Genes, Peoples, and Languages: Amazon.ca: Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Books

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"A thoroughly readable account of some of the most fascinating ideas around." -- the New Scientist

Book 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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10 Reviews

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3.5 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Ties Things Together, May 5 2011

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Bernie Koenig (London, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Genes, Peoples and Languages (Penguin Press Science) (Paperback)

Natural Law, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality

An interesting well presented work tying together biology, language, agriculture, and the migrations of people.

The main point That Cavalli-Sforza makes is that there is one human race and all our differences are due to various evolutionary factors.

The meat of the book is how migrations patterns of humans can be traced using both genetics and language. genetic changes and linguistic changes occur for similar reasons, though linguistic changes occur much more rapidly. But by showing how languages have evolved, along with how people have evolved, we get a good picture of both the genetic and the social aspects of the evolutionary process.

Much of the information in the book was not new to me. A lot of it is contained in other books I have reviewed here. But what makes this book stand out is how all the factors are tied together and how the same kinds of factors that lead to biological or genetic change also lead to linguistic and social change.

Indeed, again as other people have pointed out, social conditions can lead to biological change. Cavalli-Sforza develops this theme.

The point is that there are many many factors that are present in the evolutionary process and they influence each other.

A good book to get an overview of the evolutionary process from a wide perspective.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Unfocused work covering an uneven scope., Mar 26 2004

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Doshi - See all my reviews

This review is from: Genes, Peoples, and Languages (Paperback)

Like its title, this book is a disjointed work. There is no central thesis in this work. Narratively, it is modeled like how "101 {Concepts|Mechanisms|Analyses|Facts} of Evolution" would be organized. Nevertheless, there are some interesting ideas and data presented, like the correlation of language classification and genetic groupings, or the possible (and probable) outgrowth and expansions of human settlements, arising from Africa. Less interesting, but worth a look, is the narrative on transmission of culture.

However, this is a work best avoided, if only in favour of the abridged version of the same author's History and Geography of Human Genes.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Not well-written, not worth buying, Aug 28 2003

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Derek Law (Shanghai, China) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Genes, Peoples, and Languages (Paperback)

Granted, the author is a respectable scholar in historical genetics. And the topic is interesting. However, this book is poorly written:

1) Translation is generally sloppy. The English text is often funny, e.g. not sure which nouns a dangling clause actually refer to in running sentences. Either the original text is sloppy, or the translation is, or both.

2) Lack of information. Not a lot of actual scientific info is presented. E.g. Maps for principal component analysis for Asia genes would be of interest I think

3) Big gaps in the whole picture: the origins of both Chinese and Indians are poorly explained. It might reflect low level of scientific research in those countries; but from the writing itself, it seems the author does not really care about these people which account for ~45% of the world's population; at the same time, the author keeps pointing out that the Basques are unique.

4) Putting my Chinese head on here:
The language family that includes Na-Dene (in N. America), Caucasian (mainly Georgian), and Sino-Tibetan languages is called the 'Dene-Caucasian' family. I just can't help wondering how the scientific community name things. How can the Chinese language, with at least 800MM native speakers, not part of the name of the language family? It is probably not the author's fault, but as a founding scientist in the inquiry of human origins from genetic & linguistic point of view, the author has some responsibity for the bias I think.

5) Is the scientific evidence robust? In the early section on genetic mapping, each of the dots showing 'races' such as 'Basques', 'South Chinese', 'Dravidians', etc. are defined using considerations in 'location and languages' of the human samples. Makes me wonder whether the whole correlation between races and languages is just a convoluted tautology.

6) Lack of "so what". The book has no thesis. On this, Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs & Steel written in 1998 is a much more interesting read, using mostly the same pool of literature.

My advice: save the money, buy something else!

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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Much information, but little detail. Disappointing.
Perhaps I was hoping for too much from this book, in which Prof. Cavalli-Sforza attempts to present the current state of knowledge about the prehistory and orgins of all of the... Read more

Published on Jan 29 2003 by Vorthog

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it and use it right away in your daily life.
This is the type of book you don't want to stop reading. After reading, you jump to the site again to see what else the author made in order to buy it. Read more