Is astrology a real science?
No. Astrology has no basis in science and no experimental data supports it. Astrologers like to claim support from things like the Global Consciousness Project and the Carlson Double-Blind Experiment, but neither of these experiments actually demonstrates what their proponents claim. The Global Consciousness Project starts from the assumption that human consciousness can affect random number generators, and then looks at data from a series of random number generators for anomalous signs of non-randomness during globally significant events. Nobody has proposed a mechanism by which "universal consciousness," if it exists, would affect a random number generator, and no statistically significant deviations from expected randomness have been recorded. (The people who run the experiment claim that non-randomness was recorded during the September 11 attacks. Statistical analysis of the data do not support this claim.) And the Carlson Double-Blind Experiment is even more conclusive: it shows that astrologers can not predict compatibility among people with an accuracy any greater than pure chance. There is no scientific basis for astrology. It is pure superstition, top to bottom. It fails every test put to it, which is not surprising given that the predictions made by different astrologers about the same person or same event are inconsistent and differ wildly from each other. To quote a meta-study of astrology written by Geoffrey Dean, a long-time astrology researcher, and Ivan Kelly, a professor of Educational Psychology and Special Education at the University of Saskatchewan: Many tests of astrologers have been made since the 1950s but only recently has a coherent review been possible. A large-scale test of persons born less than five minutes apart found no hint of the similarities predicted by astrology. Meta-analysis of more than forty controlled studies suggests that astrologers are unable to perform significantly better than chance even on the more basic tasks such as predicting extraversion. More specifically, astrologers who claim to use psychic ability perform no better than those who do not.