Aretha Franklin, John McCain, Luca Cavalli-Sforza. They always go in threes.

I love Aretha. Got nothing to say about her.

John McCain I’m a little sick of. He was definitely a “flawed human” and will be remembered primarily for his flaws, which is probably better than being remembered for his political ideologies and for his complicity in producing the present political situation. He’s probably really only a great statesman in nostalgic comparison to the current administration.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza raises a similar question about the relative value of the flaws that compose our overall assessment of the scientist.  On this side of the ledger, a brilliant population geneticist who literally wrote the book on the subject.  Yup, even once signed my copy of Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer.

And on that side of the ledger, a scientist who felt that ethics were obstacles, and maintained that the interests of the people whose blood he craved were anti-science, and thus irrelevant.

Gregor Mendel with just a dash of Mengele. (Godwin’s Law is notoriously hard to transcend in conversations about bioethics, isn’t it?)  But I suppose that’s the big question: How much pollution, and of what sort,  does it take to go from “flawed human” to “flaw in a human form”?

How does Cavalli’s bioethics flaw stack up against Paul Kammerer’s data falsification or Francisco Ayala’s sexual harassment? Discuss amongst yourselves.  

There was also that little problem of Cavalli's insistence that "race doesn't exist" while simultaneously reifying it by color-coding the indigenous inhabitants of the continents.  Same intellectual flaw as Linnaeus, but higher tech.

In the meantime, here is a review I wrote of a flawed biography of Cavalli a few years ago.  It originally appeared in  the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12:1001-1002 (2006).

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 had 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.

   In the 1960s Cavalli-Sforza began to study the

genetics of African pygmies, probably inspired

by James Neel’s work on Amazonians. His early

work involved applying multivariate statistical

techniques to genetic data from human

populations to see who was more closely related

to whom (assuming that genetic distance was

proportional to time since splitting; that splitting

was all that populations did; and that culturally

defined human groups could unproblematically

be considered as natural taxa); later he began to

model the transmission of ideas from person to

person (assuming they stay reasonably intact

and do not mean different things to different

people in different contexts); and finally he

dreamed up a big science project for human

population genetics – the Human Genome

Diversity Project (HGDP) – which ultimately

failed for its insufficient attention to issues in the

relevant cognate fields, notably anthropology

and bioethics.

   Cavalli-Sforza has been a grand dilettante,

in all the senses of that word, over his entire

professional life. He visits Central Africa as an

explorer and studies its pygmies as a geneticist,

not as an anthropologist. He reconstructs the

Neolithic as an antiquarian, not as an

archaeologist. He models cultural processes as a

statistician, not as an ethnologist. In all of these

cases, Cavalli’s work has been high-profile but

low-impact in anthropology. Does this require

an explanation, or is it simply to be expected,

like the work of a spectrum of anthropological

dilettantes, from Sir Grafton Elliot Smith through

Thor Heyerdahl, Robert Ardrey, and Erich von

Däniken, and right on up to Richard Dawkins

and Jared Diamond?

   Consistently opposing scientific racism,

Cavalli-Sforza has nevertheless never quite

understood the fundamental issues that

ultimately undid his HGDP and which have

recently been admirably analysed by Jenny

Reardon in Race to the finish (2005). He still

regrets his opponents’ politicizing the scientific

project – as if the programme to take, store, and

study the blood of 700 groups of native peoples

(which needs to be done before they go extinct,

he constantly reminded us) did not constitute an

overtly political act.

   Significantly, no great burst of insights or

discoveries have followed Cavalli-Sforza’s work in

anthropology, as it followed, say, the physicists’

early forays into molecular genetics. If we are to

believe the authors, the explanation lies in

American anthropology’s recent infatuation with

postmodernism, and its stand against science. In

lieu of a relevant citation, they provide an

anecdote: at the American Anthropological

Association meetings in New Orleans a few years

ago, a sharp spike in submissions led to an

unprecedented rejection rate of sessions and

abstracts. The authors of some of the rejected

papers decided (rather unscientifically) that this

was an expression of the well-known (or

perhaps widely imagined) hostility of American

anthropology to science, and stormed off to

found their own society and have their own

meeting. But I was there, and that episode

was never about ‘science’ at all; it was about

power and paranoia and too many submitted

abstracts.

   In fact, I have always thought that the root

of Cavalli-Sforza’s failure to connect with the

broader anthropological community is simply

that most anthropologists simply do not know

how seriously to take research that can contrast

the DNA of 64 samples of ‘Chinese ... living in

the San Francisco Bay Area’, 94 samples from

‘two groups of African pygmies’, and 110

samples from ‘individuals of European origin

from ongoing studies in our laboratories or

reported in the literature’, and conclude

sweepingly that ‘ancestral Europeans are

estimated to be an admixture of 65% ancestral

Chinese and 35% ancestral Africans’ (Proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 88:

839, 1991). However sophisticated the statistics,

they simply cannot transcend the limitations of

unsophisticated epistemologies.

   More of a testimonial than a critical

intellectual biography, then, the book resists

engaging with anyone who has had anything

critical to say about any aspect of Cavalli-Sforza’s

oeuvre: Robert Sokal, for example, who

contradicted Cavalli’s interpretation of European

prehistory; Rebecca Cann, whose genetic data

suggested a very different global prehistory than

Cavalli’s; Debra Harry, an American Indian

activist who contradicted the promises and

predictions of Cavalli’s HGDP; Bryan Sykes, who

contradicted Cavalli’s ‘wave of advance’ model;

Masatoshi Nei, who applied a different statistical

technique than Cavalli to global allele

frequencies and got a different phylogenetic tree

and different branching dates; Ranajit

Chakraborty, who raised questions early on

about the HGDP’s navigation of a cultural and

political minefield in the large-scale collection of

native blood, and was quickly dropped from its

inner circle; or the numerous archaeologists

(pace Lord Renfrew) who have been critical of

Cavalli’s work on the spread of agriculture, and

the tenuous relationship between cryptic genetic

patterns and ethnohistory.

   Very oddly, the influential Harvard geneticist

Richard Lewontin’s famous 1972 ‘apportionment

of human diversity’ is even assigned to Cavalli,

and Lewontin himself becomes just ‘another

researcher (who confirmed Cavalli’s observation)

[and] did make a big deal out of this finding six

years later’ (p. 196). The only sense I can make

of the statement is that it may result from

Lewontin’s recently televised comment, ‘If I were

a South American Indian, I wouldn’t have let

them take my blood’ (www.pbs.org/race),

which may have put him in the ‘enemy camp’, if

one sees the community of science in a

sufficiently Manichaean fashion.

   All of which is not to say that Cavalli-Sforza

does not deserve the testimonial; only that this

biography seems to replicate the very criticism

that one could reasonably level at the

anthropological corpus of its subject: an

uncritical and cavalier approach to history, a lot

of bluster, and rather too little reflection.

Jonathan Marks University of North Carolina

at Charlotte

Rest in Peace, Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 

Seriously, please don't rise from the grave and become the vampire geneticist that the Musée de l'Homme warned us about a few years ago, because unfortunately you were precisely the one they had in mind.