Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza (1922–2018)

This is the second time around that I am reading this work. While the entire subject is a fascinating one, and I came with great expectations that this authoritative scholar of the field would throw light on many often tangled, usually controversial, questions, I cannot say that I am much better informed. Unfortunately, I feel that neither of the two facets - genetics and historical linguistics - have been given enough space. In some places, there seems to be an odd lapse into an almost show more Lamarckian mode of speech when talking of similarities between genetic and cultural evolution: "Culture resembles the genome in the sense that each one accumulates useful information from generation to generation" (page 176). Of course he is not really suggesting that genomes adapt according to the lived experience, but an unwary reader may fall into this sort of fallacious thinking. As a person from South Asia, I am obviously much taken up with the 'Aryan migration theory' (AMT, if you would like to capitalize), and the copy-book juxtaposition of genetics with ethnicity (racial types) and language(s), and I wish he had explored this case in more detail. One will have to look into more recent works on this subject. Finally, the book comes to a rather abrupt ending, leaving the reader a bit flummoxed about how to sysnthesize all the matter. show less

It’s not clear who comprises the intended audience for this book. It seems to have been intended as a more popular version of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s magnum opus, the encyclopedic, fascinating, and unfortunately very expensive The History and Geography of Human Genes. It doesn’t succeed there; while, in the introduction, Cavalli-Sforza says


“I have tried to restrict my use of jargon to a minimum, and I have attempted to explain terms and methods unknown to the general public.”


he show more doesn’t get very far before he’s deep in eigenvalues and allele frequencies and principal component analysis. (To be fair, my graduate work was heavily dependent on PCA and a related technique called detrended correspondence analysis, and it’s all still something of a black box to me.) What’s more, this is a case where a picture or map is worth 1000 words, but Cavalli-Sforza only includes one PCA map (of Europe) and resorts to verbal descriptions of PCA for other continents.


Another drawback is the book was written from a series of lectures, and it shows. Individual chapters are self-contained and there’s no real flow through the book.


Nevertheless, there’s interesting stuff here. If you can’t afford The History and Geography of Human Genes or get it at a library, this may suffice if you read carefully. The first five principal components of human gene frequencies for Europe display quite nicely:


*The spread of agriculture from the Middle East


*Northward migration after the last glacial retreat (hmmm. You’d think that would be more important than agriculture, but maybe it has to do with the fact that agriculture allows for larger populations).


*The introduction of the horse - or, more correctly, the introduction of genes from horse nomads - spreading west from central Asia.


*Greek colonization around the Mediterranean, and


*The Basques versus everybody else.


Work like this is, of course, easily prone to charges of “racism”, so Cavalli-Sforza devotes a lot of time to saying nope, no races here, just human “groups” or “populations” with “genetic distance” between them. He almost protests too much. There are plenty of charts of “genetic distance” between (say) inhabitants of northeast Asia and central Africa that might make the politically correct reader sit up and take notice.


The whole last half of the book is about languages and their comparison with genetic data. This is interesting stuff, too, but most of it is over my head. I did learn that the oldest reconstructed word (I’m not at all sure how the reconstruction was done) is tik, meaning “finger” or “one”, and that most ancient words relate to counting and human body parts. One interesting exception is the word “lice”, which is also very old and, strangely, doesn’t figure very often in romance novels set in the Neolithic.


Three stars, I think. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel is more accessible and covers much the same ground. show less

What a mess. But maybe in a good way. There's a lot of science and philosophy and science and politics and science here. It's a labor of love, almost a magnum opus, a summary of a lifetime's worth of cross-disciplinary research and analysis and thought.

But dude, I don't know whether your son or your translator or your editor is to blame, but the writing does not do your ideas justice. Even though I do already know what mitochondria and morphemes are, and the difference between Lucy and show more African Eve, I still was confused much of the time and had to struggle with this. It was elliptical; most discussions seemed truncated or condensed. Ironically, it would have been better if it were longer, including more examples from research, a bit more narration, and more exploration of counter-arguments.

But there were lots of valuable ideas in here, including demolition of the idea that 'race' and 'IQ' can be defined and actually matter. And I did insert 1/2 dz bookdarts.

One is just a reference to Rudolf Virchow. I seem to remember that his suggestion, that the Neanderthal specimen that looks most primitive was actually diseases (I'm paraphrasing and may not be doing so accurately), is being reconsidered again. I want to see if I can find more about that - meanwhile, do you know anything?)

I liked that the book talks a lot about science as theory, and includes much discussion of the kinds of research that was being done and would reveal more information about LLCS's work. He even made sure we were alert to potential biases and failures of method, pointing out for example that archaeologists like digging in caves because there is a better chance of finding well-preserved... relics."

I feel a revelation to read that Motoo Kimura, who studies evolution, enriches Darwin's adage of 'survival of the fittest' by pointing out that chance also plays a role and so we need also consider 'survival of the luckiest.' So true. A successful mutation may show up but never get expressed if the bearer unluckily gets eaten in infancy!

I also want to find more recent work by Joseph Greenberg. At the time of this book his claim was that Amerind languages can be divided into only three families. This was hotly contested, two decades ago, and may well be resolved by now. (Do you know?)

I love this provocative line that was almost a throwaway. "[P]robably knowledge and culture will be described as a collection of states and levels of excitement in nerve cells and their connections." What?! Comparing brain stuff to electrons? Theorizing an entirely new foundation for research into consciousness and neuro-psychology? What would [a:António R. Damásio|60033|António R. Damásio|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1235095020p2/60033.jpg], [a:Susan Blackmore|5348426|Susan Blackmore|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg], [a:Daniel Dennett|4584868|Daniel Dennett|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg] say??

I also want to look up Raven's progressive matrices, a kind of IQ test.

In sum, fascinating, believable, but a bit dated, and sometimes difficult." show less

This is a shorter version of their previous book "The History and Geography of Human Genes". Here is my review of that.

Absolutely stunning. The result of over 30 years' work by hundreds of scientists. A must for any historian, anthropologist, linguist or paleontologist. Should be of great interest to any scientist.

The authors have applied sophisticated statistical analysis to the evidence from samples of blood taken from thousands of people around the world. It is amazing how much show more information is teased out. Huge amounts of computing time were required.

They look at dozens of alleles (minor mutations) which can be traced in populations over space and time. The primary mathematical method is identification of principal components by multivariate analysis. Most interesting is the resulting geographical mappings of gene flow. There are very many of great interest. For example, they show the three major migrations into North America from Beringia. They confirm that the dispersion of farming out of Anatolia 8,000 years ago was from migrations of farmers rather than merely the spread of a farming culture.

The authors freely draw from the fields of anthropoly, paleontology and linguistics (and occasionally written history) to supplement and complement the genetic data.

(The work shows clearly that race is not of genetic significance, never mind what you may possibly read elsewhere due to misunderstanding.) show less