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The History and Geography of Human Genes

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This work, in hardback, is written with the advanced researcher in mind. The author is world famous for his pioneering efforts in identifying traits in particular traits in ethnic groups with unique genetic markers. The color plates in the index section can be helpful to those who know how to intrepret them.
It's a scholarly treatment of a highly technical subject and a thorough one as well. This is ground-breaking work collected from many samples and analyzed in detail. I think this should be required reading for college students in the field of genetic research.

In this book, a group of Italian researchers present their study of the repartition of a sample of human genetic sequences, based on data they collected between 1978 and 1986. This is certainly very interesting for the study of human races, even if based on only a sample of sequences, many of them being not relevant for races. Although the authors acknowledge that some scientists were able to identify and classify the majors races, they pretend the concept of race is a failure because there is much intra-class variation for some DNA sequences within given races (by saying this they already implicitly recognize the existence of given races.) This is however the fallacy of strawman - attacking a caricatured enemy - for the concept of race never meant that there would not be great inner variation for specific sequences, but only that it is possible to cluster and classify human groups and that such classification should correspond to a higher degree of common ancestry for individuals of the same cluster, as the races are the result of micro-evolution. And given that we now know that most of the genome is not used, that the active genes are a very small proportion, the intra-class variability makes sense, as these genes are not expressed and thus not submitted to the selection of evolutionary pressure. It is enough to find some sequences clusters that correspond to the existing races to show that different races indeed exist, which the authors actually do (something confirmed recently by the result of the genome projects, finding that inter-races distance is 0,1 of the genome, something enormous given that most of the genome is not expressed, and that the distance between humans and monkeys is 1%, the difference between human races being then 10% of the differences between humans and the closest animals.) Besides, the same intra-classes variability is also observed among animal races and vegetal varieties, yet no scientist will say that this makes the concept of animal race or vegetal variety useless. Anyway, this misconception allows the authors to get a green light from the politically correct thought police and avoid censorship.

The book follows with an exposition of their data analysis method. The main issue is the distance measure for the genetic data, something new for me. Otherwise, they use standard methods of data mining / pattern recognition : design of classification trees, and clustering with principal component analysis (PCA, for which the authors use the PC acronym).

Then, after 60 pages, come their results, which make the rest of the book, 300, p, that is most of it. It is way too much to review in detail, I will make general comments.

Globally, when dealing with the main racial groups, their findings are corroborations of what was already known or supplementary information. The PCA gives a mapping corresponding to the main racial groups (Africans, Australoids, Mongoloids, Euripids.) .After 200 000 years of existence (at about -200 000), our African ancestors start to move northwards and evolve into the common ancestor of the non-African races. 100 000 years later, at -110 000, occurs the split between the Australoids and the Eurasian. And then at -80 000 the split between Mongoloids and Euripids, Europeans appearing very lately, at -20 000.

In the remaining 200 pages, the authors deal with each local populations, proceeding continent by continent, and comparing the local races together. Interestingly, they add a lot of environmental and cultural information. But here they miss the most relevant, namely the history and anthropology that is relevant to the given population, which makes them miss important considerations and analysis. For example they seem to believe that the Basque are an ancient Indigenous population, failing to know the well established facts that they arrived very late (in the 8th century) and are believed to have come from the Caucasus. It would have been interesting to compare the Basques with the populations of the Caucasus, instead of comparing them with the native Western Europeans. Or they fail to know that the native populations of North-Africa (Berbers, Kabyls, etc.) were very blond and tall Nordic people, as is attested by the Egyptian, Greek and Roman antic sources, as well as by their Arabs conquerors. And when the Spanish conquered the Canari Island, the Berbers (Ganches) they found there were also Nordics. The genetic change of the North-African population occurred after the Arabs imported many African (Negroids) slaves, as they did in many other places, like Egypt, Palestine, etc. This the authors ignore, speaking only of the Arab genetic influence (which was probably insignificant.) It would have then relevant to compare the North-Africans with the Nordics and with the Negroids, and see how close they are to each, and the same for those Berbers populations in the mountain who did not so much racially mix and often have light hair of eyes. To their credit, the authors find out with their genetic analysis that the North-Africans have Caucasoid ancestors.

In conclusion, this book is a mine of interesting data analysis. It would have been though quite better if the authors had teamed up with historians competent in the field of racial history, or with true anthropologists (anthropology having becoming ethnology.) Let's hope that the next similar book, which will exploit the data of the human genome, will be able to improve this. Anyway, human diversity, as long as intermixing does not destroy it, is a thrilling subject that illuminates history, as this book shows.

Cavalli-Sforza & The Reality of Race by Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com)

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: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jonmarks/hgdpmap.html)

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.