Paternal Age is Negatively Associated with Religious Behavior in a Post-60s But Not a Pre-60s US Birth Cohort: Testing a
- PDF / 832,797 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 104 Downloads / 145 Views
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 Michael A. Woodley of Menie1,2 · Satoshi Kanazawa3 · Jonatan Pallesen4 · Matthew A. Sarraf5
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
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 wellestablished 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 2)—therefore, it was natural log-transformed prior to use in the
13
Journal of Religion and Health
regression analysis. These data were collected in 1975, but the question asks about income in 1957. Control Variable: IQ IQ is robustly negatively correlated with religious engagement and belief (Zuckerman et al. 2019); this may confound the paternal age effect of interest as those with higher IQ are likely to be the offspring of older fathers as there is a positive correlation between IQ and age at first birth (Rindermann 2018). In WLS, the respondents’ IQ was measured in 1957 using the Henmon-Nelson test. In AddHealth the respondent’s IQ was measured at Wave I with an abbreviated version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. In both cases, the raw scores were standardized to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Control Variable: Education Like IQ, educational attainment is associated with lower religiosity (Meisenberg et al. 2012), and also more advanced age at first birth, thus more highly educated respondents are likely to be the offspring of older fathers, who will typically be more highly educated themselves (Rindermann 2018). In WLS, the respondent’s educational attainment was measured in 1964 and was scaled in terms of the number of years of education. In AddHealth, the respondent’s education was measured at Wave I as the number of years of formal education (for example, high school graduation = 12, bachelor’s degree = 16, five or more years of graduate school = 22). Control Variable: Income In WLS, the respondent’s annual income is scaled in terms of tens of thousands of dollars in 1975. In AddHealth, the resp
Data Loading...
