Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

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Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Ronald A. Fisher

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (pronounced [luˈiːdʒi ˈluːka kaˈvalli ˈsfɔrtsa]; 25 January 1922 – 31 August 2018) was an Italian geneticist. He was a population geneticist who taught at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia and then at Stanford University.

Works

Schooling and positions

Cavalli-Sforza entered

E. coli genetics.[2] In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy (Parma, and Pavia) before taking up a professorship at Stanford in 1970. He remained at Stanford until he retired in 1992.[3]

In 1999 he won the Balzan Prize for the Science of human origins. He has been a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1994. In 1992 he was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London.[2] He was awarded the Telesio-Galilei Academy Award in 2011 for Biology.

Specific contributions

Cavalli-Sforza initiated a new field of research by combining the concrete findings of demography with a newly available analysis of blood groups in an actual human population. He also studied the connections between migration patterns and blood groups.[4]

Writing in the mid-1960s with

phylogenies).[5] Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza wrote about trees of populations within the human species, where genetic differences are affected both by treelike patterns of historical separation of populations and by spread of genes among populations by migration and admixture. Many of these influential and fundamental early papers were reprinted in 2018 in a volume focusing on A. W. F. Edwards, and dedicated to Cavalli-Sforza and Ian Hacking.[6]
In later papers, Cavalli-Sforza has written about the effects of both divergence and migration on human gene frequencies.

While Cavalli-Sforza is best known for his work in genetics, he also, in collaboration with

cultural transmission theory or dual inheritance theory. The publication Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981) made use of models from population genetics and infectious disease epidemiology to investigate the transmission of culturally transmitted units
. This line of inquiry initiated research into the correlation of patterns of genetic and cultural dispersion.

Cavalli-Sforza conducted several studies of how language differences may serve as barriers to gene flow between adjacent human populations. His studies of human migration have tested hypotheses of linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg about language "superfamilies". The hypothesized superfamilies are controversial among other linguists.[7]

Books

Cavalli-Sforza has summed up his work for laymen in five topics covered in Genes, Peoples, and Languages.[8] According to an article published in The Economist, the work of Cavalli-Sforza "challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all". The book illustrates both the problems of constructing a general "hereditary tree" for the entire human race, and some mechanisms and data analysis methods to greatly reduce these problems, thus constructing a fascinating hypothesis of the recent 150,000 years of human expansion, migration, and human diversity formation.[9] In the book Cavalli-Sforza asserts that Europeans are, in their ancestry, about two-thirds Asian and one-third African.[10]

Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes[11] (1994 with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza) is a standard reference on human genetic variation. Cavalli-Sforza also wrote The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (together with his son Francesco).

Earlier, in the 1970s, he and Walter Bodmer wrote what was the standard textbook on modern human genetics, and was also a basic reference for population genetics more generally, as the field was at the time, The Genetics of Human Populations (W. H. Freeman, 1971). The two, with Bodmer as first author, later wrote another more basic text, Genetics, Evolution, and Man (W. H. Freeman, 1976). Along with his 1994 book these are essentially classical presentations of human genetics before the genomics era began providing very much more detailed data.

Death

Professor Cavalli-Sforza died on 31 August 2018, at the age of 96 at his home in Belluno, Italy.[12] He is survived by three sons Matteo, Francesco and Luca Tommaso Cavalli-Sforza, and one daughter, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza.[13]

References

  1. ^ Edwards, Prof Anthony (2015). "History of the Department — Department of Genetics". www.gen.cam.ac.uk. Para 5. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
  2. ^
    S2CID 232093076
    .
  3. ^ Leslie, Mitchell (May 1999). "The History of Everyone and Everything". stanfordmag.org. Stanford University. Retrieved January 31, 2022.
  4. ^ Adams, Amy; Harmitage, Hanae (September 10, 2018). "Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a giant in population genetics and professor emeritus, dies at 96". Stanford Medicine News Center. Retrieved January 31, 2022.
  5. ^ Cavalli-Sforza, L., Edwards, A. W. F. (1967). Phylogenetic analysis: models and estimation procedures. American Journal of Human Genetics 19: 233–257
  6. ISBN 9781107111721
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-7486-4594-7
    . Postulated remote relationships such as Amerind, Nostratic and Proto-World have been featured in newspapers, magazines and television documentaries, and yet these same proposals have been rejected by most mainstream historical linguists.
  8. ISBN 0-86547-529-6
  9. ^ Geoffrey Carr, "Survey: The proper study of mankind", The Economist Vol. 356, no. 8177, pg. 11 (July 1, 2000).
  10. ^ Rothstein, Edward (April 1, 2000). "SHELF LIFE; Dismantling Race and Unifying the Human Species". New York Times. Retrieved May 16, 2012.
  11. ISBN 0-691-02905-9
  12. ^ Bencivelli, Silvia (September 1, 2018). "Addio a Cavalli Sforza, il genetista che studiò le migrazioni dell'umanità". La Repubblica (in Italian). Retrieved September 1, 2018.
  13. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved November 15, 2020.

Bibliography

Films

  • 2003 – Journey of Man

Further reading

External links

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