Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza · INDEX Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, 1999 Balzan Prize for Science of...

International Balzan Foundation

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

1999 Balzan Prizefor Science of Human Origins

Excerpts from the publications:

Balzan Prizes 1999 (enlarged and revised edition, 2009)

Meeting the Challenges of the Future.A Discussion between “The Two Cultures”

(Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2003)

© 2009, Fondazione Internazionale Balzan, Milano [www.balzan.org]

Revised and enlarged excerpt published on the occasion

of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s lectio magistralis

held on 7 September 2009,

at the Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milano.

INDEX

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza,1999 Balzan Prize for Science of Human OriginsMotivation for the Prize and laudatio 5

Acceptance Speech 6

A Comprehensive Outline of My Research 11

The Developments of My Research after the Balzan Prize (1999-2009) 25

Are there Limits to Knowledge? 29

Biographical and bibliographical data 36

International Balzan Foundation 41

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza,1999 Balzan Prize for Science of Human Origins

Motivation of the Prize and laudatio

For his comprehensive work on human evolution by integrating genetic andcultural features.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is the world’s expert on human genetic diversity andwhat it tells us about the phylogenetic tree of human populations.

He realised that an understanding of the evolution of mankind requires theknowledge of both genetic mechanisms and cultural, especially linguistic, fea-tures. By collecting genes from a great number of different populations and test-ing more than a hundred different alleles, as well as by analysing historical, de-mographic, linguistic, etc. data, he was able to reconstruct the origin of ancientmigration, creating a model of diffusion of culture in the Neolithic Age.

In his comprehensive works, his genetic investigations of primitive populations,especially pygmies of Africa (one of the few remaining groups of hunters-gath-erers), played an important role.

Also, the studies of the genetic consequences of technological development,particularly the spread of agriculture from its area of origin, the Middle-East, toEurope, were exemplary. All this, in combination with archaeological data, al-lowed the reconstruction of a complete tree of human descent, in which genesand languages go hand in hand, demonstrating that genetic and cultural dataconverge in furnishing a convincing explanation of human evolution.

In summing up, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has created a most comprehensivesynthesis on the differentiation of populations by integrating various fields of re-search and providing convincing evidence for genetic and cultural co-evolution.


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Acceptance SpeechBerne - 16 November, 1999

Mrs. President of the Swiss Confederation,Members of the Balzan Foundation,Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to begin by thanking all my friends, and other people I do notknow, for proposing my name for the Balzan Prize; the Prize Committee, fortheir decision to act on the nomination; and above all, Eugenio Balzan and hisdaughter Angela Lina Balzan for their great generosity to science and culture.For about the last thirty years I have been living in the United States where I fre-quently have cause to admire the large-scale sponsorship that exists there - par-ticularly in the scientific field - and from which universities and cultural institu-tions benefit to a substantial extent. And I often think what a pity it is that thereis so little sponsorship in Italy. One of the reasons, of course, is that Italian leg-islation does not particularly encourage generosity of this type, except in specialcases, and then only recently. For this reason, the way of thinking that would en-courage very wealthy people in Italy to donate part of their money to the coun-try’s scientific, cultural and intellectual progress has never been able to establishitself there. However, I hope that the generosity of the Balzans will stimulatemore people in Italy to act in a similar manner. Based on what I know of the lifeand work of Eugenio Balzan and his daughter I feel enormous admiration forthem, and I am sure their memory will be held in great respect by the many oth-ers who have benefited from their generosity in the same way as I have. I wouldlike, once again, to express my deepest gratitude to those who decided to makethe award to myself and my field of learning.

The Balzan Prize has been awarded to me for my research into the origins ofman. The first ten years of my work as a researcher were devoted to the genet-ics of bacteria. However, in 1952, in Italy, I remembered the original teachingsof my great mentor in the field of genetics, Professor Adriano Buzzati-Traver-so. I owe to him my interest in the genetics of population and evolution, and Idecided to turn to this interest, and to concentrate it on humans. I feel thechoice of humans was dictated by my university studies, which I completed inmedicine.

1999 Balzan Prize for Science of Human Origins

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The study of evolution received a solid framework with the introduction of amathematical theory which was developed between 1918 and 1950 by threegreat scientists, Sir Ronald A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright. From1948 to 1950 I had the good fortune to work with Sir Ronald Fisher in Cam-bridge and derived great benefit from the relationship. Soon after this, I foundmyself asking the question as to whether it would be possible to reconstruct theevolutionary history of man by analysing the genetic differences between hu-mans living today. At that time there were not yet sufficient genetic populationdata. Knowledge was limited to the frequency distributions of certain bloodgroups, including the so-called ABO system used for blood transfusions, andthe famous rhesus system, as well as a few others. So until enough additional sci-entific knowledge could be collected to form a critical mass, the time could bedevoted to studying the theory of evolution. At that time, there were two fun-damentally different views as to the significance of the two major evolutionaryfactors: natural selection, on the one hand, and on the other, the effects ofchance due to the limited size of populations. This inevitably leads to fluctua-tions in the statistical frequency of occurrence of genetic characteristics, andtheir effects would accumulate over generations.

