6 ms·

Religion isn't the only thing becoming extinct in those nations. Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X" where X is a nation from the list given in

Religion isn't the only thing becoming extinct in those nations. Go to Wikipedia and search for "Demographics of X" where X is a nation from the list given in the above-linked article: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. (Nation/ Total Fertility Rate) (Australia/ 1.97) (Austria/ 1.41) (Canada/ 1.58) (Czech Republic/ 1.49) (Finland/ 1.85) (Ireland/ 2.1) (Netherlands/ 1.66) (New Zealand/ 2.1) (Switzerland/ 1.46) Those numbers are for the years 2007 to 2009, depending on the nation. Note that only Ireland and New Zealand are at replacement levels. Residual Catholic natalism may explain Ireland's current fertility (given their loss of religion, don't expect that to last). Reading between the lines in the Wikipedia article for New Zealand, it seems that the Maori and Pacific Islanders are doing more than their fair share of baby-making. My guess is that they are more religious than the contracepting whites. Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. UPDATE: I can't get the formatting right on that table of fertility rates.

tomjen3 16y ago
There is no way to make a table on hn :( But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society). I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.
- jtheory 16y ago
  Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure. Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care). And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason. All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen. The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
  - cpr 16y ago
    The fertility rate in France (as in other parts of Europe) is highly skewed (up) by the immigrant Muslim population.
    - barry-cotter 16y ago
      The birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walkers-World-French-births-soar/UPI-20871209568785/ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
      - zeteo 16y ago
        Falling, but still much higher than the 'native'. Also, the increased fertility rates of the second-generation immigrants are absorbed by these statistics into e.g. "Dutch-born", which skews the comparison.
  - zeteo 16y ago
    "Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure." Not exactly true, see my comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758
  - anamax 16y ago
    > Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do. Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed. Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.
Qz 16y ago
Correlation != causation.
- jerf 16y ago
  Yes, but so what? "Correlation != causation" != "no relationship so we can all just stop thinking about it". Whether it's causative, reverse causative, or two things caused by a shared third factor that may also have other effects, there's a there there that can't be waved away by a trite, fashionable two words and a math symbol. Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this.
  - wzdd 16y ago
    > Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this. This is incorrect. Winestock: > Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. A third possibility, one of many, is "Lack of religion and a fertility rate less than 2.0 occur co-incidentally in seven countries". Given that we have only examined nine countries of a possible 195 (or so), I think that this third option is at least possible.
    - jerf 16y ago
      Accuracy of the data in question is a separate issue. My point was merely that the possibility of non-causation was covered. Inaccurate data is still not "correlation != causation" (it supercedes it).
      - wzdd 16y ago
        Even if winestock compiled a complete list of 195 countries, their religiosity, and their fertility rates, and showed a correlation between them (which it seems is unlikely -- see for example steadicat's post, or my other post), it would still be wrong to conclude, as winestock did, that > Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. There is at least one other possibility, which is that there is no link between religion and fertility, even transitively.
othello 16y ago
What do you make of France, which with Ireland has the highest fertility rate in Europe (2.01 in 2010 [1]), while Catholicism can hardly be described as thriving there: 4.5% of French people go to mass at least once a week [2]. Social policies such as benefits for families with two or more kids and low-cost, widely available day-care centers for children under 3 that allow women to work and have kids sound far more important to me than any "residual Catholic natalism". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Demographics [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religion
- winestock 16y ago
  There used to be a saying among French Catholics: "If the traditionalists win, then the liturgical language of France will be Latin. If they lose, it will be Arabic." Muslim immigration into France accounts for the high fertility.
  - barry-cotter 16y ago
    This is horseshit. he birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walkers-World-French-births-soar/UPI-20871209568785/ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke... http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurabia/ http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurab...
    - 16y ago
jerf 16y ago
Closest thing you can do is put two spaces in front of every line and monospace it: Nation Total Fertility Rate ------------------------------------ Australia 1.97 Austria 1.41 Canada 1.58 Czech Republic 1.49 Finland 1.85 Ireland 2.1 Netherlands 1.66 New Zealand 2.1 Switzerland 1.46 (Also, I'm just doing the convenience of formatting it in this message. No particular endorsement or independent verification here.)
zeteo 16y ago
It not religion per se that's becoming extinct in these nations, it's just some form of Christianity (usually, a very moderate and modernizing form). Detailed demographical studies show that fundamentalist religion (e.g. born again evangelicals and devout Muslims) is definitely on the rise, and associated with by far the largest fertility rates.
- api 16y ago
  In addition, I think it's misleading to count "no affiliation" as "no religious beliefs." What about new-age spirituality, alternative spirituality, etc.? Those typically don't show up in these kinds of studies, but they do qualify as religious beliefs.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Religion is an institutional and social thing, not just a set of "spiritual" beliefs.
  - kahawe 16y ago
