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.