There was absolutely no doubt that natural selection played a central role. Theinfluence of chance had already been especially investigated by one of the fa-thers of the mathematical theory of evolution, Sewall Wright, but there were stillno usable empirical data. In passing, I am pleased to be able to remind you thatSewall Wright was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1984, having outlived the othertwo great scientists by a good many years. The other geneticist who has so farhad the honour of receiving this prize was John Maynard Smith, who was one ofthe most brilliant students of J. B. S. Haldane. So we have the interesting coin-cidence that of the three geneticists who have been awarded the Balzan Prizeuntil now, Sewall Wright was the last of the three great names who was still alive,and the other two were students of Haldane and Fisher.

I set out to solve the problem of how to measure the effects of chance on genet-ic variation by studying a population group in the neighbourhood of the Uni-versity of Parma where I was teaching in the nineteen-fifties. The idea was thatit should be easy to predict the effects of chance on the genetic differences be-tween the various villages, by using demographic data reconstructed on the ba-sis of church records of births, marriages and deaths going back to the year


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1500. This would permit us to calculate the genetic variation due to chance pre-dicted theoretically, and compare it with actual observations. This work turnedout successfully thanks to the assistance of two young students: the priest Anto-nio Moroni, and Franco Conterio, who are both now professors at Parma, theformer of ecology and the latter of anthropology.

By 1961 enough genetic data and observations from numerous populations inthe world had been collected, and it was possible to make a first analysis of theevolutionary tree of human populations. Anthony Edwards of Cambridge Uni-versity helped me to develop and use methods of reconstructing evolutionarytrees. We performed the necessary heavy calculations with the Olivetti Eleacomputer recently purchased by the University of Pavia, to which I had movedand where I was continuing my research work. We could thus reconstruct thefirst evolutionary tree of human populations, whose basic structure is still validtoday. Another working relationship very fruitful for me was with Sir WalterBodmer, also a student of R. A. Fisher, with whom we published two books onhuman population genetics. One of these, The Genetics of Human Populations,was re-printed only a few months ago by Dover Publications, almost thirty yearsafter it was first published.

In the second half of the nineteen-sixties I extended the model of genetic re-search I had developed on the population of Parma – as far as this was possible– to a group of hunters and gatherers in the African bush: the pygmies. This isone of the few population groups still alive today with a pre-agricultural econo-my similar to that of the Palaeolithic period. Professor Marcello Siniscalco, atthat time Professor at Leiden, was very helpful to me in carrying out in his lab-oratory the genetic analysis of countless blood samples I had collected in Africa.The contact with such a totally different culture stimulated me to embark on re-search into cultural evolution which I pursued after I moved to Stanford Uni-versity in 1971. I began by analysing archaeological data on the spread of agri-culture in Europe in the Neolithic period in collaboration with the archaeologistAlbert Ammerman. Thanks to a mathematical theory developed by R. A. Fisherin 1937 we were able to measure the rate at which agriculture spread, and showthat it was consistent with the hypothesis that it was the people themselves thatspread, and not the knowledge of agriculture. In other words, it was a diffusionof farmers, which we called demic, and not of farming. In the second half of thenineteen-seventies we carried out with Alberto Piazza and Paolo Menozzi, now


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Professors of Human Genetics in Turin, and Ecology in Parma, an analysis ofdata on gene frequencies in Europe. This work enabled us to confirm that ge-netic and archaeological data are closely correlated and consistent with the ideathat agriculture spread from the Middle East. This was the start of a 14-year-long working relationship with Menozzi and Piazza. Thanks to it we extendedthese studies of genetic geography and history to the rest of the world, in theway they are described in the book The History and Geography of Human Genespublished in 1994.

In the nineteen-eighties the first methods of genetic analysis were used whichmade it possible to carry out direct investigations on DNA. This revolutionarydevelopment expanded the bandwidth of genetic variation from a few hundredgenes to several tens of thousands, and genetic analysis could be shifted down tothe smallest unit of DNA, the individual nucleotide. It also became possible touse new methods of collecting genetic data on significant factors in human evo-lutionary history, particularly on the spread of modern man beyond the areafrom which he originates: Africa. Four years ago, a researcher from my labora-tory, Peter Underhill, together with Peter Oefner, a colleague from Ron Davis’laboratory, invented a new and particularly efficient method of investigatingDNA differences. This made it possible to find many genetic variations in the Y-chromosome. For a number of reasons this chromosome turned out to be ex-tremely valuable, even though it had made practically no contribution to evolu-tionary research up to that time. Since then, however, we have entered a phaseof great activity and fascinating discoveries.

The explosive growth in knowledge in the last few years has also had an effecton certain socio-cultural fields of study such as linguistics and onomastics - thestudy of names. In connection with my studies of onomastics and blood rela-tionships I would like to acknowledge the valuable support of Professor Gian-na Zei of Pavia. We have observed a significant similarity between the develop-ment of language and of genes, which is in part due to common evolutionarymechanisms and historical expansionary processes of populations. With thestudies of the development of language I have had the assistance of JosephGreenberg and Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford, and Bill Wang of Berkeley. Theselatest studies result in part from thirty years of collaboration with ProfessorMarc Feldman of Stanford, with whom we developed a mathematical theory ofcultural heredity. Until now the studies of cultural evolution have not aroused


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much interest among cultural anthropologists, with one important exception:the joint research on the pygmies with Professor Barry Hewlett of WashingtonUniversity. The studies have, however, proved interesting to economists whofind the mathematical approach more appealing.