    Depending on the country of Europe, you could not register as a "Buddhist"; in Germany it is not an official religion, for example.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  Detailed demographical studies show that fundamentalist religion (e.g. born again evangelicals and devout Muslims) is definitely on the rise, and associated with by far the largest fertility rates. Approximately three minutes after your reply came another reply http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354753 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354753 that cites sources that may allow analysis of what's going on here.
  - zeteo 16y ago
    Right, that post however doesn't seem to make a very good conclusion from the numbers presented. I've replied to it in more detail.
ugh 16y ago
Is that a problem?
api 16y ago
All mainstream religion is, at its core, a fertility cult.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
I honestly don't understand your point. Humanity is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, Dutch (etc.) culture/genetic stock is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, and an argument from eugenetics is both dangerous and likely to be moot when genetic tinkering becomes widely accepted in a couple of generations. (Also, e.g. country-level wealth is extremely non-adaptive according to your criterion. You may want to reconsider it.)
anemecek 16y ago
This argument is just surreal. Are you claiming that the two are related? Why are fertility rates low in other countries not on the list as well? And in many countries, it's even lower. You never explicitly link the two together but you seem to be making some sort of implication that the trend of low fertility rates, which is more than anything related to the economical development of a particular country, is related to the lack of religiousness in the particular country.
wzdd 16y ago
Let's look at a few others, then. USA: 2.1 UK: 1.9 Spain: 1.5 Portugal: 1.4 Denmark: 1.9 Nice to see that Spain, Portugal, and the USA, those bastions of atheism, have such high fertitily rates. A better explanation is "Western nations have low fertility rates".
steadicat 16y ago
Care to show some numbers to support your argument? Here: Nation Total Fertility Rate ------------------------------------ Iceland 2.14 * Ireland 2.10 * New Zealand 2.10 USA 2.01 Norway 1.98 * Australia 1.97 France 1.97 UK 1.96 Turkey 1.92 * Finland 1.85 Denmark 1.74 Luxembourg 1.70 Sweden 1.67 * Netherlands 1.66 Belgium 1.65 Estonia 1.63 * Canada 1.58 Greece 1.50 * Czech Republic 1.49 Portugal 1.49 Spain 1.47 * Switzerland 1.46 Germany 1.42 * Austria 1.41 Italy 1.41 Hungary 1.33 The list is sorted. Those marked "*" are in the original list. Where is the correlation?
- winestock 16y ago
  The number for Iceland is the only one that surprises me. The rest exemplify the general trend in the West in modern times: religion has been on the wane and irreligious people are not as interested in baby-making as religious believers. Let's not get fooled by reputations. We may think of Spain, Portugal, and Italy as being very religious countries, but the Catholic Church more or less gave up trying to do its job starting with Vatican II. Turkey has had a secular (and secularizing) government since Ataturk. Hungary, Estonia, and other Eastern European nations were under Marxist indoctrination for more than forty years. In the Balkans (e.g., Greece), religion is more a marker for ethnicity than a guide for living life. Much of the positive side of the ledger for population in Western nations is due to immigration of people who are induced to have children either as an act of piety (Muslims in Europe) or as a matter of custom (Mexicans in the United States). The above chart does not contradict this.
  - dantheman 16y ago
    Don't confuse correlation with causation - less interest in baby-making could be due to: * better education * higher income
    - rbarooah 16y ago
tomlin 16y ago
At the risk of sounding ignorant, I ponder correlation or a relationship, but furthermore whether the relationship has something to do with intelligence. In my observation, intelligent people breed less. Intelligent people are also less associated with religion. Could we also be looking at a list of countries with highest intelligence per capita?
- tokenadult 16y ago
  Data on national comparisons of IQ are very poor. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/04/jelte_wicherts.html http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010... http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/APA02.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/APA02.pdf This is a hard issue to analyze when most countries don't gather data on IQ that are comparable at all from country to country, and when there is considerable disagreement about what we mean by "religion." It is becoming a firmly established research finding that rationality is weakly correlated with IQ, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/English http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli... http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/CognitivePsychology/?view=usa&ci=9780195341140 http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/Cog... with many high-IQ individuals exhibiting extremely poor rationality, so even if we knew differing IQ distributions for countries around the world reliably, which we do not, we would have no idea from those statistics which countries have a populace that tends to act rationally.
wisty 16y ago
I suggest that religions and fertility are both decreased by education and economic growth. So it could be "strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive".
gcheong 16y ago
"Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive." I think you're missing that population control within available resource constraints is also part of the fitness equation. Also it's very likely that population expansion or contraction is more cyclical over the long term than a two year period of data would show.
- winestock 16y ago
  Biology isn't my strong suit, so I hope that I'm not misunderstanding you, but wouldn't your statement imply selection at the group level? Additionally, although the figures I quoted were over a two-year figure, they exemplify a larger trend. For example, the Wikipedia article on Australia's demographics show that Australia hasn't had replacement level fertility since 1975.
  - gcheong 16y ago
    My statement really should have been worded as a question as biology, admittedly, it is not my strong suit either so I won't attempt to address your question but hope that someone with a better understanding will chime in here.
microtherion 16y ago
This implies that "fitness" of a society is correlated positively to fertility rates, which for a species which is not exactly on the endangered list, and which is capable of producing results that can be measured on other scales than just warm bodies, seems to be a dubious idea. Your argument would imply that the 10 "fittest" countries in the world are: Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Burundi, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.

