Astrological signs

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Some history about the zodiac and astrological signs theory.

Now there is a nice gentleman who wrote a book about this but I lost a lot of documents and I cant remember for now who he is and what is the book name but I will rectify this problem.

Astrology divides the sky into twelve regions, represented by the familiar signs of the Zodiac: Aquarius, Libra and so on. The sun sign represents the part of the sky occupied by the sun at the time of birth. For example, anyone born between September 23 and October 22 is a Libran.

History of astrology.
Astrology is an ancient practice, and appears to have its origins in Chaldea, thousands of years B.C.
By 700 B.C., the Zodiac was established, and a few centuries later the signs of the Zodiac were very similar to current ones.
The conquests of Alexander the Great brought astrology to Greece, and the Romans were exposed in turn. Astrology was very popular during the fall of the Republic, with many notables such as Julius Caesar having their horoscopes cast. However, there was opposition from such men as Lucretius and Cicero.

Astrology underwent a gradual codification culminating in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, written in the second century A.D. This work describes in great detail the powers of the sun, moon and planets, and their significance in people's lives. It is still recognized as a fundamental textbook of astrology.
Ptolemy took  astrology as seriously as he took his famous work in geography and astronomy; this is evident from the introduction for the Tetrabiblos, where he discusses two available means of making predictions based on the heavens. The first and admittedly more effective of these concerns the relative movements of the sun, moon and planets, which Ptolemy had already treated in his celebrated Almagest. The secondary but still legitimate means of prediction is that in which we use the "natural character" of the aspects of movement of heavenly bodies to "investigate the changes which they bring about in that which they surround.
He argues that this method of prediction is possible because of the manifest effects of the sun, moon and  planets on the earth, for example on weather and the tides.
The European Renaissance is heralded for the rise of modern science, but occult arts such as astrology and alchemy flourished as well.
Arthur Koestler has described Kepler's interest in astrology: "not only did astrology provide Kepler with a livelihood, he also pursued it as a serious interest, although he was skeptical of the particular analyses of previous astrologers."
Astrology was popular both among intellectuals and the general public through the seventeenth century. However, astrology lost most of this popularity in the eighteenth century, when it was attacked by such figures of the Enlightenment as Swift and Voltaire. Only since the 1930's has astrology again gained a huge audience: most people today know at least their sun signs, and a great many believe that the stars and planets exercise an important influence on their lives.

In an attempt to reverse this trend, Bart Bok, Lawrence Jerome and Paul Kurtz drafted in 1975 a statement attacking astrology; the statement was signed by 192 leading scientists, including 19 Nobel prize winners.
The statement raises three main issues:
- astrology originated as part of a magical world view,
- the planets are too distant for there to be any physical foundation for astrology, and
- people believe it merely out of longing for comfort.

First, origins are irrelevant to scientific status. The alchemical origins of chemistry and the occult beginnings of medicine are as magical as those of astrology, and historians have detected mystical influences in the work of many great scientists, including Newton and Einstein.
Hence astrology cannot be condemned simply for the magical origins of its principles.

Similarly, the psychology of popular belief is also in itself irrelevant to the status of astrology: people often believe even good theories for illegitimate reasons, and even if most people believe astrology for personal, irrational reasons, good reasons may be available.

Finally the lack of a physical foundation hardly marks a theory as unscientific Examples: when Wegener  proposed continental drift, no mechanism was known, and a link between smoking and cancer has been established statistically though the details of carcinogenesis remain to be discovered.
Hence the objections of Bok, Jerome and Kurtz fail to mark astrology as pseudoscience.


And then the author goes on and prove why astrology is a pseudo science with some scientifically arguments - but this is the only paragraph I have found for the moment.