My research work has frequently led me into areas normally out of bounds tothe natural sciences, and it can therefore promote a greater interchange betweenthe “Two Cultures”. Multidisciplinarity is central to fields such as mine. On theother hand, science demands ever-increasing specialisation, because otherwisethere is the danger of superficiality. However, it is always possible to becomemultidisciplinary by seeking out good co-workers in other disciplines. I ampleased I have had the opportunity to mention the most important ones and tothank them. My research work would not have been possible without them.

LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI-SFORZA


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A Comprehensive Outline of My Research(1999 – revised July 2009)

by Luigi Luca Cavalli-SforzaProfessor Emeritus at the School of Medicine, Stanford University

In my thanks I have given a very preliminary history of my research on humanorigins, taking the pleasure of naming all the main collaborators who havehelped me. I now wish to give a summary of the main results.

Drift vs. natural selection as factors of evolution and the importance of de-mography

Jacques Monod published a great book called Chance and Necessity which, giv-en its contents, could also have been named with the less attractive, but moredescriptive title of “Mutation and Natural Selection”. In the book, chance washeld partly responsible for evolution because of the randomness of mutation,but in reality it plays an even greater role, because of random genetic drift, thatis the effect of statistical fluctuations of the frequencies of genes, due to popula-tion size, isolation and poverty of migratory exchanges. At the time I started myresearch, enthusiasts of selection tended to downplay the importance of drift.My early research proved that you can predict the extent and importance ofdrift by using demographic information of populations, especially their geo-graphic structure and reciprocal migrations, and that drift is far from negligible.It is clear that human evolution is extremely favorable for the study of drift, be-cause demography, which can predict it quantitatively, is especially easy to studyin humans. But demography is also the basis of natural selection, which is theoutcome of differential survival and reproduction. It is not surprising that Dar-win was greatly influenced by Malthus’ insight on the manner of demographicgrowth of human populations. It is now clear that the understanding of evolu-tion is largely based on the study of demography. In his famous book The Ge-netic Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher adopted Lotka’s equation express-ing the rate of population growth to define the method of measurement of“Darwinian fitness” in natural selection, that is, the hereditary capacity for indi-vidual adaptation in natural selection, and to use its individual variation to pre-dict the main aspects of evolution by natural selection.


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Thanks to the Japanese population geneticist Motoo Kimura, molecular genet-ics has played a key role for understanding the major influence of drift in gener-al evolution. Drift is important also when there is natural selection, but in its ab-sence – that is for “selectively neutral” traits – it is almost the only factor, withmutation and migration, of evolutionary change. Many genetic variants discov-ered at DNA level are selectively neutral or nearly so. Kimura introduced theidea of “survival of the luckiest” to emphasize the role of chance as a counter-point to natural selection, as defined by “survival of the fittest”.Population structure and migratory exchanges between populations are ex-tremely important for understanding human evolution. They are also beginningto play a major role in medical genetics, for a simple reason: it is becoming clearthat human population “isolates” are very common. These are populations whohave gone through a demographic bottleneck at some stage in their lifetime andhave had limited migratory exchange with their neighbors. They are stronglysubject to drift, and the result is that their genetic epidemiology is quite differ-ent from that of the general human population as a whole. Many hereditary dis-eases common elsewhere are rare or absent in some of these isolates, while oth-er genetic diseases rare or absent in the general population are common.Text-book examples of such population isolates are French Canadians, Afrikan-ers, Ashkenazi Jews, Sardinians and many other smaller populations like that ofthe island of Tristan da Cunha, and others. Most hereditary diseases like schizo-phrenia or allergies are due to many different genetic causes and are thereforedifficult to study in the general population, but responsible genes are easier toidentify in these isolates. In fact it is likely that a single gene is responsible for allof a given disease found in an isolated population, or at least it is much easier todissect, through the study of an isolated one, a complex causal genetic system ofdiseases or other rare traits.

Evolutionary trees

The first approach I tried for reconstructing the history of human evolution wasthe use of evolutionary trees. Their application relies on the principle that thefurther the separation of two populations, the greater is, in probability, the mag-nitude of the genetic difference between them. This requires measurement of aquantity we have called “genetic distance”. When one examines the genetic dis-tance between species which have been separated for very long times, tens orhundreds of millions of years, one usually examines one individual per species,


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and finds that species differ for many single genetic differences. The percentageof DNA units which happen to be different in two species is related, in a verysimple way, to their evolutionary time separation. But human populations livingtoday have been separated for a relatively short time. Archaeology shows thatmodern humans appeared only a little over one hundred thousand years ago, inAfrica, and spread first to Asia, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, andfrom South East Asia to Oceania between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. Europewas reached about 40,000 years ago from both West Asia and North Africa, andAmerica from Siberia beginning 15,000 years ago.Mutation first appears in one individual, and then it spreads to other individu-als only in successive generations, when the individual carrying the mutated typehas several progeny carrying the mutation, either because mutants are favoredby selection and survive easily or have more children, or they are favored bychance. It usually takes a great number of generations before the mutation isfound in many individuals, and even more for it to replace completely the orig-inal type. Thus between the first appearance of a mutation and the replacementof the original type there will usually elapse a very long time. During that periodthe mutant type is “polymorphic”, i.e. there coexist in the population both theoriginal (ancestral) type and the mutant one. There are extremely few mutationsthat have reached the whole of the human species after its origin in Africa.In fact, we established that, although the human population has enormous ge-netic variation between individuals, 85% of the total human variation is withinsingle populations, and only 15% between them. We therefore cannot use forthe comparison of different human populations the same measure of geneticdistance useful for comparing different living species, for which an individualfrom each species would suffice. For instance, we find that the RH negative typehas a frequency of 50% in some populations, e.g. in the Basque country, a low-er one in England (40%), and 0% in East Asia. Genetic replacement meanstransition from 0% to 100%. The difference between Basques and English peo-ple is only 50%-40% = 10% of a complete replacement, and that betweenBasques and East Asians 50% . We actually employ slightly more sophisticatedformulas to calculate the genetic distance between two populations, which is, onaverage, proportional to the time since the two were separated. It is also essen-tial to calculate the averages of many genes for these measurements to be valid.When chance is one of the main factors responsible for change, the only way toeliminate the uncertainty it causes is to apply the law of large numbers, that is,use a large number of genetic differences. However, even if we could confine


