Genes, Peoples, and Languages

This is an excellent and easy to read book about the fascinating analysis of the heritage of mankind. The author has developed an extensive multidisciplinary approach that includes: a) archeology, b) history, c) genetics, d) linguistics, and e) mathematics.Although the author never stresses mathematics as a key discipline to analyze mankind heritage, his work relied on Principal Component Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, Cluster Analysis, Logistic Regression, and Hypothesis Testing. Thus, the readers familiar with these statistical methods will enjoy reading this book as a fascinating social science application of such methods.You certainly don't have to be a mathematician or a scientist to enjoy this book. The author has clearly written it as an introduction to this field aimed at the layperson.You will learn many fascinating concepts. One of those, is that the history of genes, cultures, and languages converge. In essence, they all influence each other back and forth. It is somehow hard to tell what is the main driver of overall changes in population. You run into many Nature or Nurture arguments. Continuing along the same line, he refers to other scientific works explaining the difference in IQ between individuals. Well, it is 1/3 due to heredity (nature); 1/3 due to cultural transmission (nurture); and 1/3 due to differences in personal experience (random). That is a pretty far cry from the 80% to 90% due to heredity that many people believe in. Also, natural evolution will or has already stopped according to the author. This is because medicine in industrialized societies has reduced the natural mortality rate down to almost zero among the pre-reproductive age set. In other words, medicine has eliminated the natural selection process as the survival rate mechanism of our specie. Some of us may have had concepts that humans eventually will evolve and look like aliens with extremely big heads (for superior intelligence and processing powers) and very skimpy bodies (since physical force is useless in an information age). Well, that's not going to happen.Throughout the book there are many very interesting graphs and maps that beautifully illustrate and clarify the concepts he introduces. The migration map on page 94, clearly outlines all the major original migrations out of Africa starting 100,000 years ago. On page 71, a world map showing the actual genetic distance between locations is fascinating too. On page 164, you can observe the best diagram of the Indo-European languages you will ever see. English is a Germanic language, as we all know. However, English predates German by several centuries!You can see how throughout his life, he must have been a fantastic university professor. About 6 months ago, I started reselling my books at Amazon Marketplace to cut my cost of reading. However, I am not reselling this one. I am keeping it as a reference. I anticipate there will be so many occasions when I will be glad I have kept it. The book has opened for me a new window of knowledge quest where so many of the social and quantitative sciences have converged into one to crack the mystery of the history of mankind. I hope this book will do for you, what it did for me.

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Genes, Peoples, and Languages is an excellent introduction to the study of how the human species has evolved and spread out of Africa. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza has pulled together years of his own research and synthesized it into an easy to read, and sometimes humorous, narrative that looks at the archaelogical, genetic and linguistic evidence for the spread of the human species from Africa to all points of the globe. A good addition to your library if you have enjoyed recent books by Spencer Wells and Bryan Sykes.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza'a book "Genes, Peoples, and Languages" is a fascinating history of humankind based on genetics, archeology, and linguistics. It addresses topics, which are of interest to many people who are starting to look into their genealogy in more global aspects. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza is a Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Stanford University. Together with Peter Underhill and Peter Oefner they have published extensively on detecting DNA variation in the Y chromosome and developing markers to study the evolution of modern humans.The book delves into genetics and linguistics issues, which are explained well despite the multidisciplinary approach. A must read for students in genetics, history, linguistiscs, and even genetic counseling.For readers who would like to utilize the knowledge of genetics in studying their distant family relationships as a supplement to this work, I would refer them to the "Ancestry DNA Toolbox" or the book "How to DNA test our family relationships?" available from amazon.com.

racism is the greatest tragedies of humanity. Figuratively speaking it symbolizes a vast ocean of tears and pain, instead of the joy of life and laughter. this book throws the final and decisive light on the futility of racism . as usual it is science that solves all of our problems.this book tells the exciting story of the research work in genetics and the combined applications of linguistics, paleo-meteorology to unravel our invaluable past and the factors that contributed to our change physically and the progress of our ideas.

It really stuck to me these 2:- the description of the concept of race, in his view the concept of race is obsolete and it just does not have any valuable meaning, and he explains you why in the first few chapters.- the ability by DNA study to generate a migration map (like the one detailed about Europe), just amazing how it matches maps drawn by archeologists or linguistic studies.Overall a very good look at what has been done on genetics study on people.

This book is one of the first books to arrange the human family based on the advances in DNA science which occurred in the 1990s and apply it to people and languages. A cheap shot here, as a result the information and interpretations are a bit dated, but much of the information is pretty insightful.This is a highly technical book. It is college level reading.

A wonderful book - this is a second copy for presentation to a friend

L'autore del libro è un grande. Libro dei più venduti. Ma l'acquisto fatto è scarso. Si vede come sia stato comprato su una bancarella e venduto a un prezzo carissimo.

Mr. Sforza's candor and expertise both come out clearly in almost all the chapters. However he has faltered while covering the complex subject of Indo- European language family. particularly on the Indian group- the easternmost among the IE speakers. However this has not in anyway affected the overall quality of this book as a seminal work on an integrated approach on the subject of 'human evolution'.

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. Natural Law, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality

It is a wonderful book. I want to read more of Sforza.