tomjen3 16y ago

There is no way to make a table on hn :( But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society). I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.

jtheory 16y ago
Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure. Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care). And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason. All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen. The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
- cpr 16y ago
  The fertility rate in France (as in other parts of Europe) is highly skewed (up) by the immigrant Muslim population.
  - barry-cotter 16y ago
    The birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walkers-World-French-births-soar/UPI-20871209568785/ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
    - zeteo 16y ago
      Falling, but still much higher than the 'native'. Also, the increased fertility rates of the second-generation immigrants are absorbed by these statistics into e.g. "Dutch-born", which skews the comparison.
- zeteo 16y ago
  "Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure." Not exactly true, see my comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758
- anamax 16y ago
  > Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do. Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed. Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.

Qz 16y ago

Correlation != causation.

jerf 16y ago
Yes, but so what? "Correlation != causation" != "no relationship so we can all just stop thinking about it". Whether it's causative, reverse causative, or two things caused by a shared third factor that may also have other effects, there's a there there that can't be waved away by a trite, fashionable two words and a math symbol. Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this.
- wzdd 16y ago
  > Careful reading of the "bottom line" winestock posted will show that (s)he actually understands this. This is incorrect. Winestock: > Bottom line: Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. A third possibility, one of many, is "Lack of religion and a fertility rate less than 2.0 occur co-incidentally in seven countries". Given that we have only examined nine countries of a possible 195 (or so), I think that this third option is at least possible.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Accuracy of the data in question is a separate issue. My point was merely that the possibility of non-causation was covered. Inaccurate data is still not "correlation != causation" (it supercedes it).
    - wzdd 16y ago
      Even if winestock compiled a complete list of 195 countries, their religiosity, and their fertility rates, and showed a correlation between them (which it seems is unlikely -- see for example steadicat's post, or my other post), it would still be wrong to conclude, as winestock did, that > Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive. There is at least one other possibility, which is that there is no link between religion and fertility, even transitively.