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ourselves to studying the differences due to natural selection, we must alwaystake the averages of many characteristics. The populations of which we can mostusefully study separation by means of evolutionary trees are those which aremost widely separated, and genetic separation is strictly proportional to geo-graphical separation. Geographically close populations are very similar to eachother, generally speaking, because migration is more frequent between neigh-bors. Husband and wife tend to be born at short distance from each other. Mi-gration acts as a genetic homogenizer and tends to suppress genetic differencescaused by natural selection or drift. But when two groups are located at a greatdistance, enough to repress genetic exchange between the original populationand the new colony, differentiation will begin and will continue at a more or lessconstant rate, largely dictated by drift, and, if there are important environmen-tal differences, by natural selection. For this reason, evolutionary trees of popu-lations enable us to reconstruct their history, and are in reasonable agreementwith archaeological observations. More recently, we reconstructed genetic trees of individuals, especially for ge-netic traits which are inherited through one parent only. These are based on mi-tochondrial DNA, which is transmitted through mothers only to all children,or on Y chromosomes DNA, transmitted only from fathers to sons. DNA se-quencences make it possible to reconstruct the genealogies of mutations thattook place over very long periods, and beautifully confirm the evolutionarytrees made on populations, while being much more detailed and significant. Inpractice, they reconstruct the individual genealogy starting from a single “Eve”(through mitochondrial DNA), or from a single “Adam” (through a Y chro-mosome) respectively, who lived between one hundred and two hundred thou-sand years ago, but not because there was ever a moment in which only onecouple or only one ancestor was alive. At the beginning of our species, therewas probably one tribe of about a thousand people who lived at some place inEastern Africa, but for statistical reasons, both for mitochondria and for Ychromosomes, there is only one ancestor common to all of the mitochondriaand to all of the Y chromosomes present today: it is the only one that has beenreproduced to this day; all the others have not had children, grandchildren orgreat-grandchildren who have survived until the present day. For those whothink that there was actually a time when only one pair of individuals lived, asthe Bible says, we must say that our genetic Adam and Eve lived in very sepa-rate times and perhaps places.


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Genetics and culture

I find it useful to call Culture the heritage of knowledge accumulating over gen-erations, or, we may also say, culture is what we learn from others and affects ourbehavior: it is a much more general definition than the one normally used for theword “culture” by daily newspapers, which seems to concern only films andnovels. Most animals have culture, though it is clear that humans are the mostcultural animals of all. Culture evolves according to rules which are similar tothose of biology, but the substrate is clearly very different, relying on neuronalstates and relationships, rather than on DNA structure. There are culturalchanges which are equivalent to genetic mutations, such as inventions or inno-vations, but they are not as random as biological mutations. On the contrary,they are often directed toward a specific aim. This is a major difference with bi-ological evolution. Another great difference is that transmission is not confinedto transmission from parents to children, but can take place, and does more of-ten take place, between unrelated individuals. This makes cultural change muchfaster than biological change. However, there are also cultural traits which are,in evolutionary terms, much more stable. They are often transmitted from par-ents to children (what we call “vertical” transmission), and therefore imitate tosome extent biological transmission, that is known to be very stable. Childrenare, to a certain extent malleable, but they also go through critical periods inwhich they are especially susceptible to learning specific things, e.g. their ownlanguage must be learned within the first three or four years of life. And the ma-jority of people have difficulty in learning foreign languages after adolescence.Most cultural transmission is, however, “horizontal”, i.e. not necessarily influ-enced by kinship or age difference between transmitter and transmittee. Thismakes the acquisition of cultural novelties potentially very fast, and thus fastcultural evolution favors assimilation.What is learnt is not always necessarily favorable to survival or reproduction.Nevertheless, one can consider culture as an adaptive mechanism that devel-oped out of the combined use of communication, observation of others, andlearning skills. It obviously relies on the presence of neural structures whichmake this possible. Cultural change is not necessarily good or bad, though itcontributes in a significant way to determining our behavior, and, therefore, issubject to natural selection. One can expect that this will continue to keep cul-tural change adaptive, on average, even though maladaptive cultural aberrationslike crime, drugs and the like are to some extent inevitable.


