Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
The Golden Phonebook
By Jared Diamond
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Translated from the Italian by Mark Seielstad
North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 227 pp., $24.00
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's latest book summarizes the life work of this fascinating polymath, who for the last fifty-five years has been developing ingenious methods to understand the history of everybody. I first encountered his methods by chance thirteen years ago while I was browsing my weekly copy of the international scientific journal Nature. Virtually all of the journal's articles were written in technical language incomprehensible to laypeople, and indeed to most scientists. There were studies of the high-Tc superconductor YBa2Cu3O7_s, a c-erb-A binding site, copia element genome reshuffling, corticofugal feedback, and other things that I had never heard of in my career as a scientist.
Review, 4048 words
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