othello 16y ago

What do you make of France, which with Ireland has the highest fertility rate in Europe (2.01 in 2010 [1]), while Catholicism can hardly be described as thriving there: 4.5% of French people go to mass at least once a week [2]. Social policies such as benefits for families with two or more kids and low-cost, widely available day-care centers for children under 3 that allow women to work and have kids sound far more important to me than any "residual Catholic natalism". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Demographics [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religion

winestock 16y ago
There used to be a saying among French Catholics: "If the traditionalists win, then the liturgical language of France will be Latin. If they lose, it will be Arabic." Muslim immigration into France accounts for the high fertility.
- barry-cotter 16y ago
  This is horseshit. he birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walkers-World-French-births-soar/UPI-20871209568785/ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke... http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurabia/ http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurab...
  - 16y ago

jerf 16y ago

Closest thing you can do is put two spaces in front of every line and monospace it: Nation Total Fertility Rate ------------------------------------ Australia 1.97 Austria 1.41 Canada 1.58 Czech Republic 1.49 Finland 1.85 Ireland 2.1 Netherlands 1.66 New Zealand 2.1 Switzerland 1.46 (Also, I'm just doing the convenience of formatting it in this message. No particular endorsement or independent verification here.)

zeteo 16y ago

It not religion per se that's becoming extinct in these nations, it's just some form of Christianity (usually, a very moderate and modernizing form). Detailed demographical studies show that fundamentalist religion (e.g. born again evangelicals and devout Muslims) is definitely on the rise, and associated with by far the largest fertility rates.

api 16y ago
In addition, I think it's misleading to count "no affiliation" as "no religious beliefs." What about new-age spirituality, alternative spirituality, etc.? Those typically don't show up in these kinds of studies, but they do qualify as religious beliefs.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Religion is an institutional and social thing, not just a set of "spiritual" beliefs.
- kahawe 16y ago
  Depending on the country of Europe, you could not register as a "Buddhist"; in Germany it is not an official religion, for example.
tokenadult 16y ago
Detailed demographical studies show that fundamentalist religion (e.g. born again evangelicals and devout Muslims) is definitely on the rise, and associated with by far the largest fertility rates. Approximately three minutes after your reply came another reply http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354753 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354753 that cites sources that may allow analysis of what's going on here.
- zeteo 16y ago
  Right, that post however doesn't seem to make a very good conclusion from the numbers presented. I've replied to it in more detail.

ugh 16y ago

Is that a problem?

api 16y ago

All mainstream religion is, at its core, a fertility cult.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago

I honestly don't understand your point. Humanity is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, Dutch (etc.) culture/genetic stock is not in danger of dying out from lack of fertility, and an argument from eugenetics is both dangerous and likely to be moot when genetic tinkering becomes widely accepted in a couple of generations. (Also, e.g. country-level wealth is extremely non-adaptive according to your criterion. You may want to reconsider it.)

anemecek 16y ago

This argument is just surreal. Are you claiming that the two are related? Why are fertility rates low in other countries not on the list as well? And in many countries, it's even lower. You never explicitly link the two together but you seem to be making some sort of implication that the trend of low fertility rates, which is more than anything related to the economical development of a particular country, is related to the lack of religiousness in the particular country.

wzdd 16y ago

Let's look at a few others, then. USA: 2.1 UK: 1.9 Spain: 1.5 Portugal: 1.4 Denmark: 1.9 Nice to see that Spain, Portugal, and the USA, those bastions of atheism, have such high fertitily rates. A better explanation is "Western nations have low fertility rates".

