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So what shall we call our baby?
By Roger Highfield
(Filed: 27/06/2003)
What's in a name? Nothing, according to a study that sheds new light on a decision facing every parent. The
research by evolutionary scientists has concluded that, though rare, it
is inevitable that a few parents who invent an offbeat name for their
baby, such as like "Grast" or "Blonk", will unwittingly determine the
names of thousands of children in as little as a decade. The
study also found that girls - such as Phoenix Chi, the daughter of Mel
B (Scary Spice) – have a 40 per cent higher chance of getting a unique
name than boys, such as Brooklyn (the son of Victoria Beckham, Posh
Spice), so that the top girls' names today will be unseated faster than
the top boys' names. This might reflect how we
live in a patriarchal society, where boys are more often given
traditional names, or it might show the "playground effect" - boys with
unusual names are going to be "teased mercilessly", according to
Matthew Hahn of Duke University, North Carolina, who reported the study
recently with Dr Alex Bentley of University College London in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology Letters. The
aim of their research was to settle a dispute in the social sciences,
where there is currently no consensus on the mechanism by which
cultural ideas evolve. Their work suggests that
ideas - in this case, names - spread simply by random copying between
individuals, rather than because names have symbolic meaning or
function - there really is nothing in a name. This
means that the most common names tend to remain common, though random
forces can occasionally unseat popular names. The comings and goings of
popular names could be modelled with "random drift" - people randomly
copy existing names from other babies, with some occasionally inventing
new names. They also consistently found that female babies average 2.3
new names per 10,000 births, while boys only average 1.6. Random
copying closely predicts how names have fared over the past century.
The resulting distribution follows an elegant mathematical function
called a power law, with many uncommon names and a few very popular
names, thousands of times more popular than the majority. Although
the scientists cannot say which names will become popular in the next
decade, they are certain that one unique name for a baby today, such as
Phoenix Chi, will end up becoming very common. Scientists are finding power law distributions in many complex phenomena, such as movements of the stock market,
earthquakes and links on the internet, where there are lots of small
events, a few big ones and an intermediate number of average-sized ones.
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