Hahn and Bentley (2003) apply Kimura and Crow's neutral-allele model to baby-name popularity and conclude a value-neutral process with no preference or selection reproduces its power-law distribution

cultural-evolutionneutral-theorypopulation-geneticsbaby-namespower-lawdriftcross-domain-bridge

In "Drift as a mechanism for cultural change: an example from baby names," Matthew W. Hahn and R. Alexander Bentley carry the same 1964 population-genetics result the bibliometrics literature borrowed into a wholly unrelated popularity phenomenon. They cite it directly — "In population genetics, it has been shown analytically (Kimura & Crow 1964) that the number of neutral alleles" with a given frequency follows a predictable distribution — and argue that the power-law distribution of U.S. first-name frequencies over roughly a century is reproduced by "a completely value-neutral process: no preference, fitness, or selection is needed, only proportional sampling." Names, in this account, rise and fall in popularity not because parents prefer them but because each generation copies names in proportion to how common they already are; the resulting turnover and concentration fall out of drift alone. The paper frames itself explicitly as a null model against selection-based explanations of cultural change.

What is borrowed is the model, not a curve-fit of the 1964 formula. Hahn and Bentley quote the Kimura–Crow analytic result and then set it aside — their Social Security Administration data are "the cumulative number of baby names in a decade" rather than an instantaneous distribution, so they "therefore modelled the random copying of names by computer simulation," a simulation they describe as "equivalent to the infinite-allele model of population genetics for a single-locus, multiple neutral-allele system (Kimura & Crow 1964; Crow & Kimura 1970)." The shared object is the neutral-allele model and its parameter u = 4Nm; the published formula is cited as the analytic statement of it, not used as the estimator.

This is the middle leg of the lineage set out in the lineage observation: the identical neutral-drift formula that Simkin and Roychowdhury credit for their citation-count model also underwrites a cultural-evolution model of name popularity, reached in a different field and without borrowing from the bibliometrics side — this paper (2003) predates Simkin's preprint (2005) and cites Kimura & Crow on its own account. What the 2026-10-11 audit removed is the stronger reading: Simkin's own text names this paper as an example of the same theory applied to culture, so the two uses are parallel but not mutually unaware. It is a second, distinct cultural-evolution mechanism imported into the vault alongside the iterated-learning/bottleneck account in model collapse as cultural evolution — neutral drift (selection-free proportional sampling) and iterated learning (bottleneck filtering) are not the same import and should be kept distinct.

The claim rests on the fetched mirror PDF (Tier 1 for the paper's own argument); the underlying Kimura & Crow (1964) derivation the paper cites was not read this session and is the shared, unread antecedent tracked in question-verify-kimura-crow-1964-is-shared-mathematical-ancestor-of-citation-and-cultural-drift-models.