Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (PDF)

Description

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was among the first to ask whether the genes of modern populations contain a historical record of the human species. Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question―anticipated by Darwin―with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author’s work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past hundred thousand years of human evolution.Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Effectively communicates complex ideas for a general audience without sacrificing the important technical details that underlie them; thus it should be of great interest to professional as well as lay readers.”–Theodore G. Schurr, “American Scientist About the Author Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was born in Genoa in 1922 and has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Parma, and Pavia. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Stanford University and is the author of The History and Geography of Human Genes.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is an excellent and easy to read book about the fascinating analysis of the heritage of mankind. The author has developed an extensive multidisciplinary approach that includes: a) archeology, b) history, c) genetics, d) linguistics, and e) mathematics.Although the author never stresses mathematics as a key discipline to analyze mankind heritage, his work relied on Principal Component Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, Cluster Analysis, Logistic Regression, and Hypothesis Testing. Thus, the readers familiar with these statistical methods will enjoy reading this book as a fascinating social science application of such methods.You certainly don’t have to be a mathematician or a scientist to enjoy this book. The author has clearly written it as an introduction to this field aimed at the layperson.You will learn many fascinating concepts. One of those, is that the history of genes, cultures, and languages converge. In essence, they all influence each other back and forth. It is somehow hard to tell what is the main driver of overall changes in population. You run into many Nature or Nurture arguments. Continuing along the same line, he refers to other scientific works explaining the difference in IQ between individuals. Well, it is 1/3 due to heredity (nature); 1/3 due to cultural transmission (nurture); and 1/3 due to differences in personal experience (random). That is a pretty far cry from the 80% to 90% due to heredity that many people believe in. Also, natural evolution will or has already stopped according to the author. This is because medicine in industrialized societies has reduced the natural mortality rate down to almost zero among the pre-reproductive age set. In other words, medicine has eliminated the natural selection process as the survival rate mechanism of our specie. Some of us may have had concepts that humans eventually will evolve and look like aliens with extremely big heads (for superior intelligence and processing powers) and very skimpy bodies (since physical force is useless in an information age). Well, that’s not going to happen.Throughout the book there are many very interesting graphs and maps that beautifully illustrate and clarify the concepts he introduces. The migration map on page 94, clearly outlines all the major original migrations out of Africa starting 100,000 years ago. On page 71, a world map showing the actual genetic distance between locations is fascinating too. On page 164, you can observe the best diagram of the Indo-European languages you will ever see. English is a Germanic language, as we all know. However, English predates German by several centuries!You can see how throughout his life, he must have been a fantastic university professor. About 6 months ago, I started reselling my books at Amazon Marketplace to cut my cost of reading. However, I am not reselling this one. I am keeping it as a reference. I anticipate there will be so many occasions when I will be glad I have kept it. The book has opened for me a new window of knowledge quest where so many of the social and quantitative sciences have converged into one to crack the mystery of the history of mankind. I hope this book will do for you, what it did for me.

⭐Granted, the author is a respectable scholar in historical genetics. And the topic is interesting. However, this book is poorly written:1) Translation is generally sloppy. The English text is often funny, e.g. not sure which nouns a dangling clause actually refer to in running sentences. Either the original text is sloppy, or the translation is, or both.2) Lack of information. Not a lot of actual scientific info is presented. E.g. Maps for principal component analysis for Asia genes would be of interest I think3) Big gaps in the whole picture: the origins of both Chinese and Indians are poorly explained. It might reflect low level of scientific research in those countries; but from the writing itself, it seems the author does not really care about these people which account for ~45% of the world’s population; at the same time, the author keeps pointing out that the Basques are unique.4) Putting my Chinese head on here:The language family that includes Na-Dene (in N. America), Caucasian (mainly Georgian), and Sino-Tibetan languages is called the ‘Dene-Caucasian’ family. I just can’t help wondering how the scientific community name things. How can the Chinese language, with at least 800MM native speakers, not part of the name of the language family? It is probably not the author’s fault, but as a founding scientist in the inquiry of human origins from genetic & linguistic point of view, the author has some responsibity for the bias I think.5) Is the scientific evidence robust? In the early section on genetic mapping, each of the dots showing ‘races’ such as ‘Basques’, ‘South Chinese’, ‘Dravidians’, etc. are defined using considerations in ‘location and languages’ of the human samples. Makes me wonder whether the whole correlation between races and languages is just a convoluted tautology.6) Lack of “so what”. The book has no thesis. On this, Jared Diamond’s Gun, Germs & Steel written in 1998 is a much more interesting read, using mostly the same pool of literature.My advice: save the money, buy something else!

⭐Genes, Peoples, and Languages is an excellent introduction to the study of how the human species has evolved and spread out of Africa. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza has pulled together years of his own research and synthesized it into an easy to read, and sometimes humorous, narrative that looks at the archaelogical, genetic and linguistic evidence for the spread of the human species from Africa to all points of the globe. A good addition to your library if you have enjoyed recent books by Spencer Wells and Bryan Sykes.

⭐Professor Cavalli-Sforza’a book “Genes, Peoples, and Languages” is a fascinating history of humankind based on genetics, archeology, and linguistics. It addresses topics, which are of interest to many people who are starting to look into their genealogy in more global aspects. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza is a Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Stanford University. Together with Peter Underhill and Peter Oefner they have published extensively on detecting DNA variation in the Y chromosome and developing markers to study the evolution of modern humans.The book delves into genetics and linguistics issues, which are explained well despite the multidisciplinary approach. A must read for students in genetics, history, linguistiscs, and even genetic counseling.For readers who would like to utilize the knowledge of genetics in studying their distant family relationships as a supplement to this work, I would refer them to the “Ancestry DNA Toolbox” or the book “How to DNA test our family relationships?” available from amazon.com.

⭐Although a lot of interesting books have been written in the last few years about deep ancestry and the origins of humanity it is important to have a work that concisely and authoritatively brings together the current broadly accepted ideas as they stand today. ‘Genes, Peoples and Languages’ reconstructs prehistory by using the concepts that are explained in the title and gives an outline of the origins of all the major populations in the world and their relationship to each other.Other works of recent years have proposed new theories that challenge or modify the orthodox ideas on human origins but to make sense of newer theories it is necessary to understand how the accepted views were arrived at.Some of the dry technical aspects of the methodology can be a little tedious at times but they don’t take too long to read, and aren’t necessary to understand precisely in order to grasp the conclusions that Cavelli-Sforza derives from them.

⭐A wonderful book – this is a second copy for presentation to a friend

⭐I have another book (on languages) that cites this. Although not very well indexed, it is certainly a good source of information about migration of peoples.

⭐I read this mostly because it’s a classic referenced from many other books. It’s okay, though IIRC some of its theses have been questioned of lately.

⭐The book is readable, and does not require any depth of scientific knowledge, while setting out the history of the peoples on the planet

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