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澳洲, 奧地利, 加拿大, 捷克, 芬蘭, 愛爾蘭, 荷蘭, 新西蘭, 瑞士/ [; n/ Q# a' \$ r! G
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1 l* T5 }% Y! Q! v& l" Lhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197
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! |3 |1 o8 ]# l- a2 w# M1 y: M22 March 2011 Last updated at 03:31 ET Share this pageFacebookTwitter ShareEmail Print Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study saysBy Jason Palmer
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Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas
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A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.
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The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.
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The team\'s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.% |, u8 D9 g9 ~) l8 o
* M/ y8 A3 k+ vThe result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.4 z* g0 E- t- Y: p5 o
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The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
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Their means of analysing the data invokes what is known as nonlinear dynamics - a mathematical approach that has been used to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.
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- [ A! \# n% B& p% W, [3 [* z$ I5 VOne of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.
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8 `# S5 d- p- zAt its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the \"utility\" of speaking one instead of another.
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\"The idea is pretty simple,\" said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.
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! n1 N( x4 W+ j$ J8 S\"It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.
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' E+ e+ @2 R( A4 `3 n" F) T\"For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there\'s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.\"
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# T( e9 F1 _! m* hDr Wiener continued: \"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there\'s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.\"
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: v9 N: ^) \4 G+ ~9 YThe team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the \"non-religious\" category.: f8 ^( g5 S3 U# h
6 L+ D3 H! I$ f1 _& J, o: N9 IThey found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.
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And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.8 N' z! ^/ G q$ M7 D. ?
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However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a \"network structure\" more representative of the one at work in the world.
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0 o0 _; Q) a) X/ \7 R) C\"Obviously we don\'t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,\" he said.
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However, he told BBC News that he thought it was \"a suggestive result\". ) M" N9 I l ~, c3 G) h
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\"It\'s interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going.
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\"Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out.\" |
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