steadicat 16y ago

Care to show some numbers to support your argument? Here: Nation Total Fertility Rate ------------------------------------ Iceland 2.14 * Ireland 2.10 * New Zealand 2.10 USA 2.01 Norway 1.98 * Australia 1.97 France 1.97 UK 1.96 Turkey 1.92 * Finland 1.85 Denmark 1.74 Luxembourg 1.70 Sweden 1.67 * Netherlands 1.66 Belgium 1.65 Estonia 1.63 * Canada 1.58 Greece 1.50 * Czech Republic 1.49 Portugal 1.49 Spain 1.47 * Switzerland 1.46 Germany 1.42 * Austria 1.41 Italy 1.41 Hungary 1.33 The list is sorted. Those marked "*" are in the original list. Where is the correlation?

winestock 16y ago
The number for Iceland is the only one that surprises me. The rest exemplify the general trend in the West in modern times: religion has been on the wane and irreligious people are not as interested in baby-making as religious believers. Let's not get fooled by reputations. We may think of Spain, Portugal, and Italy as being very religious countries, but the Catholic Church more or less gave up trying to do its job starting with Vatican II. Turkey has had a secular (and secularizing) government since Ataturk. Hungary, Estonia, and other Eastern European nations were under Marxist indoctrination for more than forty years. In the Balkans (e.g., Greece), religion is more a marker for ethnicity than a guide for living life. Much of the positive side of the ledger for population in Western nations is due to immigration of people who are induced to have children either as an act of piety (Muslims in Europe) or as a matter of custom (Mexicans in the United States). The above chart does not contradict this.
- dantheman 16y ago
  Don't confuse correlation with causation - less interest in baby-making could be due to: * better education * higher income
  - rbarooah 16y ago

tomlin 16y ago

At the risk of sounding ignorant, I ponder correlation or a relationship, but furthermore whether the relationship has something to do with intelligence. In my observation, intelligent people breed less. Intelligent people are also less associated with religion. Could we also be looking at a list of countries with highest intelligence per capita?

tokenadult 16y ago
Data on national comparisons of IQ are very poor. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/04/jelte_wicherts.html http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010... http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/APA02.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/APA02.pdf This is a hard issue to analyze when most countries don't gather data on IQ that are comparable at all from country to country, and when there is considerable disagreement about what we mean by "religion." It is becoming a firmly established research finding that rationality is weakly correlated with IQ, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/English http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli... http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/CognitivePsychology/?view=usa&ci=9780195341140 http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/Cog... with many high-IQ individuals exhibiting extremely poor rationality, so even if we knew differing IQ distributions for countries around the world reliably, which we do not, we would have no idea from those statistics which countries have a populace that tends to act rationally.

wisty 16y ago

I suggest that religions and fertility are both decreased by education and economic growth. So it could be "strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive".

gcheong 16y ago

"Lack of religion is either non-adaptive from a fitness perspective, or it is strongly tied to traits which are themselves non-adaptive." I think you're missing that population control within available resource constraints is also part of the fitness equation. Also it's very likely that population expansion or contraction is more cyclical over the long term than a two year period of data would show.

winestock 16y ago
Biology isn't my strong suit, so I hope that I'm not misunderstanding you, but wouldn't your statement imply selection at the group level? Additionally, although the figures I quoted were over a two-year figure, they exemplify a larger trend. For example, the Wikipedia article on Australia's demographics show that Australia hasn't had replacement level fertility since 1975.
- gcheong 16y ago
  My statement really should have been worded as a question as biology, admittedly, it is not my strong suit either so I won't attempt to address your question but hope that someone with a better understanding will chime in here.

microtherion 16y ago

This implies that "fitness" of a society is correlated positively to fertility rates, which for a species which is not exactly on the endangered list, and which is capable of producing results that can be measured on other scales than just warm bodies, seems to be a dubious idea. Your argument would imply that the 10 "fittest" countries in the world are: Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Burundi, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.