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

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 =)