Interview of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Description: Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (born January 25, 1922) is an American-Italian population geneticist born in Genoa, who has been a professor at Stanford University since 1970 (now emeritus).

One of the more distinguished geneticists of the 20th century, he has summed up his work for laymen under five topics covered in Genes, Peoples, and Languages (2000). Physiologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond praised the work for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races." 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 Human Genome Survey, 1 July 2000, pg. 11)

Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes (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 (with his son Francesco).

Once the genetic structure of inheritance had been made plain, Cavalli-Sforza was one of the first scientists to ask whether the genes of modern populations might contain an inherited historical record of the human species. The study of demographics was already well-established, based on linguistic, cultural, and archaeological clues, but it had become overlaid with nationalist and racist ideologies. 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.

Cavalli-Sforza has studied the connections between migration patterns and blood groups.

His papers in the mid-1960s with Anthony Edwards pioneered statistical methods for reconstructing evolutionary trees (phylogenies). They introduced the first parsimony method, which searched for the tree that connected the populations with the least change in gene frequencies.[citation needed] They also were first to use maximum likelihood methods to estimate phylogenies. They had an early distance matrix method as well. In effect, their work in 1963-1964 introduced two of the three major numerical methods for reconstructing phylogenies, with distance matrix methods having also been introduced by Walter Fitch.[citation needed] Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza were always concerned with 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. Cavalli-Sforza has been concerned with 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 Marcus Feldman, initiated the sub-discipline of cultural anthropology known alternatively as coevolution, gene-culture coevolution, cultural transmission theory or dual inheritance theory. The seminal publication Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981) made use of models from population genetics 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 received his M.D. from the University of Pavia in 1944. His post-war studies at Cambridge in the area of bacterial genetics were followed by years of teaching in northern Italy, in Milan, Parma, and Pavia, and a move in 1970 to Stanford, where he found the intellectual culture more open-ended and cooperative, and where he has remained.

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Luca_Cavalli-Sforza)