Kin relatedness and church fissioning among the “Nebraska” Amish of Pennsylvania

Abstract

A model of group fissioning, applied by Mange (1964) to a Hutterite population and by Chagnon (1975) to an Amazonian Indian population, is applied to the “Nebraska” Amish community in Central Pennsylvania. Genealogical data were collected on 228 living, married individuals and their known ancestors in two new churches resulting from the fission of a church in 1978. The acrimonious fissioning of the church produced increased levels of intrachurch genealogical relatedness in the two new churches formed, as compared to the level of relatedness in the original church, with a greater increase for male/male relatedness than for female/female relatedness. This general increase in relatedness, documented for three human populations and also for fissioning groups of rhesus macaques, conforms to predictions from kin selection theory.