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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?

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.

Don't confuse correlation with causation - less interest in baby-making could be due to:

* better education * higher income

In the countries with declining reproduction, I'd be interested to see how rate of procreation relates to income-level. Is it the well off who are not reproducing, or the relatively poor?

And easy access to birth control by living in an industrial society with the capacity to make it.

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.)

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France#Religion

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.

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/Walke...

http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/why-eurab...

The quote uses terms like "Dutch-born" and "German-born." Do those terms include only Christian women who are ethnically Dutch or German? Or do those terms also include the second generation of women born in Holland and Germany, whatever their religion or ethnicity?

I just read the linked article at UPI. It is unclear on the matter.

It means born in the country. If they had meant Dutch or German ethnic they would have said so. So it's referring to people on the short road to assimilation.

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 40 years, is growing at a rate of 20+% per generation, whereas the "native" population is declining.

To this decades-old immigration that is still growing strong, we must add recent immigrants, who are much more religious and have much higher fertility rates.

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/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...

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"

The laws of France make it notoriously difficult to gather data on the correlation between religion and fertility, but the best available studies show that in France "[t]he estimated fertility of a woman assisting [religious] offices every week is 24% higher that the expected fertility of a woman who never assist to offices."

http://ideas.repec.org/p/mse/cesdoc/v08089.html

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.

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.

Religion is an institutional and social thing, not just a set of "spiritual" beliefs.

Depending on the country of Europe, you could not register as a "Buddhist"; in Germany it is not an official religion, for example.

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

that cites sources that may allow analysis of what's going on here.

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.

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".

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fertility rate in France (as in other parts of Europe) is highly skewed (up) by the immigrant Muslim population.

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/Walke...

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.

"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

> 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.

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".

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.

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.)

Correlation != causation.

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.

> 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.

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.

So, what's your point? We have all had this ingrained in us since our first statistics class. Saying that correlation does not equal causation really says nothing. It does not agree. It does not disagree. The only thing this does is easily dismiss something of importance, which by definition has a connection to the discussion.

Correlation != causation is laziness at it finest.

"Correlation != causation" is a warning sign not a stop sign.

If we find a correlation, then that's a sign that we should look deeper. So far, the evidence says that lack of religion is tightly connected with a drop in fertility. If something other than lack of religion is causing the drop then the best place to look for it is by checking those factors that are most common to the irreligious and least common among the religious.

If someone has done this research then I am unaware of it.

"Correlation != causation" is a warning sign not a stop sign.

I might add that for social causation issues like this, longitudinal data (studies of changes over time) are often much more informative than cross-sectional data (comparisons of different subgroups at the same time). You and the original submitter posted longitudinal data, studied by researchers who have a data model that they are further investigating. That's at least worth talking about here.

After edit: as several replies have helpfully noted, one way to test the proposed model is to look at data from other countries, and another way to test it would be to look at data from different (earlier) historical periods in the same or different countries. Much work needs to be done to accept the causal mechanism proposed in the submitted link, but meanwhile we can check the narrower issue of whether participation in organized religion has the same time trend (reduction over time) as fertility rates in various countries of interest.

A study which also attempted to model societies that weren't trending towards religious extinction be a lot more useful (the states were most likely chosen for readily available data rather than being selected due to being exceptional in their levels of religious disaffiliation). Right now I'm seeing a correlation between "nations which make detailed census data available in convenient form to academic researchers" and increasing levels of religious disaffiliation and low birth rates.

The same model would probably fit quite well to countries where there's a marked trend increase in a specific religious affiliation, like Indonesia where dominant and growing Islam may hypothetically be decades away from making other affiliations extinct. Does Indonesia have a correspondingly much higher fertility rate? Actually no (~2.28), especially not if you control for other variables like poverty and infant mortality that are known to be correlated with high fertility rates. And it's dropping.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

--Randall Munroe

Is that a problem?

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