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The Great Human Diasporas by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza

There are many excellent popular science books on the subject of evolution and natural selection. Most of them pick examples that are clear-cut and easy to transmit in a pedagogical sense, avoiding the evolution of humans and the issues of similarity and dissimilarity between the various human races. In the first five chapters, the authors pursue answers to the following questions:

• How different are humans from other animals?
• What accounts for the differences between humans of different races?
• Why do scientists claim that we all come from Africa?
• Are there any beneficial mutations? (The answer is yes, and the book gives many excellent examples.)
• Can all humans trace our ancestry back to a single person? (the answer is surprising and complicated to understand)

This book answers all of these questions and more. You might find answers to some of these questions in other books as well, but for people interested in what evolution has to say about humans, this book is the most readable resource that I've found.

The primary author of this book is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who is an emeritus professor of genetics at Stanford University and this book is mostly a chronicle of his contributions to the field of genetics and how he used these tools to address questions about human origins and diversity.

The first five chapters deal with the author's main strength in the use of genetic drift in order to find answers about the movement of humans out of Africa and in other parts of the world. In chapter 6, the authors use archeology and in chapter 7, they use linguistics to show that these related fields concur with the genetic studies and importantly, do not contradict them. The facts in chapter 7 are a bit dated since the publication of this book and there are many recent books that give an updated picture of the evolution of language (see, for instance, "The Origins of Life" (From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language) by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathm\'ary).

In chapter 9 and in the postscript, the authors take on the use of genetics to prove that some races are inherently more intelligent than others and thoroughly debunk these approaches. In chapter 10, however, is the weakest chapter in the book where the authors simply descend into preaching and philosophy of life discussions.

One unfortunate thing about this book is the large number of typographical errors that have been carelessly allowed to remain in the final published version. The publisher should be ashamed that they did not proof-read this document more carefully.

%T The Great Human Diasporas
%T :The History of Diversity and Evolution
%A Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
%A Francesco Cavalli-Sforza
%A :translated from the Italian by Sarah Thorne
%I Perseus Books
%D 1995
%D :First Italian Edition, 1993
%G ISBN: 0201442310 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0201407558 (hc)
%P 300
%K science, evolution

Date written: 2000/05/21