Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (; 25 January 1922 – 31 August 2018) was an Italian geneticist. He was a
population geneticist
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and between populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and popu ...
who taught at the
University of Parma, the
University of Pavia
The University of Pavia ( it, Università degli Studi di Pavia, UNIPV or ''Università di Pavia''; la, Alma Ticinensis Universitas) is a university located in Pavia, Lombardy, Italy. There was evidence of teaching as early as 1361, making it one ...
and then at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
.
Works
Schooling and positions
Cavalli-Sforza entered
Ghislieri College in Pavia in 1939 and he received his
M.D.
Doctor of Medicine (abbreviated M.D., from the Latin ''Medicinae Doctor'') is a medical degree, the meaning of which varies between different jurisdictions. In the United States, and some other countries, the M.D. denotes a professional degree. T ...
from the
University of Pavia
The University of Pavia ( it, Università degli Studi di Pavia, UNIPV or ''Università di Pavia''; la, Alma Ticinensis Universitas) is a university located in Pavia, Lombardy, Italy. There was evidence of teaching as early as 1361, making it one ...
in 1944. In 1949, he was appointed to a research post at the Department of Genetics,
Cambridge University
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
by the statistician and evolutionary biologist
Ronald A. Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...
in the field of ''
E. coli
''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus ''Escher ...
'' genetics.
In 1950, he left the University of Cambridge to teach in northern Italy (
Parma
Parma (; egl, Pärma, ) is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, Giuseppe Verdi, music, art, prosciutto (ham), Parmigiano-Reggiano, cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,292 ...
, and
Pavia
Pavia (, , , ; la, Ticinum; Medieval Latin: ) is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy in northern Italy, south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It has a population of c. 73,086. The city was the capit ...
) before taking up a professorship at
Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...
in 1970. He remained at Stanford until he retired in 1992.
In 1999 he won the
Balzan Prize
The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the br ...
for the Science of human origins. He has been a member of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences ( it, Pontificia accademia delle scienze, la, Pontificia Academia Scientiarum) is a scientific academy of the Vatican City, established in 1936 by Pope Pius XI. Its aim is to promote the progress of the math ...
since 1994. In 1992 he was elected Foreign Member of the
Royal Society of London
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
.
He was awarded the Telesio-Galilei Academy Award in 2011 for Biology.
Specific contributions
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. He also studied the connections between
migration patterns and blood groups.
Writing in the mid-1960s with another genetics student of
Ronald A. Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...
,
Anthony W. F. Edwards, FRS, Cavalli-Sforza pioneered statistical methods for estimating
evolutionary trees (
phylogenies
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...
). 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 and
Ian Hacking
Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been ...
. 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 with
Marcus Feldman
Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, ...
and others, initiated the sub-discipline of
cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portma ...
known alternatively as
coevolution
In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well ...
,
gene-culture coevolution,
cultural transmission theory
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: gen ...
or
dual inheritance theory
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: gen ...
. The publication ''
Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach'' (1981) made use of models from population genetics and infectious disease epidemiology 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 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 linguists
Merritt Ruhlen and
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
about language "superfamilies". The hypothesized superfamilies are controversial among other linguists.
Books
Cavalli-Sforza has summed up his work for laymen in five topics covered in ''Genes, Peoples, and Languages''. According to an article published in ''
The Economist
''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...
'', 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. In the book Cavalli-Sforza asserts that Europeans are, in their ancestry, about two-thirds Asian and one-third African.
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
Human genetic variation is the genetic differences in and among populations. There may be multiple variants of any given gene in the human population (alleles), a situation called polymorphism.
No two humans are genetically identical. Even m ...
. Cavalli-Sforza also wrote ''The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution'' (together with his son Francesco).
Earlier, in the 1970s, he and
Walter Bodmer
Sir Walter Fred Bodmer (born 10 January 1936) is a German-born British human geneticist.
Early life
Bodmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and went on to study the Mathematical Tripos at the Univ ...
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''. WHFreeman, 1971. The two, with Bodmer as first author, later wrote another more basic text, ''Genetics, Evolution, and Man'' WHFreeman, 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.
Death
Professor Cavalli-Sforza died on 31 August 2018, at the age of 96 at his home in Belluno, Italy. He is survived by three sons Matteo, Francesco and Luca Tommaso Cavalli-Sforza, and one daughter, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza.
References
Bibliography
*
Edwards, A.W.F., and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. 1964. Reconstruction of evolutionary trees. pp. 67–76 in ''Phenetic and Phylogenetic Classification'', ed. V. H. Heywood and J. McNeill. Systematics Association pub. no. 6, London.
* Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and
A.W.F. Edwards
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS (born 1935) is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called ...
. 1967. Phylogenetic analysis: models and estimation procedures. ''American Journal of Human Genetics'' 19:233–257.
* Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and W. F. Bodmer. 1971. ''The Genetics of Human Populations.'' W. H. Freeman, San Francisco (reprinted 1999 by Dover Publications).
* Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and M. Feldman. 1981. ''Cultural Transmission and Evolution.'' Princeton University Press, Princeton.
* Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., P. Menozzi, A. Piazza. 1994. ''The History and Geography of Human Genes.'' Princeton University Press, Princeton.
* Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza. 1995. ''The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution''. Addison-Wesley
* Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. 2000. ''Genes, Peoples, and Languages.'' North Point Press, New York.
* Cavalli Sforza, L. L, ''Il caso e la necessità – Ragioni e limiti della diversità genetica'', 2007, Di Renzo Editore, Roma
Films
*2003 – ''Journey of Man''
Further reading
* Book review by Olson of biography
A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza By L. Stone and P. F. Lurquin American Journal of Human Genetics, January 2006. Vol 78, issue 1, page 171
External links
*: Brief biography of Cavalli-Sforza
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza interview by Frederica Crivellaro, December 5th 2006 (video)* (''Annual Reviews'' interview video)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca
1922 births
2018 deaths
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Italian emigrants to the United States
Italian geneticists
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Members of the Lincean Academy
Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Physicians from Genoa
Population geneticists
Stanford University School of Medicine faculty
University of Pavia alumni
Archaeogeneticists