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There has been a tendency in some sociobiological circles and their descendantsto consider cultural traits as dominated by biology, but the reverse is becomingthe rule. There is unquestionably a range of new genetic traits which have beenintroduced as an answer to cultural changes. Most of them have to do with ac-quired cultural traits introduced by new diets or customs, like getting dressed.The expansion toward northern Asia would have been impossible withoutclothing. Whether clothing was determined by the previous loss of hairiness, orwhether it helped loss of hair is difficult to say, but it is likely that hair loss tookplace earliert and made clothing necessary. One may also venture that hair waslost because fire had become a major presence in human life, and hairiness isdangerous in proximity to fire. Another genetic change having specific racialconsequences is paleness of the skin. That skin became pale was largely a con-sequence of a cereal-based diet, which, in dark-skinned people, causes rickets atnorthern latitudes. Wheat does not contain vitamin D, but a chemical substancethat is its precursor, which can be converted into vitamin D only by an enzymepresent in the lower layers of the skin. This enzyme, however, must be activatedby ultraviolet rays, which are too scarce in Europe because of its high latitude.The melanin responsible for the dark color of the skin stops ultraviolet rays,whereas pale skin allows the formation of vitamin D in a diet based on cerealsand cancels out the highly harmful consequences of rickets.Another example of the biological consequences of cultural evolution is intoler-ance to milk (and tolerance to it). Practically all mammals lose the ability to uselactose after being weaned, but among many herding peoples, the custom ofdrinking milk among adults became widespread, even though this may give riseto serious cases of lactose intolerance. A mutation that arose among herders inthe Ural Mountains around 6000 years ago abolished the disappearance afterweaning of the enzyme that makes it possible to use lactose, and the carriers ofthis mutation are totally lactose tolerant. Today this mutation is found in 90-95% of Scandinavians, is very frequent in northern Europe, a little less in cen-tral Europe and present in 20-40% of southern Italy.

The heredity of acquired behavioral characteristics through cultural evolution isa reality that enables characteristics transmitted via cultural routes to overcomethe great slowness with which normally favorable biological characteristicsspread through populations: thanks to biological heredity alone. The spread oflactose tolerance is an example of one of the most rapid biological evolutions inhumans, though it was undoubtedly helped enormously by the spread of milk


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consumption, especially among adults, which came about through a Lamarckiantype of heredity (of acquired characteristics during lifetime). The genetic study ofhuman evolution has shown with extreme clarity that the genetic success of apopulation, as proved by its expansion in numbers and across vast regions, waslargely the result of major technological innovations in relatively recent times:food production (agriculture, stockbreeding and their various developments) ortransportation (cattle, horses, camels, lamas, boats, oceanic navigation), or mili-tary power (bronze, iron, cattle and horses, camels) and, in more recent times,communication (roads, and again the horse, the telephone, radio, television, andso on), mathematics (agronomy, geography, astronomy, computers), the experi-mental method (engineering, chemistry, modern physics). With the modern triumph of communication cultural evolution is becomingmore and more the directional force of human evolution, and genetic evolutionmay well end up be completely under its control. Even the evolution of animalsand plants is undergoing intense acceleration as a result of cultural evolution inhumans. The remote origins of the success of humans as a species lie in two in-novations which are partly biological, but perhaps in part also cultural. The firstis language, which certainly required a strong development of the essentialparts of our brain, and which was hence largely a biological evolution. Howev-er, once it became possible to use it, it developed enormous driving force. Theother was human ingeniousness, which brought about many cultural innova-tions, the usefulness – if not necessity – of which has been proved beyond adoubt. Unlike genetic innovations due to mutation, which are by chance, cul-tural innovations are responses to a necessity. However, they are not alwayswholly appropriate, and like all innovations, they may also have costs that areheavier than their benefits.

Racism

I do not like the word “race” because it corresponds to old subdivisions that areinconsistent with genetic reality and unjustifiable by a rational classification.Moreover, there is no real use for such classifications and, what is worse, thereis always an associated racist flavor. Darwin had already recognized the difficul-ty of a rational classification of races in what is an almost perfect continuum, andnoted the enormous variety of numbers and definitions of races, from two to al-most one hundred. The current trend toward increased admixture can onlymake the idea of race even less clear.


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It is important, however, to note that current classifications depend on externalappearance, which is due to very few genes (hereditary factors) affecting skin,hair and eye color. Body and face size and shape may involve a few more genesbut, like the former, are the result of an adaptation to climate (including diet andclothing, which obviously also depend to a large extent on climate and also onculture). Common belief in the “existence” of races must depend on uniformityof skin color in different environments: definitely dark in tropical climates,brown at some distance from the equator, light brown in southern Europe,reaching the highest degree of paleness in the southern Baltic. To a very super-ficial examination, races do exist, in the sense that some groups of individualsare distinguishable and relatively uniform in terms of a few superficial traits.However, the existence of “pure” races is pure myth, generated by the fact thatmost Europeans are pale, sub-Saharan Africans black, many Asians brown, anda few other traits may help to distinguish more finely the geographic origin of in-dividuals. There is no equal uniformity beneath the skin: genetic differencesamong populations or races, however defined, are small or trivial compared tothose few perspicuous characteristics that inevitably attract our attention. Belowthe superficially uniform veneer created mainly by the color of the skin, thereare no “pure races”. Moreover, cultural differences among ethnic groups haveoften been held to be of genetic origin, though the reality is that most of themdisappear after two or three generations of assimilation into another culture,and if some last longer it is because some cultural traits are more highly con-served than others. Distinguishing nature from culture is extremely difficult formost behavioral traits, but cultural differences are often strong in appearancethough only skin-deep when put to the test of time. Some who have studiedtwins have, I think, been betrayed by their enthusiasm for genetics, beginningwith the classical example of Sir Cyril Burt, whose aberrations have been ex-posed. I am not pressing for a blanket condemnation of all students of twins, butI think the marvel that some of them have expressed at the fact that a few iden-tical twins reared apart prefer the same brand of cigarettes should not be takenvery seriously – and in any event, even if there is something genetic about it,there are many cultural differences that we do not see in twins who grew up to-gether (and there are very few cases of twins separated at birth). Another mythwhich dominated nineteenth century Europe and continues in the present cen-tury is that interracial hybrids are inferior, and that race admixture is to beavoided at all costs. The degree of genetic differentiation in the human speciesis so small that it is impossible for racial admixture to be genetically dangerous.


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On the contrary, the exact opposite, the vigor of hybrids may be deemed prob-able. There are, in fact, a few recent examples of very successful interracial hy-brids. They cannot be too many, because there still is a real social handicap con-fronting interracial hybrids in most societies, which limits their numbers andsuccess. Revisiting the Italian translation of this text at a distance of ten years, in2009, I cannot refrain from making an addition: to note the great satisfaction atthe recent election of a North American who is a hybrid of the two most differ-ent races, and how important that can be for the future of mankind.I consider racism one of the scourges of humanity. There are very few social en-vironments from which it is absent, and racism is certainly not only a Europeanor white social disease. My beloved African Pygmies are considered animals bymost of their Bantu neighbors, who think themselves superior because of the su-periority of an agricultural economy, however primitive, compared with that ofhunter-gatherers. The Saami should not be called Lapps, as they usually are, be-cause the name “Lapps” means “no good” and they are thus called by theirproximate neighbors because they do not practice agriculture. I find that cul-ture, not genetics, is more useful in distinguishing people. And every culture hasmerits, but these give very different chances of economic and educational suc-cess. Is racism innate in humanity ? I do not know, but I believe a strong educa-tional effort to eradicate racism is one of the most urgent needs. It may be im-possible to totally eliminate it, but it should be possible the reduce thecriminality with which it is constantly associated.

Political difficulties encountered by genetics

There is today great disagreement on the practical applications of molecular ge-netics to plants and animals. It is a good thing that these discussions take place.Every innovation is associated with potential benefits and costs. The latter aremore difficult to evaluate in advance, leaving room for pessimists to overworry,and for optimists to be careless. It is a good thing that different countries takedifferent strategies, so that the overcautious can wait as long as they like, and theoverconfident take the loss, if there is one and teach others in the process.

The study of human evolution has had its share of political difficulties. This hascome from the religious attitudes of primitive cultures and from some politicalarenas. At the beginning the Human Genome Project in Washington avoidedthe study of variation, mostly, I believe, because it was felt that dealing with one


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single genome was already ambitious enough. The international branch of theHuman Genome Project (the Human Genome Organization, HUGO) helpedme to study human genetic variation. The Human Genetic Diversity Project(HGDP) – unrelated to the Human Genome project – has been the outcome.Its aim is that of accumulating samples of DNA from the human world popula-tion, make them available to research workers in human population genetics,and put their results into a data bank available to the research community.(Writing ten years later, in 2009, I can say that coordinated effort has broughtsubstantial advantages). It is a fact that new developments in medical geneticsmake this type of research very useful. Pharmaceutical and biotechnologiesfirms have promptly understood their interest in genetic variation and havestarted working on genetic isolates and patenting polymorphisms. Our work hasbeen made particularly difficult by totally unjustified attacks full of lies by a spe-cial-interest group, a Canadian NGO, which has an established network amongsome indigenous populations of America and Oceania. It accused the HumanGenome Diversity Project of being behind totally unrelated patenting efforts ofcell lines by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, of being interested in profitand consorting with pharmaceutical industries, and various other lies. The truthis that the HGDP is a non-profit institution, and has always been against patent-ing DNA.Fortunately several countries and regions, including the European Union, Chi-na, some Moslem countries and Israel have started efforts in the systematicstudy of human variation. The Human Genome Project has begun to reverse itspolicy of avoiding the study of human variation. One of the unsolved problems is that a few indigenous populations that are po-litically organized are asking for a share in the possible profits from research inethnic variation. This may be a reasonable request, especially considering thepoverty of indigenous peoples, but these profits are difficult to predict and as-certain, and can only come on a very long term basis from medical research,which is very expensive. Rumours have been spread by some journalists thatknowledge of ethnic variation could be used for new forms of biological warfaredirected against special ethnic groups. This is a hypothetical form of warfarevery unlikely to be ever possible or effective, given the extremely mixed andcomplex structure of human populations. We witness daily heinous examples ofethnic warfare very effectively delivered with conventional or even traditionalweapons, between peoples among whom there cannot exist any, or almost anygenetic difference, but only political or religious ones. Unfortunately there ex-


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ists already a very dangerous biological arsenal, but the weapons developed sofar have fortunately no connection whatsoever with ethnic differences.

