The names that parents give their children illuminate cultural evolution. “Had Apple Blythe Alison Martin—the offspring of a celebrity couple, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin—been born a boy, it is quite possible she would have had been given something of a more normal name. This suggestion arises from research into changing fashions in children’s names, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Alexander Bentley, of University College, London, and his colleagues are studying the mathematics of cultural transmission. For this sort of work, birth records—which contain every instance in a country of one sort of cultural object, namely people’s first names—are a particularly good source of data.” (The Economist )