How the Moon Affects You. - book reviews

The cover of How the Moon Affects You advertises it as a "revised and updated version" of The Lunar Effect, which was published in 1978 (Anchor Press). There are two differences between this update and its predecessor. First, Lieber has given the book a title more likely to appeal to those who believe in astrology. This is not entirely bad. With its new title, the book is less likely to be mistaken for a scientific work. It will probably end up in the New Age section of bookstores. Second, its author has added a fourteen-page afterword entitled "New Research."

The book's predecessor introduced the world to Lieber's "biological tides theory." This theory maintains that since the moon causes ocean tides and the human body is 80 percent water, the moon's gravitational pull also causes tides in the human body. If one accepts these premises, it's a short step to believing that some people behave irrationally when their water balance is upset. Astronomers reject this argument as being based on a crude and misleading analogy. In a cogent review that appeared in the Spring 1979 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, astronomer George O. Abell pointed out that the moons gravitational pull was less than the weight of a mosquito. Two of my colleagues, Roger Culver and Roger Ianna, subsequently showed that the moon's "pull" was less than that of a wall of a building six inches away (see Culver and Ianna 1988).

This book contains very little that is new, as Lieber acknowledges: "When invited to revise and update the material in the present book, I was surprised to learn how slight the modifications were. Most of the earlier findings are still relevant" (p. 156).

It would take too much space to identify (let alone correct) all of the errors that precede this conclusion. However, Lieber's claims have turned out to be wrong so often in the past that I felt compelled to do a line-by-line comparison of the two books. Lieber's revisions served to save face. For example, Lieber's first edition describes how he learned that the earth, sun, and moon would line up in January and February of 1974. Became this "cosmic coincidence" would cause high tides, Lieber alerted the Miami police, the local news media, and the emergency room of a public hospital to expect an outbreak of abnormal and criminal behavior. Lieber repeats this story in his revised edition, complete with the line: "Sure enough, all hell broke loose" (p. 61). After two pages of anecdotal evidence, his previous edition concluded by noting that there would be another cosmic coincidence in December 1990 and in January 1992. But of course these dates passed uneventfully. So it is not surprising to find that this is one of Lieber's few revisions.

Another revision can be found in Lieber's reference to The Jupiter Effect by John R. Gribbon and Stephen H. Plagemann (Random House, 1974), a book that, according to Lieber, reports "the significance of tides as triggers of earthquakes" (p. 86). He states that Gribbon and Plagemann are concerned that a coincidence of cosmic cycles "may trigger another great California earthquake." But when? He gives no date. But, if we turn to Lieber's earlier edition, we find that he gave a date: 1982. Of course, no earthquake of any note occurred in California that year.

Unfortunately, instead of correcting past errors, Lieber has added fourteen additional pages of faulty logic, distorted facts, and ad hominem arguments in the chapter entitled "New Research." He reports that there have been "at least 43 data-based studies" since The Lunar Effect appeared in 1978. That number sounds about right. However, Lieber errs when he asserts that "critical review of documented findings reveals the following: positive and negative findings are pretty much equally divided" (p. 156). The fact is that most studies have failed to uncover anything resembling support for the lunar hypothesis, as I. W. Kelly, Roger Culver, and I have documented (Kelly, Rotton, and Culver 1996).

Lieber doesn't cite (let alone review) any of the "at least 43 studies" that he mentions, nor does his bibliography contain references to works that appeared since the first edition of his book. Instead of describing what other scientists have found, he devotes seven pages to a failure to replicate his work with C. R. Sherin. In a 1972 article, Lieber and Sherin uncovered what they claimed was "a lunar effect" for homicides in Dade County, where Miami is located. Their data spanned the years between 1956 and 1970. The present book contains a graph (on page 41) that seems to suggest that homicides peaked at the full moon. As Kelly, Culver, and I have documented (Kelly, Rotton, and Culver 1985-86), Lieber and Sherin based their claims on three tests that attained significance. They neglected to tell readers that they performed forty-eight tests of significance in all. Not divulging this information is like a gambler failing to tell us how many times a coin was tossed before three heads came up. Since Lieber and Sherin chose a conventional (p [less than] .05) level of significance, we would expect 2.4 (i.e., .05 x 48) of the tests to attain "significance" by chance alone.