Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Cavalli-Sforza, October 2010. | |
| Born | (1922-01-25)25 January 1922 |
| Died | 31 August 2018(2018-08-31) (aged 96) |
| Education | Ghislieri College, Pavia,University of Pavia (M.D. 1944) |
| Awards | Weldon Memorial Prize(1978) Balzan Prize(1999) Mendel Medal(2002) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Genetics |
| Institutions | Cambridge University,University of Pavia,Stanford University |
| Academic advisors | Ronald A. Fisher |
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (pronounced[luˈiːdʒiˈluːkakaˈvalliˈsfɔrtsa]; 25 January 1922 – 31 August 2018) was an Italian geneticist. He was apopulation geneticist who taught at theUniversity of Parma, theUniversity of Pavia and then atStanford University.
Cavalli-Sforza enteredGhislieri College in Pavia in 1939 and he received hisM.D. from theUniversity of Pavia in 1944.[1] In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at the Department of Genetics,Cambridge University by the statistician and evolutionary biologistRonald A. Fisher in the field ofE. coli genetics.[2] In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy (Parma, andPavia) before taking up a professorship atStanford in 1970. He remained at Stanford until he retired in 1992.[3]
In 1999 he won theBalzan Prize for the Science of human origins. He has been a member of thePontifical Academy of Sciences since 1994. In 1992 he was elected Foreign Member of theRoyal Society of London.[2] He was awarded the Telesio-Galilei Academy Award in 2011 for Biology.
Cavalli-Sforza initiated a new field of research by combining the concrete findings of demography with a newly available analysis ofblood groups in an actual human population. He also studied the connections betweenmigration patterns and blood groups.[4]
Writing in the mid-1960s withA.W.F. Edwards, another genetics student ofRonald A. Fisher, Cavalli-Sforza pioneered statistical methods for estimatingevolutionary trees (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 andIan 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 withMarcus Feldman and others, initiated the sub-discipline ofcultural anthropology known alternatively ascoevolution,gene-culture coevolution,cultural transmission theory ordual inheritance theory. The publicationCultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981) made use of models from population genetics and infectious disease epidemiology to investigate the transmission ofculturally 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 linguistsMerritt Ruhlen andJoseph Greenberg about language "superfamilies". The hypothesized superfamilies are controversial among other linguists.[7]
Cavalli-Sforza has summed up his work for laymen in five topics covered inGenes, Peoples, and Languages.[8] According to an article published inThe 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'sThe History and Geography of Human Genes[11] (1994 with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza) is a standard reference onhuman genetic variation. Cavalli-Sforza also wroteThe Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (together with his son Francesco).
Earlier, in the 1970s, he andWalter 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.
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]
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.
