A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

• Published in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 12; no. 4; pp. 1001 - 1002
• Main Author: Marks, Jonathan
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London Blackwell Publishers 01.12.2006; John Wiley & Sons, Inc; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Biographies; Cultural anthropology; Genetics; Human evolution; Nonfiction; Population
• ISSN: 1359-0987; 1467-9655
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00372_40.x

STONE, LINDA & PAUL F. LURQUIN. A genetic and cultural odyssey: the life and work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. xxi, 227 pp., maps, figs, illus., bibliogr. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005. £29.50 (cloth) This book attempts an intellectual biography of the renowned and controversial Stanford geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza. There have been many earlier attempts to use genetic data to study human microevolution, with varying degrees of success (see, e.g., Man 28: 153 and 28: 171, 1928); many attempts to model cultural evolution; many retrievals of blood samples as objects from the field; and certainly many attempts to identify ethnohistoric events in genetic patterns. This book, however, never actually tells us what made Cavalli's work necessarily better; it unfortunately has little interest in situating Cavalli's work within the history of human genetics, or of genetic-based anthropology.