Religion and Population Growth...

Here's an excellent TED talk about the influence of religions on population growth.  It's an excellent counterpoint to the theories of Mark Steyn et al, and also a great example of the intellectual dangers of trying to establish causation by correlation.  By that last comment, I don't mean that I think either this talk or Mark Steyn's theories are either right or wrong – I'm just observing that starting with essentially the same data, both parties have arrived at very different conclusions.  This is true even though both of them are inferring causes by observing correlations in basically the same data set.  This stuff is complicated and hard.  But even if one ignores their stated conclusions, their observations are very interesting indeed...