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The History and Geography of Human Genes: (Abridged paperback edition)

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This book used to be a great reference when it was first published back in 1996. A lot of water has flown under the bridges since in the field of genetics, the fastest evolving science in the early 21st century. I have read my fair share of books about genetics, and try to keep up-to-date with the scientific literature with regards to population genetics in particular. This is probably why reading this book came as such a disappointment to me. It already seems so antiquated. The fact that the writing style is so dense and repetitive does not help either. The strong point are the maps and statistic tables, but even they are of little value if you have seen more recent data, notably Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA studies. My recommendation would be to purchase a newer book on the subject. If you are looking for a good popular science book on population genetics, go for The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

Cavalli-Sforza & The Reality of Race by Steve Sailer The New York Times has hailed "Genes, Peoples, and Languages", the new book by Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the dean of population geneticists, for "dismantling the idea of race." In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond salutes Cavalli-Sforza for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races".

Cavalli-Sforza himself has written, "The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise"; and that "The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose."

Don't believe any of this. This is merely a politically correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out that keeps his life's work -- identifying the myriad races of mankind and compiling their genealogies -- from being defunded by the commissars of acceptable thinking at Stanford.

What's striking is how the press falls for his squid ink, even though Cavalli-Sforza can't resist proudly putting his genetic map showing the main races of mankind right on the cover of his 1994 magnum opus, "The History and Geography of Human Genes."

(Here's also a link to Cavalli-Sforza's map on the website of molecular anthropologist Jonathan Marks, author of "Human Biodiversity," one of the few leftists acute enough to notice the spectacular contradiction between Cavalli-Sforza's boilerplate about the meaninglessness of race and the cover of his most important book.

This is Cavalli-Sforza's own description of this map that is the capstone of his half century of labor in human genetics: "The color map of the world shows very distinctly the differences that we know exist among the continents: Africans (yellow), Caucasoids (green), Mongoloids ... (purple), and Australian Aborigines (red). The map does not show well the strong Caucasoid component in northern Africa, but it does show the unity of the other Caucasoids from Europe, and in West, South, and much of Central Asia."

Basically, all his number-crunching has produced a map that looks about like what you'd get if you gave Jesse Helms a paper napkin and a box of crayons and had him draw a racial map of the world. In fact, at the global level, Cavalli-Sforza has largely confirmed the prejudices of the more worldly 19th Century imperialists. Rudyard Kipling and Cecil Rhodes could have hunkered down together and whipped up something rather like this map in honor of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

Cavalli-Sforza's new book, "Genes, Peoples, and Languages," is a surprisingly readable updating of a series of lectures on his work that he's been giving for years. It's not at all a bad introduction to this hugely productive scientist. But to find out just how politically unpopular Cavalli-Sforza's findings really are, you need to crack open his tecnically intimidating but endlessly fascinating landmark, "The History and Geography of Human Genes." (The reaonably priced abridged version is all that you'd ever need; the $195 unabridged volume is for libraries only.) It remains the best summary of how the early humans of Africa split apart into the countless racial groups we see today.

Cavalli-Sforza's team compiled extraordinary tables depicting the "genetic distances" separating 2,000 different racial groups from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then, Cavalli-Sforza has found, the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danish, and the Japanese 59 times greater. Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus (the main group of sub-Saharan blacks) is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish. (The genetic distance between Japanese and Bantus is even greater.)

From these kind of tables, Cavalli-Sforza reached this general conclusion: "The most important difference in the human gene pool is clearly that between Africans and non-Africans ..." As you can imagine, this finding could get him in a bit of hot water if the campus thought police ever found out about it. So, we should certainly forgive the charade he keeps up to fool the New York Times. But, we definitely don't have to believe it.

Ultimately, what is a "race"? It is essentially a lineage, a family tree. A racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Thus, race is a fundamental aspect of the human condition because we are all born into families. Burying our heads in the sand and refusing to think clearly about this bedrock fact of life only makes the inevitable problems caused by race harder to overcome.

This book is very hard to get through as someone with no backing in genetics or biology, but it is very interesting, and it shows how we humans are really just like a couple thousand breeds of dogs, all slightly different, but with the same ancestor, our distant ancestor though was probably no wolf. It is interesting when they mention the little unexplainable historical abnormalities (african genes and caucasian genes in latin american indigenous populations, perhaps?) that they see in the genes of some groups of humans.

I allmost want to dedicate my life to genetics because of all the damn interesting knowledge that could be spawned from the information presented by the authors of this book. If you know anyone studying in this field, you must give them this book for christmas or something, please.

It is now my theory that human language has been the driving force behind human evolution, how often do two parents without a common language stay together 18+ years to raise a family? Just think about that, and it explains the human diaspora pretty well. Humans very rarely mate outside of their language group. You have a group of people in africa that speak the same language, then later on, two languages develop, or three or four, these people migrate off, and form a tribe, this tribe doesnt mate with other tribes because romance and love just dont work without a common language. Tribal names and language names are usually connected anyway, and this is why. When you read this book, you need to view humanity as an animal group pretty much, its very objective without any feeling. Human beings are creatures of communication, communication has driven our evolution forward. Writing started cities, before even that farming started widespread language and trading. It seems that the natural path this should take is more communication, but most people dont like to talk, fewer like to read and write, though that is our path of destiny as humans. The average american spends more money on lottery tickets every year than books. TV is far too widespread now, the love for books is dying, though civilization has allways been built upon the libraries of past civilizations, the histories of the victors.

