Genes, Peoples, and Languages | 
| Author: Luigi Luca Cavalli-sforza
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 203496
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 239
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0520228731
Dewey Decimal Number: 599.938
EAN: 9780520228733
ASIN: 0520228731
Publication Date: April 3, 2001
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Condition: cover edge wear ; minor scratches on cover ; rubbing on edges ;227 pages ; (C) 2000
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Amazon.com
Jared Diamond says, "It would be a slight exaggeration to say that L.L. Cavalli-Sforza studies everything about everybody, because actually he is 'only' interested in what genes, languages, archaeology, and culture can teach us about the history and migrations of everybody for the last several hundred thousand years." Cavalli-Sforza has been the leading architect of a revolution (even a paradigm shift) in human genetics since the 1960s. Because of his work, geneticists no longer think that the human species is divided into color-coded races. Cavalli-Sforza's studies of the transmission of family names in Italy, of the relationship between human genes and languages, of migration and marriage, are the benchmarks of our biological self-understanding. Genes, Peoples, and Languages is less personal than Cavalli-Sforza's preceding book, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. And it is far more compact than the magisterial The History and Geography of Human Genes (available abridged for those who prefer not to buy books by the pound). Instead, it is a an excellent overview of Cavalli-Sforza's many-faceted approach to human history and our present condition. It is that rarest of achievements, holistic without any trace of mushy-mindedness. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Product 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 Interesting and informative December 30, 2007
The book deserves 5 start, if only for this statement:
"...creating human races artificially by cloning would have potentially very dangerous consequences..."
Genes, People and Languages July 31, 2007
The connection between the categories in the title becomes more apparent after reading this excellent book.
Genes, Peoples, and Languages June 2, 2007
Excellent reference explaining the current developments and thinking on the evolution of Homo Sapiens.
 Worth a read... May 25, 2005
12 out of 19 found this review helpful
It seems that Sforza makes the presumption that most readers of this book will have read his earlier works. Perhaps he is justified in deciding thusly. The book, however, comes off as being a overture to the politically-correct in the first half of it and a piece of patchwork for his previous works in the second half. Granted, there have been great advances in the fields of genetics and mollecular archaeology since last he wrote a book marketed toward the layman and patchwork might be necessary.
Sforza, as an elder-statesman in the field of genetics, is entitled to a bit more slack than others. This book, however, does not read as well as his previous works or even as well as the various books by newer authors who have disputed him on such topics as the mannerof the introduction of agriculture to Europe or the nature of race.
Taken as a whole, Genes, Peoples and Languages strikes me as being half sermon and half footnote to a brilliant career. The footnote section is certainly worth reading, but only for those who have read at least one or two of his previous works.
A great introduction to the history of mankind. March 5, 2005
26 out of 27 found this review helpful
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.
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