RELIGION AND BABIES

The links between religion and sexuality. This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet. And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this — three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year — and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this.

Today in the 2000, there's almost two billion babies. What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century?

This is a quiz. What do you think? Do you think it will decrease to one billion? Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century? Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there?

But now, what does religion have to do with it? When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think. You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this. It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough. So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia, we found this map. But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed.

In 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies. The exception was Japan. Japan here was regarded as an exception. Otherwise it was only Christian countries. But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman. But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa. And countries with Islam as the majority religion, all of them almost had six to seven children per woman, irregardless of the income level. And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level.

Now let's see what has happened in the world. I start the world, and here we go. Now 1962 — can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling? Look at China. They're falling fairly fast. And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down, as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range. And when we enter into this century, you'll find more than half of mankind down here. And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman.

It's a quite amazing development which has happened. And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman.