Many nations are getting more religious, but young people are still less religious

One thing that has bothered me, or at least piqued my interest, are two seemingly contradictory facts:

1) Many regions & nations have seen a resurgence of religion in the past generation (i.e., 1980s to 2010). The post-Communist and Islamic world most prominently. There is quantitative data for the post-Communist world, while for the Islamic world it is more impressionistic (e.g., the shift toward more stark outward “conservatism” in dress among the young).

2) But The World Values Survey does not show a skew toward religiosity among the young for most nations. Very few in fact. This is a bit curious in light of some plausible background assumptions. For example, religious people have more children the world over within each nation (though religiosity at the national level may have a more unpredictable relationship to fertility, as evident in Western Europe).

I decided to present the data which I’m basing the second assertion on. The WVS has several “waves.” I decided to look at wave 5, wave 4 and wave 2, which were done during the mid to late 2000s, around 2000 and 1990 respectively. I also looked at the question:

How important is God in your life? Please use this scale to indicate- 10 means very important and 1 means not at all important.

The WVS interface outputs mean values (as well as standard deviations). You can then drill-down and cross with age of the respondents in 3 classes:, 15-29, 30-49, and 50+. I was curious as to age related changes, so I simply put the mean values of the importance of God by age class into the linest function. So, if the mean values were 7, 8 and 9 for the age classes from youngest to oldest, the linest would output a slope of 1 as I omitted x values (so the classes would be recoded implicitly as 1, 2, 3, etc. for x’s). If you reversed it, it would output -1. So, negative values indicate that the younger are more religious than the old. Here are some trends in the data…..

Here are some charts ordered by the values generated by linest by wave. The countries at the top exhibit larger differences between the young and old. Observe the large asymmetry in the number with positive vs. negative values (that is, many more nations have more secular young than old). You need to click to see the larger version.



Some of the nations span the waves (many do not). 30 nations span wave 5 and wave 4. Here are the correlations between the same columns across waves:

Mean religiosity = 0.98
Trend of religiosity by age = 0.84

I don’t know if the samples are representative (though the developed world ones do seem to be, I’ve checked with independent surveys and they often match up well), but the two waves seem consistent with each other here.

Now let’s compare wave 2 and wave 5. So from from ~1990- to ~2005.

Mean religiosity = 0.92
Trend of religiosity by age = 0.77

How about differences in mean religiosity from wave 2 to wave 5? Here we see a bias toward greater religiosity in the 26 countries found in both waves.

The results match expectation. The nations to the right, those which have seen the most increase in religiosity are post-Communist ones. No surprise there. The nation furthest to the left is Spain, it’s gone through the most striking shift toward secularism since 1990. That is in line with what the news reports, the position of the Catholic Church at the center of Spanish life has been collapsing since the 1980s (more accurately, since the end of the Franco regime).

One assumes that the difference in religiosity by age cohort is a feature of less religious societies. If everyone is religious, as is the case in some Muslim and African countries, then there can’t be any variance. Merging all 3 waves together, here’s a scatter plot which shows the trend:

Now a labelled plot of wave 5.

An interesting point of contrast is China and Spain. In the 1970s Spain was still a pro-clerical right-wing authoritarian regime, while China was an atheist left-wing regime. Political pressures toward conforming to a particular attitude toward religion have abated in both nations over the past generation, and while Spain has become much more secular, China seems to more religious. The mean value of the importance of God in one’s life in China is 3.7 in the youngest age group, and 3.5 in the oldest (survey taken in 2007). In 1990 it was 1.5 and 1.8 respectively.

The big test would be to see how the 15-29 compared to 30-49 between wave 2 and wave 5. I’m a little worn out by this right now, so I’ll look at that systematically tomorrow (or the next day), but spot checking Russia seems to show that the rank-order holds, but all age cohorts became more religious (not relevant for the youngest cohort in wave 5 because they weren’t surveyed in 1990). In Spain the 15-29 year olds in wave 2 who became 30-49 year olds in wave 5 are invariant. If you want to get a jump ahead of me, here are some raw data file (excel):

religwave2.xls

religwave4.xls

religwave5.xls

Here are two preliminary comments:

* All the post-Communist nations have seen a resurgence in religion (perhaps with the exception of the Czech Republic). But this is a phenomenon which has “lifted all boats,” older people who were militant atheists who went on anti-religious rampages in their youth have been swept along, just as generations who barely remember Communism exhibit the nominal culturally grounded religious sensibilities normal in many societies. I’ve read a fair number of news stories over the years about the generational “God-gap” in the post-Communist states, but I suspect that it makes a punchier story-line than to suggest that there’s been a broader societal shift. That it isn’t a case of atheistic pensioners vs. youthful churchgoers.

* The Muslim countries are really weird. On most of the religious data in the WVS the only nations which approach or surpass them consistently are the African ones, and these do not exhibit the uniformity of outlook of the Muslim ones, especially the “core” Muslim nations of the Middle East. In some of the surveys for Pakistan no Pakistanis in a sample of 2,000 will admit to not believing in God, and in one survey all the respondents gave the highest value for the importance of God in their life on a 1 to 10 scale. By all, I mean all 2,000. It isn’t implausible to me that somehow someone who was really religious just recoded the survey data to make Pakistan seem more religious than it was, but if so that bespeaks a zealous confo
rmity of outlook in the society. But overall many of the Muslim nations are so religious that there isn’t variation in belief by age group because there isn’t variation much of belief, period. Everyone’s on the same page. When you see women donning the hijab or men growing beards I think perhaps we should reconceptualize what’s going on, as it isn’t renewed orthodoxy (belief) as opposed to a change in orthopraxy. Of course it may be that Muslim nations do exhibit variation in religiosity, but they’re just off the scale here. I suspect of the funniest shock-documentary projects would be to have someone run into a public square in the Muslim world screaming that God is dead. Of course, it might be a suicide mission!

What Darwin Said: Part 7 – Levels of Selection

This is the seventh and last in a series of posts about Charles Darwin’s view of evolution. Previous posts were:

1: The Pattern of Evolution.
2: Mechanisms of Evolution.
3: Heredity.
4: Speciation
5. Gradualism (A) , which dealt with Darwin’s views on gradualism in the rate of evolutionary change.
6. Gradualism (B), about the size of the mutations adopted by natural selection.

This final post deals with Darwin’s views on the levels of selection in evolution. Does selection occur mainly between genes, individuals, families, groups, species, or what? In the modern debate on levels of selection, Darwin has been quoted in support by both sides: those who accept, and those who reject, a major role for selection above the level of the individual organism.

Unless otherwise stated, all page references are to Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species: a Variorum Text, edited by Morse Peckham, 1959, reprinted 2006.

This post will be (relatively) brief, because there is already an excellent detailed study [Ruse] which I have little to add to.

Darwin’s position on levels of selection can be summarised in four points:

1. His formulation of the process of natural selection is expressed almost entirely in terms of selection among individuals, based on what he calls ‘individual differences’. In this respect he differs from Wallace, who referred mainly to selection between ‘varieties’. It has recently been argued that Wallace (in 1858) did not quite ‘get’ the idea of natural selection after all. Be that as it may, Wallace was always more welcoming than Darwin to what we would now call group selection.

2. Darwin gave no autonomous role to selection between species or varieties. In so far as he did mention selection at these levels, it was as a by-product of selection at lower levels. For example, if a newly introduced species displaces an indigenous one, it is because the individual organisms of the first species are competitively superior to those of the second.

3. Darwin recognised the possibility that selection might operate on individuals indirectly, via the individual’s relatives, as in the case of neuter insects. Thus he had the germ of the modern ideas of kin selection and inclusive fitness, but these were not fully developed until much later.

4. At a level between the family and the species, Darwin recognised a role for selection between social communities, notably among social insects and human ‘tribes’. Most of the recent debate about Darwin’s views on levels of selection has concerned the interpretation of this ‘community selection’.

Darwin’s most explicit statement on the issue in the Origin says in the first edition (with italics added):

Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change [172]

In the fifth edition the word each is revised to this and in the sixth to the community. It has been suggested [Richards p.217] that these changes involve an important shift towards group selectionism. In the first edition, traits benefiting the community are only selected if they are also beneficial to the individual, but in the fifth and sixth editions such a trait can be selected if even if it is harmful to the individual. I agree that this is an important revision, but I think it is only stating as a general principle something that Darwin had already accepted in individual cases. He believed that the sterility of neuter insects had been selected for the good of the community [417]. Likewise, the sting of bees is useful to the community, and is selected for that reason, even though it kills the individual bee when it is used [374]. Since dying, or becoming sterile, are clearly against the interests of the individual, these examples were inconsistent with Darwin’s original formulation, and his revisions may just have been a belated recognition of this.

If a trait is beneficial to the community, but harmful to the individual who possesses the trait (like the bee’s sting), the question arises how such a trait can increase in frequency. In the case of the sterile classes of social insects Darwin saw fairly clearly that the solution was in the relatedness of the members of the colony:

This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened or, as I believe, disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end… Thus I believe it has been with social insects: a slight modification of structure, or instinct, correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of the community, has been advantageous to the community: consequently the fertile males and females of the same community flourished, and transmitted to their fertile offspring a tendency to produce sterile members having the same modification [416-17].

The same mechanism does not apply where individuals are not genetically related. In the fifth edition Darwin discussed the problem in the context of the sterility of hybrids:

With sterile insects we have reason to believe that modifications in their structure and fertility have been slowly accumulated by natural selection, from an advantage having been thus indirectly given to the community to which they belonged over other communities of the same species; but an individual animal not belonging to a social community, if rendered slightly sterile when crossed with some other variety, would not thus itself gain any advantage or indirectly give any advantage to the other individuals of the same variety, thus leading to their preservation [445]

Darwin concluded (contrary to the position of Wallace) that the sterility of hybrids, and the inter-sterility of different species, had not evolved directly by natural selection but as a by-product of other changes. Unfortunately in the sixth edition the quoted passage was omitted, as Darwin believed he had more convincing new evidence that the sterility had not been selected.

In the Descent of Man, Darwin returned to the issue in the context of the evolution of human morality. He believed that tribes containing ‘a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members’ [Descent of Man, 1871, p.162] would succeed in competition against other tribes, but he saw a problem in explaining how such virtues could evolve within a tribe: ‘But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised?’ [163] He thought it was very unlikely that these qualities could be directly favoured by natural selection within a tribe. As a ‘probable’ solution, he suggested two important factors. One was what we now call ‘reciprocal altruism’, i.e. that a benefit might be provided in the expectation of a return benefit [163]. To complicate matters, Darwin believed that habitual behaviour, once acquired, could be transmitted by ‘Lamarckian’ inheritance [163-4]. The second, and more important, factor was ‘the praise and blame of our fellow-men’ [164]: ‘it i
s hardly possible to exaggerate the importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame’ [165]. Darwin does not explain how praise and blame are converted into individual fitness, but modern theorists have devised game theoretical models to handle these issues, which tend to confirm the importance of reputation. An individual who gains a reputation as a cheat or shirker will be excluded from the benefits of social life, with adverse effects on fitness.

Finally, Darwin returns to the point that tribes with many individuals possessing traits of courage, etc, ‘would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection’ [166]. This passage is the main basis for the claim that Darwin became a ‘group selectionist’. In a sense this is true, since it does give selection between groups (tribes) a role in promoting the spread of a trait. However, I do not think Darwin intends it as part of the solution to the question ‘how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities’. If he did, the solution would clearly be invalid. The process of group selection envisaged by Darwin presupposes that some tribes already have ‘many individuals’ possessing the qualities in question. At best group selection has a role in reinforcing and extending the prevalence of altruistic traits which have first emerged within the tribes for other reasons.

The crucial problem for group selectionists has always been to explain how altruistic traits can become common within a group despite harming individual fitness. Darwin sidesteps the problem in this form, since his two suggested mechanisms (reciprocal altruism and ‘praise and blame’) in fact raise individual fitness, perhaps sufficiently to offset the loss of fitness. The problem of altruism still remains for those theories in which altruists suffer a net loss of individual fitness. If ‘genes for altruism’ are randomly distributed, and the benefits of altruism are simply proportional to the number of altruists in the group, then altruism will always be eliminated (apart from recurrent mutations) [Maynard Smith p.166]. A solution is however possible if either (a) genes for altruism are concentrated in some groups above chance levels, for example because close relatives tend to live near each other; or (b) the benefits of altruism are not simply proportional to the number of altruists. If chance concentrations of altruists gain disproportionate benefits, altruism can be selected despite its fitness detriment to those altruists who fall outside such concentrations. ‘Synergistic’ effects of this kind are quite plausible [Maynard Smith p.167], yet this solution to the problem has been strangely neglected.

Group selection of some kind is therefore possible, and it is an empirical matter to determine its prevalence and the mechanisms responsible in any particular case. Darwin did not solve the problem, but at least it may be said that he recognised it more clearly than any evolutionist before R. A. Fisher, and that he sketched out most of the possible solutions to the problem that have been explored more fully by his successors.

This post brings to an end my series of posts on ‘What Darwin Said’, which I regard as my contribution to ‘Darwin Year’. I have not aimed to cover every aspect of Darwin’s work, even in evolutionary theory – notably, I have not discussed sexual selection. I hope however that I have clarified Darwin’s views on most of the issues that are still under serious debate. I have also tried to evaluate how far Darwin’s views have stood the test of time. Overall, I think the answer is ‘remarkably well’, considering the extent of ignorance and false beliefs in Darwin’s time on many key issues such as the nature of inheritance. But Darwin was not infallible, even with the evidence available to him, and it would be short-sighted to defend evolutionism in general by pretending (in the manner of diehard Marxists) that the Master was always right.

References:
John Maynard Smith, Evolutionary Genetics, 1989.
Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, 1987.
Michael Ruse: ‘Charles Darwin and Group Selection’, Annals of Science, 37, 1980, 615-30, repr. in The Darwinian Paradigm, 1989.

The slob factor

FuturePundit observes a phenomenon which might open up a possible avenue for nudge:

Clean rooms also increased willingness to volunteer and donate to charity.

That’s just the sense of smell. We have other senses. What does room color do to us? Which color makes us most unfair? Red? Yellow? Is it the same color that makes us most cynical or most haughty? And what does the feeling of slime on one’s hands do to one’s disposition? Probably something similar to nasty smells is my guess.

Svante Paabo believes modern humans & Neandertals interbred

Neanderthals ‘had sex’ with modern man:

Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.

Paabo recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York that he was now sure the two species had had sex – but a question remained about how “productive” it had been.
“What I’m really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?” he said. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence.”

The way Paabo is couching it, what he has found then seems likely to be evidence that humans who had just expanded Out of Africa contributed to the genomes of Neandertals. In other words, modern human introgression into Neandertals. Of course if the gene flow was from modern human to Neandertals exclusively, then it would be an evolutionary dead end since that lineage went extinct.
In any case, for several decades some fossil-based paleoanthropologists have been claiming that there are “intermediate” individuals in the record which indicate modern human-Neandertal hybridization. Most prominently Erik Trinkaus. If Paabo’s finding becomes more solid, then it seems time to update the probabilities on these sorts of claims based purely on morphology.
H/T: Anthropology.net
Related: Neandertal introgression.

The means of taxation

Over at New Majority David Frum has a review up of Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000. Frum elaborates on one of Wickham’s central theses about the nature of the fall of the Roman Empire, the shift from direct taxation to assignments of land (what eventually evolved into what we term ‘feudalism’). Wickham’s book has been discussed in detail on this weblog before, he works within a Marxist framework whereby impersonal social and economic forces loom large, so you won’t get too much on battles as opposed to tax receipts.
But jumping forward in history 1,500 years I am struck by some of the same issues which crop up in the 18th century with the rise of the British Empire, and its ascendancy over continental powers such a France despite its smaller population (on the order of 1/3 France’s population in the early 18th century I believe). The argument roughly runs that Britain constructed a military-financial complex, whereby it could utilize debt to finance its wars, while France was dependent on more conventional forms of direction taxation. This is a classic case of using leverage to beat an opponent which by all rights should have you outgunned on paper. The early American republic saw conflicts between those who wished to emulate the British state (Alexander Hamilton) and those who did not (Thomas Jefferson). We know who won that debate. In any case, it is important to remember that before 1800, and in particular before 1500, differences in per capita wealth between regions were trivial compared to what we see today. The most extreme differences in per capita wealth might be 50%, while something closer to 10-25% were much more typical. This is why Greg Clark asserts blithely that for almost all of human history per capita wealth remained approximately what it was when our species were all hunter-gatherers in Farewell to Alms. No, what was different between Rome and the “barbarian” lands beyond the limes had less to do with median differences in wealth, and more to do with how the wealth was allocated and leveraged. This is why, I think, nomad elites invariably invaded civilized states despite the likelihood that the average nomad was likely more affluent than the average peasant; civilized super-elites could extract much more surplus from their subjects than nomadic warlords could from their inferiors.
Addendum: One thing want to add, structural and institutional innovations often only result in a transient advantage. For example, both Tim Blanning and Peter Turchin point out that the most consistent predictive variable for victories during the wars which erupted in Europe after the French Revolution was the size of armies. The initial victories of the French were simply a function of the revolutionary state’s putting many more men under arms, while most of the European monarchies stuck longer with smaller professional armies. Once other states caught up the French advantage disappeared. But despite the fact that the equilibrium was restored after a generation, I think we can admit that the transient was very important as a “hinge of history.”

Svante Paabo believes modern humans & Neandertals interbred

Neanderthals ‘had sex’ with modern man:

Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.

Paabo recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York that he was now sure the two species had had sex – but a question remained about how “productive” it had been.

“What I’m really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?” he said. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence.”

The way Paabo is couching it, what he has found then seems likely to be evidence that humans who had just expanded Out of Africa contributed to the genomes of Neandertals. In other words, modern human introgression into Neandertals. Of course if the gene flow was from modern human to Neandertals exclusively, then it would be an evolutionary dead end since that lineage went extinct.

H/T: Anthropology.net

The Madoff curse?

Lawyer: Death complicates Madoff investment case:

The death of Jeffry Picower, accused of profiting more than $7 billion from the investment schemes of his longtime friend Bernard Madoff, will make it more difficult for suing investors to recoup their money, attorneys said.

But the trustee’s lawyer said Picower’s claims that he was a victim “ring hollow” because he withdrew more of other investors’ money than anyone else during three decades and should have noticed signs of fraud.
According to the lawyers, Picower’s accounts were “riddled with blatant and obvious fraud,” and he should have recognized that because he was a sophisticated investor.