Inferring processes of cultural transmission: the critical role of rare variants in distinguishing neutrality from novelty biases.

ABSTRACT: Neutral evolution assumes that there are no selective forces distinguishing different variants in a population. Despite this striking assumption, many recent studies have sought to assess whether neutrality can provide a good description of different episodes of cultural change. One approach has been to test whether neutral predictions are consistent with observed progeny distributions, recording the number of variants that have produced a given number of new instances within a specified time interval: a classic example is the distribution of baby names. Using an overlapping generations model, we show that these distributions consist of two phases: a power-law phase with a constant exponent of [Formula: see text], followed by an exponential cut-off for variants with very large numbers of p

SUBMITTER: O'Dwyer JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665813 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature