Interesting story on people's given names as memes. I think The Economist blows it, however, in its main point: they suggest that the vicissitudes in naming children seems to be attributable to random drift, and that this casts doubt on whether names are memes, and perhaps on whether memes compete selectively like genes do. There are two big problems with the Economist's theory:
1- Assuming evolution of names is, in fact, driving mostly by random drift, that means little for memes in general. One strong piece of evidence supporting this point is (almost) contained within the article itself, when it mentions that the popularity of various dog breeds drifts over time much like the popularity of names. Consider this: how did we get the various dog breeds we currently have? Through humans' capricious selection, rather than natural selection. But just because dog breeds were created by human selection doesn't mean that natural selection doesn't apply to other organisms. Similarly, just because name-memes might be subject only to human-caused random drift doesn't mean that all memes evolve that same way.
2- Moreover, I fundamentally do not believe that the evolution of names is primarily subject to random drift. I would submit that researchers looking at this have simply not yet discovered what the selection pressures are. And yes, thinkness is quite culturally savvy, so here goes one crazy conjecture: much of the change in creativity for boys' names parallels the broad changes in socially acceptable male flamboyance.
Over the course of modern Western history (modern meaning "since the Renaissance"), the flamboyance and visual appreciation of males has ebbed and flowed considerably -- I think back to a statue of Louis XIV, the Sun King, depicting him spreading his lavish clothes to reveal his shapely legs. (Those legs, I hear, were actually not his, but the legs of a rather more attractive model. It's good to be the king.) I would say that this cycling leads fairly closely to the varying creativity of boys' names, which can be either agents of conservativism or ostentation. In Victorian times, where men became imprisoned in both unbending propriety and modern Western business attire, the ten most popular names were the traditional English ones: John, William, Charles, George, James, Joseph, Frank, Henry, Thomas, Harry.
The Economist article says that the creativity for names of both genders went up in the 70s and down in the 80s. I'd say this mostly fits in with my theory, though I don't want to explain it right now and I'll just leave it at that. But I will go into the next observation, which is that boy-name creativity went through the roof in the 90s. Why? Metrosexuality! That was the decade of Details, when straight men realized women loved gay men and wanted to be them but with more sex with women. The 90s brought broad acceptance of gay males (witness all the teevee shows) and with it metrosexuality. Ostentation was then a new selection pressure on boy names, and they consequently became more creative.
(By the way, the SSA has a great baby-name site.)
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