Some moan that the work of contemporary artists has no redeeming merit. They carp that haute couture is an empty charade. They are equally scornful about the never-ending procession of celebrities who seem to be famous for being famous.

They are not culture-blind philistines, however. According to research by an international team on the mathematics of cultural transmission, they are right to suspect that fad and fashion are all show and no substance.

Among academics in the social sciences, there has been a debate about why certain ideas become fashionable, while others are outmoded. Some argue that cultural ideas - whether the cut of clothes, designs on pots, or choice of first names - spread simply by random copying (that is, they are popular because, er, they are popular). Others believe that cultural ideas become fashionable because they have some symbolic meaning, merit or function that helps them to thrive in a particular society.

Over the past year or two, a team has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board to test why cultural ideas take hold in the population by looking at the rise and fall in the popularity of dog breeds, baby names, patterns on ancient clay pots, copying of Internet links, sales of pop albums and subjects tackled by US patents.

Their findings provide powerful support to those who believe that beige has as much merit as any other colour, and those who still puzzle over why no one likes to be called Cyril or Gertrude any more.

What's in a name? Not much, according to the researchers. Is one brand of art better than another? No. When bell-bottom jeans of the 1970s gave way to tight-fitting bleached jeans in the 1980s, did it say anything meaningful about culture? Nope. Is green the new black? No more than red or blue or orange is, according to research by Dr Matt Hahn of the University of California, Davis; Professor Hal Herzog of Western Carolina University; and Dr Alex Bentley and Professor Stephen Shennan of the Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour, University College, London.

The simple process of imitation is crucial for human society and has allowed ideas to be passed from generation to generation. The same process is at the heart of how fads and fashions have fared over the past century: in essence, if they like it, I like it too. This model can closely reproduce trends. Take the puppy registrations to the American Kennel Club over the past few decades. The top three breeds in 1950 - cocker spaniels, followed by beagles and boxers - were replaced by Labrador retrievers, followed by golden retrievers and German shepherds in 2001.

The breeds that have shown the fastest rise in popularity over the past five years are the Havanese, cavalier King Charles spaniels, Brussels griffons and French bulldogs. "At some point dogs went from being a custom - something that people kept because they were important in their lives and had utility - to a fashion," said Herzog. "This is an incredibly nice model for looking at rapid changes in culture."

Something, anything, whether a mullet hairstyle (argh!), love of progressive rock (never again!) or flared trousers (heaven forbid!) forms a distribution over time which resembles the mathematical pattern that would be produced by random copying.

The resulting distributions of the popularity of a name, hairstyle or whatever follow an elegant mathematical function called a power law, which sums up how there are many uncommon varieties and a few very popular ones, thousands of times more popular than the majority.

This comes as no surprise. Power law distributions are everywhere. They are found in the movements of the stock market and the size of earthquakes, where there are lots of small events, a few big ones and an intermediate number of average-sized ones. The law also rules the links between sites on the Internet. If the message of this work is that popular ideas persist, you may wonder why we are no longer dressed in furs and playing bone flutes in caves. The research does not mean that once a clothing design, dog breed, name or school of art is popular it will remain so.

Although the most common names tend to remain common, random forces occasionally unseat the cool, hip and chic. The team finds that the comings and goings of popular ideas can be modelled with "random drift" - people randomly copy existing fads and fashions from others, with new ideas emerging from time to time to churn the overall variety.

Thus, though rare, it is inevitable that a few parents who invent an offbeat name for their baby, such as Apple, will unwittingly determine the names of thousands of children in as little as a decade. Similarly, a relatively unusual breed, such as the chow-chow, can occasionally unseat more popular dogs.

"The popularity of some breeds just takes off - much like a social epidemic," said Herzog. "This is the case for booms that occurred with Doberman pinschers and Saint Bernards."

Nor does this research suggest that random copying of cultural ideas accounts for everything, though it is the dominant force on popular culture. Non-randomness clearly exists alongside the basic random pattern. There is a celebrity effect, though it does not always work the way that you expect.

One might expect the world to be blessed with more Britneys than it used to be, but Ms Spears seems to have had a negative effect, said Bentley. The name was ranked three in the US in 1995. In 1999, when she released Baby One More Time, it fell to 37th and last year languished at around 211.

The celebrity effect can be seen more clearly in dog breeds. Dalmatians became popular after the re-release of a film version of Dodie Smith's novel 101 Dalmatians (the original release triggered a modest rise). Registered English sheepdogs soared from 149 in 1960 to more than 16 000 in 1974 after Disney's The Shaggy Dog in 1959. And Rottweilers were sent into decline by the bad publicity associated with an increase in fatal attacks in the mid-1990s.

Herzog, citing earlier work by Stanley Lieberson at Harvard University on the rate of changes in baby names, found a similarity in the timescale of the waxing and waning of dog breeds and first names, again emphasising how a common mechanism is at work. "For example, the rise and fall in the popularity of 'Jennifer' are nearly identical to the rise and fall of Irish setter registrations at about the same time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s."

Celebrity is transient, media scares eventually subside and familiarity does indeed breed contempt. Today, the name John - just like the Dalmatian - is far less popular than it used to be.

And although the scientists cannot say what will become popular in the next decade, they are certain that some tiny blip on the cultural landscape today will balloon into a mass phenomenon.

The team has now studied other real-world examples such as archaeological pottery and applications for technology patents. According to a recent report in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B (Biological sciences), the same power law pattern expected of random copying holds sway.

Even 7 000 years ago, a community of Europe's first farmers show random copying patterns in the way they decorated their pots, according to Shennan.

The findings have wider implications. The bad news is that inequality (among randomly copied ideas) is inevitable, because a power law distribution of popularity always emerges among the available choices.

"However, if you want to reduce the inequality - reducing the disparity between the most and least popular - you need a larger population," said Bentley. "If you hold the population constant, increasing mutation rate also decreases inequality."

The same goes for money, which is essentially "copied" from one person to another, he said. "Since wealth in modern economies is power-law distributed, the model could predict how reducing inheritance [effectively 'innovation' by refreshing property ownership each generation, for example, or punitive inheritance tax] would reduce wealth inequality."

- © The Telegraph, London