At the boundary between biological and cultural evolution: The origin of surname distributions

Surnames and non-recombining alleles are inherited from a single parent in a highly similar way. A simple birth-death model with mutations can accurately describe this process. Exponentially growing and constant populations are investigated, and we study how different compositions of the founder populations can be observed in present-day diversity distributions. We analyse different quantities in the statistically stationary state, both through analytic and numerical methods. Our results compare favourably to field data for family sizes in several countries. We discuss the relationship between the distribution of surnames and the genetic diversity of a population. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.