The future of human genetics

There are a few signs of directions which human evolution may take. There hasbeen, especially in the last five hundred years, an increasing migration acrosscountries and continents, which has already had some effects in increasing over-all admixture. Le Comte de Gobineau, who feared that admixture would ruinthe qualities of human races (especially of the white race, of course), could bereassured today. There is absolutely no danger, and possibly even some advan-tage, from increased admixture. Human individual variation is the best insur-ance against future challenges from parasites or other environmental dangers,and the genetic structure of populations guarantees that this will not change.Global variation will not change, but the distribution of variation between andwithin continents or “races” may change, with a decrease in the variation be-tween, and an increase in that within populations. Today there is, however, amajor difference between the net reproductive rates of different countries andcontinents. Europeans grew in numbers in the last millennium but wentthrough a demographic transition in the last two centuries, which is almost com-pleted, and are practically not increasing any more in numbers, except throughimmigration. The rest of the world, with the exception of northern America andpart of Oceania is increasing at maximum rate. This is the result of the arrival inthe developing countries of Western hygiene and medicine, even if still very lim-ited. Unaccompanied by birth limitation, it is causing a very worrying jump inpopulation numbers. With white people of European origin being demograph-ically stationary and the rest of the world with an average darker skin multiply-ing actively, the consequence will be an average darkening of the skin at a worldlevel. This change may chagrin white racists, but is really not worrying from agenetic point of view.What is more worrying is that medicine has a dysgenic effect, because it has be-come successful in curing diseases which have a genetic component, and there-fore these diseases will increase in frequency in the future. In truth, there hasbeen very little progress in curing hardcore hereditary diseases. The main hopeseems to be mostly gene therapy, which is due in a not necessarily close future.Progress of medicine has been more common in surgical treatment of many dis-eases, and in that of infectious ones, where the genetic component is less dra-


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matic, though not absent. As diseases which will increase in frequency are thosewhich are curable, there will be no worsening of general health, but there will bean increase in the global cost of medical treatment, which will be compoundedwith the increase due to the greater expense of modern medical treatment, in-dependently of the augmented frequency of disease. This cost increase is alreadywrecking current systems of social medicine. A third cause of increase is the ex-tension of medical treatment to developing countries, which however is veryslow and in any event to be desired.

In the last century and in the first part of the present one there was great confi-dence in eugenics, a movement which recommended improvement of the hu-man species by encouraging the multiplication of people endowed with suc-cessful characters (positive eugenics), and discouraging that of antisocial andmedically unfit individuals (negative eugenics). Basically this was inspired by thepractice of animal and plant breeders, who try to improve breeds by artificial se-lection, i.e. the choice of the best reproducers. However, there are serious trapsin eugenic policies: it is very difficult to tell “good genes” from “bad genes”, oreven good people from bad people – even if, of course, some cases are clear. Ithas been noted that selecting against serious psychiatric diseases like schizo-phrenia and manic depressive psychosis might destroy major sources of enter-tainment and pleasure like the theater, literature, and the arts, given that there isa significant association between these diseases and artistic creativity. A verygood geneticist, H.J.Muller, gave involuntarily another famous example. He wasin favor of conserving sperm from famous people for insemination of femalevolunteers, and gave a list of examples of men whose sperm should be con-served for propagation of their genes. He was a communist and went to theUSSR before World War II in the hope of convincing the Soviet authorities totry his program. But he was not successful and, on his return to the free world,he decided to cancel Lenin and Stalin from his list of great men who should do-nate their sperm for his eugenic program. We can now predict the birth of children with major genetic diseases in time forearly and safe pregnancy interruption. This practice, which avoids many painsand expenses to families and potential patients of very serious diseases, has metwith considerable success even in traditionally Roman Catholic countries, wherereligious views are still contrary to it. There is often confusion between it andeugenics, but this practice is neither eugenic nor dysgenic. It does almost exact-ly what natural selection does, by removing from reproduction individuals who


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would not ordinarily reproduce. With very few exceptions, it simply removesthem before they are born, usually avoiding extreme pains to them and to theirrelatives. It therefore does not, in practice, change the genetic incidence of thedisease, but kills it before it appears, in the unborn.

Multidisciplinarity and historical studies

The research of human origins has made it useful or necessary to study parallelevents and phenomena in a number of related disciplines, ranging from geneticsto paleoanthropology, archaeology, ecology, history, demography, sociology, cul-tural and physical anthropology, linguistics, toponomastics and anthroponymy,and this list will probably increase in the future. This has been made possible bymany collaborators whom I have tried to thank in my acceptance speech. Thereare definite advantages in this multidisciplinarity. A major one is the intellectualpleasure of finding so many similarities between disparate fields of study, someof which belong traditionally to the two opposite sides of culture: science andthe humanities. The unity of scientific method comes out very clearly from suchan exercise. It is also clear that many basic paradigms, especially mathematicalones, are extremely useful in many different disciplines, including both sciencesand humanities, and are sufficiently few and simple that they can be easily ex-ported from one field to the other. The book The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow al-ready gave reasons for not maintaining the gap existing between the two cul-tures, but little has happened since it was published. There is also a specific advantage in multidisciplinarity when studying evolu-tion. Evolution, like all history, suffers from a major handicap: one cannot usethe experimental method, because one cannot hope to replicate history with theaim of verifying the causes. For this reason, some philosophers of science havedenied that the study of evolution is a science. But historical events have rarelyhad restricted meaning or influence. One finds again and again the same conse-quences of the same events in profoundly different things. To give an example,the history of the settlement of geographical areas by populations expanding de-mographically has often similar consequences in genetics and in linguistics, somuch so that their evolutionary trees are similar, in spite of the profound differ-ence of the physical substrate evolving in biology and language. There is muchfear among some scientists of the possible superficiality of conclusions drawn onthe basis of analogies between different sciences. But one of the great scientists,Darwin, noted, in chapter 14 of the Origin of Species (second edition), that if we


