Argument by Analogy: a Friend of Yours Is Convinced of the Influence

question 69

Essay

Argument by Analogy: A friend of yours is convinced of the influence of the Moon on everyday human affairs. He cites a supposed correlation between crime and the occurrence of a full moon as proof. He even speculates that the gravitational influence of the Moon is the mechanism by noting that it is the gravitational pull of the Moon that causes the tides. "After all", he argues, "as over half a human's weight is water, the Moon must affect the flow of blood in human beings!" How would you explain to your friend that this analogy, between the ocean tides and water in the human body, is profoundly flawed. Are there any alternate explanations for a link between moon phase and crime?

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Definitions:

Frequencies

The counts or occurrences of specific events or characteristics in a set of data.

Central Tendency

A statistical measure that identifies a single value as representative of the middle of a dataset, commonly by using the mean, median, or mode.

Variance

A measure of the distribution of data points in a data set around the mean, indicating how spread out the data points are.

Z-score

A statistical measure representing the number of standard deviations a data point is from the mean of its data set, used in standardizing scores for comparison.