Everyone has watched cartoons in which storks bring babies to expectant mothers.

Question

Everyone has watched cartoons in which storks bring babies to expectant mothers. Since I was an impressionable youth, for years, I thought that this was indeed how babies came about. As a result, I have more first (and last) dates than normal until well into my twenties. In graduate school, I was further confused by an empirical study showing that areas (counties in England) with a high stork rate also had a high birth rate (of human children). The actual data, from observations in several English counties, showed a statistically significant correlation of .823, which is very high. In addition, a peer reviewed journal article by Robert Matthews (2000) with the title "Storks deliver babies (p <0.008)" shows that this strong positive correlation is true in other European countries (Teaching Statistics, vol 22. #2 (Summer 2000)).

Explanation / Answer

statistics textbooks routinely warn of the dangers of confusing correlation with causation, pointing out that while a high correlation coe¤cient is indicative of (linear) association, it cannot be taken as a measure of causation. Such warnings are typically accompanied by illustrative examples, such as the correlation between the reading skills of children and their shoe size, or the apparent relationship between educational level and unemployment.

The journal article by Robert Matthews (2000) with the title "Storks deliver babies (p <0.008)" actually says that the empirical relationship between the number of stork breeding pairs and human birth ratesin 17 European countries provides a non-trivial example of a correlation which is highly statistically signi¢cant, not immediately explicable and yet causally nonsensical or you can say its just a co-incidence that the areas with a high stork rate also had a high birth rate but that does not imply Storks deliver babies.

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