of several persons who died within the month shown. Yet when I show these to the "experts," they can only point out a number of dangerous positions in that period, and seldom do they come close to the actual death position. Or do I expect too much?
For those who delight in complexity, some of the more devoted students of this wonderful pursuit have, in their wisdom, ascertained still more cycles in the human life-span that they say we would do well to heed. I cannot certify that the conventional biorhythm promoters agree with these newcomers, but feel that I should point out the latest claims so that not one nuance of the art will be neglected. There are, we are told, many additional aspects, such as a "compassion" cycle (38 days), "aesthetic" cycle (43 days), "self-awareness" cycle (48 days), and finally a "spiritual" cycle of 53 days. Thus we must look for criticals (not to mention double-criticals or worse!) at intervals of 11½, 14, 16½, 19, 21½, 23, 24, 26½, 28, 33, 38, 43, 48, and 53 days! How fraught with critical days we now find our lives! A simple calculation demonstrates the possibility of 37% to 59% single critical days. *(2)
I can imagine hitting a 23/33/43/48-day critical conjunction, at which point one would be likely absentmindedly to step off a ladder while painting the house puce and suffer a broken leg.
George Thommen once appeared on a well-known radio show to startle me with the declaration that in 95 percent of all births he had studied the sex of the child had been predictable based on a knowledge of the mother's biorhythm data! He said that when the physical/masculine cycle was at a high point during the period of conception, a boy was likely, and that the opposite was true when the emotional/female cycle was high. Such a percentage seemed remarkable and easily provable, but at the time the means for such a determination were not at my disposal. Happily, W. S. Bainbridge, Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, troubled to check this claim. His results were just as interesting as Thommen's assertion: the biorhythm theory flunked again. Bainbridge eliminated cesarean births, difficult labors, and induced births from a sample of over 300 subjects. He was left, after random rounding off, with births of 100 males and 100 girls. Of these cases there were 104 in which there was no definite "high" or "low" that could, in all fairness to the theory, be used. Of the 96 remaining, in 48 of the cases the biorhythm prediction was right, and in 48 it was wrong. But the wife of a biorhythm "expert" whom Bainbridge was dealing with had an ingenious solution to the failures. Perhaps, she said, these kids grow up to become homosexuals with an indeterminate sex identity! And when Professor Bainbridge asked the "expert" (who actually teaches classes in this pseudoscience) to calculate the sexes of the children based on his data, his associate was unable to do so during the three months he was allowed. This is a familiar situation.