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Religion may become extinct in nine nations

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#71

Post by jerf »

wzdd wrote: post #59
jerf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unde…

> 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". Gi…

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).

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#73

Post by zeteo »

barry-cotter wrote: post #66
zeteo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post you're replying to argues that Muslim immigration has raised fertility rates, and your numbers confirm that opinion. Even the falling Muslim fertility rates, after 15 years, that you mention are far above the "native" rates (2.9 as opposed to 1.7 in Holland, and you call the idea that Muslims raise fertility rates "horseshit"?!). The rates that you cite for Germany show a Muslim population that, even after 4…

zeteo Muslim immigration into France accounts for the high fertility. The second development to note is that INED, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies, has done some detailed research and concluded that France's immigrant population is responsible for only 5 percent of the rise in the birthrate and that France's population would be rising anyway even without the immigrant population. http://www.upi.com…

France is an interesting and peculiar case, with lots of natalist policies and with laws impeding the collection of statistics based on religion and ethnic origin. I'd love to see the original INED study, though, if you have a link.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#74

Post by barry-cotter »

zeteo wrote: post #73
barry-cotter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zeteo Muslim immigration into France accounts for the high fertility. The second development to note is that INED, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies, has done some detailed research and concluded that France's immigrant population is responsible for only 5 percent of the rise in the birthrate and that France's population would be rising anyway even without the immigrant population. http://www.upi.com…

France is an interesting and peculiar case, with lots of natalist policies and with laws impeding the collection of statistics based on religion and ethnic origin. I'd love to see the original INED study, though, if you have a link.

I can't, unfortunately. Here's the INED publications webpage

http://www.ined.fr/en/resources_documentation/publications/d...

It might be one of the "Recent Demographic Developments in France"

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#75

Post by wzdd »

jerf wrote: post #71
wzdd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". Gi…

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).

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.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#76

Post by rick888 »

jojofloor wrote: post #41

Religion is a burden on society, a social trait from civilizations past, they lacked the vast majority of scientific knowledge we currently embrace, this "evolution" was bound to happen sooner or later. Any rational intelligent being should quite clearly see the fundamental floors of all religions, how they act mearly as placebos at best; but primarily as precursors to wars, hours of wasted time per week on mundane r…

If all religions were gone tomorrow, the burden on society would still be there in another form. There are many people religious about global warming, Linux, the GNU, styles of politics and economics, etc. Even some political figures are followed religiously to a point (where logic and reason are out the door when you try to have a conversation questioning them).

Religion isn't all bad. There are people that take it to the extremes, but many of the things in the bible teach you to be a better person. I like Buddhism too.

..and we also can't forget that nobody can really prove either way about an afterlife, if god exists, if someone created our universe or it was always there.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#77

Post by wisty »

winestock wrote: post #5

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) (Irela…

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".

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#78

Post by gcheong »

winestock wrote: post #5

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) (Irela…

"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.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#79

Post by tokenadult »

tomlin wrote: post #68
winestock wrote: post #5

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) (Irela…

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?

Data on national comparisons of IQ are very poor.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010...

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsRavenAfr2010rej.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/Engli...

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.

Re: Religion may become extinct in nine nations

#80

Post by winestock »

steadicat wrote: post #67
winestock wrote: post #5

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) (Irela…

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 * Swit…

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.

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