Cavalli-Sforza

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 A.W.F. Edwards, another genetics student of Ronald A. Fisher, Cavalli-Sforza pioneered statistical methods for estimating evolutionary trees (phylogenies). 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.