Galton–Watson process

The Galton–Watson process is a branching arising from Francis Galton's statistical investigation of the extinction of family names. The process models family names as patrilineal (passed from father to son), while offspring are randomly either male or female, and names become extinct if the family name line dies out (holders of the family name die without male descendants). This is an accurate description of Y chromosome transmission in genetics, and the model is thus useful for understanding human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups, and is also of use in understanding other processes (as described below); but its application to actual extinction of family names is fraught. In practice, family names change for many other reasons, and dying out of name line is only one factor, as discussed in examples, below; the Galton–Watson process is thus of limited applicability in understanding actual family name distributions.

There was concern amongst the Victorians that surnames were becoming extinct. Galton originally posed the question regarding the probability of such an event in an 1873 issue of The Educational Times, and the Reverend Henry William Watson replied with a solution. Together, they then wrote an 1874 paper entitled "On the probability of the extinction of families". Galton and Watson appear to have derived their process independently of the earlier work by I. J. Bienaymé; see Heyde and Seneta 1977. For a detailed history see Kendall (1966 and 1975).

Assume, for the sake of the model, that surnames are passed on to all male children by their father. Suppose the number of a man's sons to be a random variable distributed on the set { 0, 1, 2, 3, ... }. Further suppose the numbers of different men's sons to be independent random variables, all having the same distribution.

Then the simplest substantial mathematical conclusion is that if the average number of a man's sons is 1 or less, then their surname will almost surely die out, and if it is more than 1, then there is more than zero probability that it will survive for any given number of generations.

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