What's in a name? Glimmers of evolution in naming babies, choosing a dog, study finds
Jun 2022, phys.org
Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Results:
- The more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. Same goes for popular dog breeds.
- When a name is most rare — 1 in 10,000 births — it tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most common — more than 1 in 100 births — its popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.
And this is why Darwin got his idea for natural selection from language-trees:
"Natural selection is incredibly hard to measure. You're asking, for an entire population, who lived, who died and why. And that's just a crazy thing to try to ask. By contrast, in names, we literally know every single name for the entire country for a hundred years."
via University of Michigan: Mitchell Newberry, Measuring frequency-dependent selection in culture, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01342-6
Image credit: AI Art - Humanoids in Occult Ritual - 2022
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