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Paternal Age is Negatively Associated with Religious Behavior in a Post-60s But Not a Pre-60s US Birth Cohort: Testing a Prediction from the Social Epistasis Amplification Model

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Abstract

Participation in social behaviors that enhance group-level fitness may be influenced by mutations that affect patterns of social epistasis in human populations. Mutations that cause individuals to not participate in these behaviors may weaken the ability of members of a group to coordinate and regulate behavior, which may in turn negatively affect fitness. To investigate the possibility that de novo mutations degrade these adaptive social behaviors, we examine the effect of paternal age (as a well-established proxy for de novo mutation load) on one such social behavior, namely religious observance, since religiosity may be a group-level cultural adaptation facilitating enhanced social coordination. Using two large samples (Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and AddHealth), each of a different US birth cohort, paternal age was used to hierarchically predict respondent’s level of church attendance after controlling for multiple covariates. The effect is absent in WLS (β = .007, ns, N = 4560); however, it is present in AddHealth (β = − .046, p < .05, N = 4873) increasing the adjusted model R2 by .005. The WLS respondents were (mostly) born in the 1930s, whereas the AddHealth respondents were (mostly) born in the 1970s. This may indicate that social-epistatic regulation of behavior has weakened historically in the USA, which might stem from and enhance the ability for de novo mutations to influence behavior among more recently born cohorts—paralleling the secular rise in the heritability of age at sexual debut after the sexual revolution.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that the reality of group selection is a controversial matter (see Bahar 2018). Nevertheless, some of the most quantitatively sophisticated evolutionary theorists of recent times have provided a great deal of support for the view that group selection does operate, or at least has operated, in human populations (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 2011; Jones 2018; see also: Salter and Harpending 2013). Individual and gene-level selection theorists who oppose group-selection theories have failed to provide any compelling basis on which to doubt the results of such research, so we freely avail ourselves of the concept of group selection.

  2. For molecular-genetic evidence of mutation accumulation in some European populations over many thousands of years, see Aris-Brosou (2019). But note that there is little reason to think that relaxed selection is relevant to the mutation accumulation detected except for that in “recent times” (Aris-Brosou 2019, p. 7), as mutation-accumulation theories stressing the role of industrialization would predict.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Michael A. Woodley of Menie

  2. Unz Foundation, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Michael A. Woodley of Menie

  3. School of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Satoshi Kanazawa

  4. Independent Researcher, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jonatan Pallesen

  5. University of Rochester, New York, NY, USA

    Matthew A. Sarraf

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  1. Michael A. Woodley of Menie
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  2. Satoshi Kanazawa
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  4. Matthew A. Sarraf
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Correspondence to Michael A. Woodley of Menie.

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Woodley of Menie, M.A., Kanazawa, S., Pallesen, J. et al. Paternal Age is Negatively Associated with Religious Behavior in a Post-60s But Not a Pre-60s US Birth Cohort: Testing a Prediction from the Social Epistasis Amplification Model. J Relig Health 59, 2733–2752 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-00987-9

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