|
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 100,000 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 shy there is no genetic
basis for racial classification and proposes that a comparison
of blood types is a far better means of determining "genetic
distance" and explaining linguistic and cultural differences.
A panoramic tour of the major discoveries
in genetic anthropology, Genes, Peoples, and Languages
gives us a rare firsthand account of some of the most significant
scientific work of recent years.
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.
|