Anyway,
The things that could be done if these scientists who wrote this book could get together to do research with the people that are at the tip of the spear in supercomputer research...

If you want to have some mental fun/anguish, then this book should be read in conjunction with 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo.

Try it =)

Note that this book is not made for the layman, but if you are a layman, and have a biology textbook laying around, you can get through it no problem.

Any one who is thinking of reading this book, or anyone who has should really do a bit of research on National Geographic's Genographic project that is collecting genetic information all over the world right now (the same migratory route tracing that is in this book) and building a huge database...The cool thing though is that you can send National Geographic $100, and they will send you a kit, you send a cheek swab back, and later on, they tell you everything that you ever wanted to know about your ancestors, and their migratory routes, back 60,000 years...
The database is also building daily, so the information that you will first get about your genes will get more comprehensive as time goes on, and more genetic samples are collected from 10's or 100's of thousands of people all over the planet...
Anyone who reads this book actually MUST do a google search on this National Geographic Genographic Project, right now =)

"[This] landmark global study flattens The Bell Curve, proving that racial differences are only skin deep.... The History and Geography of Human Genes is.... The book's firm conclusion.... there is 'no scientific basis' for theories touting the genetic superiority of any one population over another." - Time

This is a very interesting review by Time magazine. Notice that Time says The Bell Curve shows that race differences are more than skin deep. In reality, The Bell Curve doesn't say this at all! In fact, The Bell Curve shows that races overlap considerably. The Bell Curve is merely a statistical study of differences in behavior between races concerning; graduation rates, illegitimacy, average age, poverty rate, and IQ scores which all overlap between races.

Not only that but the book The History and Geography of Human Genes discusses literally no topics discussed in The Bell Curve. They are about completely different topics.

This whole Time review reads to me, as a illogical attempt to discredit a breakthrough book- The Bell Curve. I wonder why somebody would do this?

I highly recommend both The Bell Curve and The History and Geography of Human Genes- both are landmark books in completely different fields. Also I would recommend the book The 10,000 Year Explosion for a more up to date view of recent human evolution.

Cavalli-Sforza presents the nearest approximation possible to the correlation of all measurable human genes, markers and attributes. You might think of the work as the "unified field theory" for evloutionary biology, culture and linguistics.

While the heft even of the abridged version is imposing, the component parts are manageable for those who already have basic statistical knowledge or who are willing to pay attention to the author's explanations. The world's populations are addressed in geographic chunks, and then at various appropriate points, more general conclusions drawn from the pieces.

Given the advances in genetic research acheived since publication, the model may ultimately prove more valuable than the particular contents...but for this decade the contents are fascinating.

This book is amazing. Everything you've ever wondered about human population groups is in this book.

Read the book for yourself and see.

The book provided a great deal of information about genetic distances and the relationships between populations. However, Mr. Martel's review includes lies and these lies must be addressed. First of all, the native North Africans were not "very blonde" or "nordic". In fact, the ORIGINAL population was as black as their rock art depictions of themselves (which just so happen to span the Sahara and date back nearly 10000yrs). Many of these Ancient Saharans were, however, completely abosorbed by an incoming of migrants from the Middle East. Perhaps these migrants are the people Mr. Martel is speaking of??? At any rate, with the dessication of the Sahara, most of the original Saharans (blacks) migrated South into The Sudan. In fact, they can still be found in West Africa today. They (especially the Fulani and Dogon) can be recognized in person as easily as they can be recognized in the Ancient Saharan depictions drawn by their ancestors.

Thus, despite Mr. Martel's comments to the contrary, the admixture seen in North Africans today is not so much the result of slaves (modern admixture) as it is the result of both modern admixture as well as ancient admixture - admixture which took place LONG before the Arabs ventured anywhere near the region. As for the Egyptians, they were from the same stock as the rest of North Africa and they almost always depicted themselves as brown and intermediate between and separate from both the white people of the North (Europe), the light skinned Semites (Middle East), and the darker, more Sudanese people of the South (Nubia).

Mr. Martel is not completely wrong in so far as SOME of these Middle Eastern migrants had blonde hair and light eyes (a few individual Lybians were depicted this way). But, such features were most probably seen at the same rate theyre seen in Middle Easterners and North Africans today. Neither people, however, are "Nordics", and to assume they descend from Nordics based on hair color alone is ridiculous. Blondism occurs in Aborigines... are we to believe they descend from Nordics as well? Somehow, I think not.

A complex subject such as Human Genetics is addressed in a very complex and laborious way, without giving room to speculation and methodological flaws where they would be most dangerous. The despicable so-called Skeptics in the U.S. (both the Skeptics Society and the CSICOP, with individual laudable exceptions such as Dr. S.J. Gould) who showed myserable sympathy towards the miserable pseudoscience of "The Bell Curve" would better learn from these exemplary Italians. So dilligent as they are when it comes to bullying upon parapsychologists, psychics and contactees, they drool at Murray and Herrnstein's pseudoscholar trickery when their book's main thesis is easily debunked with decades-old genetics knowledge. As a result I feel ashamed of being called the name 'skeptic'(once a matter of pride) and instead I feel proud of being a biologist.

I learned who the people closest genetically to Basques are. The French! Makes sense the French have a a portion of Basque country in their political nation of France. I'm of French background myself. French-Canadian that is.