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knew the genealogical tree of humanity we could predict that of languages. Weare now very close to this aim. In reality, we have seen that he was right, even ifhe may have had too much faith in the idea. Many researchers have noted inde-pendently the similarities between the evolution of genes, of languages, and,more generally, of culture. Without the study of demography, the study of ge-netic evolution, especially of the human species, would be fruitless. One couldcontinue with these parallels, reciprocal interactions, and cross-fertilizations ofdifferent disciplines, but naturally, no two cases where the same model can ap-ply are truly identical. Analogies, metaphors, and models are powerful instru-ments for novel ideas, but critical thinking remains our best protection againstpossible superficiality of conclusions derived from them. Increase in knowledge demands today extreme specialization, but in my experi-ence the cooperation of scientists from different disciplines can give that degreeof generality without which research would be penalized. Multidisciplinarity isa major enrichment, especially in those sciences in which, as in history, repeti-tion of the experiment is impossible, and may provide a sort of analogue of it.


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The Developments of My Research after the Balzan Prize (1999-2009)

by Luigi Luca Cavalli-SforzaProfessor Emeritus at the School of Medicine, Stanford University

The Balzan Foundation has taken the kind initiative of republishing in Englishand Italian writings I had prepared for the Foundation on the occasion of re-ceiving the Balzan Prize (1999). My scientific activity has since continued and Ithought it useful to prepare a short update.In 1999 I was, (and had been since 1992, according to the rules then in force), aprofessor emeritus in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University Med-ical School, though I officially remained “active”, meaning that I kept the rightto maintain my laboratory so long as I had the necessary research funds. In theUSA the best known universities expect professors to finance their own re-search with funds from external foundations, which are much more numerousand active than in Italy.

In 1992 I began to spend half of my year in Italy to continue research I had nev-er fully abandoned, and also started some new projects. In the first of these Ibegan a collaboration with my son Francesco to write science textbooks forItalian secondary schools, which continues. Three scientific projects were ef-fectively started after the year 2000, even though they had been conceived ofand partly begun long before. One of these, called the Human Genome Diver-sity Panel (HGDP) is a collection of lymphocyte cell lines from more than a to-tal of 1000 individuals, belonging to 52 ethnic groups from the five continents,for obtaining DNA to distribute to non- commercial research laboratories – toavoid DNA patenting which would have ruined research. These laboratoriesmade an undertaking to make their results public in detail before publicationsusing them, in order to favor further research by laboratories of human popu-lation genetics, which are now numerous, from all over the world. This re-search needs a large number of data. The cell lines were collected with the helpof several researchers, mostly personal friends, and are housed in the ParisCEPH (Centre d’Etudes des Polymorphismes Humains) founded by JeanDausset, under the direction of Professor Howard Cann. The distribution ofDNAs to laboratories interested in analyzing them was begun in 2002, and to-


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day over 130 laboratories have received the DNA collection. The richest seriesof results was generated, on my proposal, by a group of Stanford researchersmostly from the Department of Genetics and made available on the Internet inSeptember 2007. The article analyzing them was published in “Science” inFebruary 2008 (J.Li et al.). The 948 unrelated individuals of the HGDP collec-tion were analyzed for 650,000 DNA nucleotides known to be most variable inhumans, with Illumina Microarray, and they are at the moment the largest setof data available on the genetic variation of any species. Its full statistical analy-sis of it will probably take several years. Apart from this experimental work,collaboration with Stanford is maintained especially with Professor MarcusFeldman from the Department of Biology at Stanford on cultural evolution, myother major field of interest.New activity in Italy includes two major projects, one of which is close to giv-ing its first results: the Italian Genome Project (PGI), which follows closely theHGDP model. We already have over 1000 samples of lymphocytes comingfrom a province for each Italian region, selected as representative of theprovince by anthroponymic methods, and some hundreds of cell lines pre-pared from them, designed to get a first analysis of the Italian populationgenome. The PGI samples come from blood donors of AVIS, the Italian Asso-ciation of Voluntary Blood Donors (more than a million members), naturally allconsenting and informed. BGT (Bio-Genomic Technology) is producing celllines. DNA analysis with over one million nucleotides (Illumina) is beginningnow. Results will be used for research on the genetics of the Italian human pop-ulation, but its major application will be in terms of the collaboration we canoffer to Italian medical geneticists who have started or are about to start inves-tigations in the genetic determination of diseases they are researching. Oncethis was done by comparing patients with their close and not so close healthyrelatives. Today it is believed that a more efficient method is that of comparingstatistically the DNA (today we say the genome) of a group of patients with agroup of “controls”, healthy people of the same ethnic origin. In spite of thevery scarce support offered in Italy by the government or wealthy people andfoundations there are a number of active medical geneticists. Perhaps it is rela-tively easier to find financial help for medical research: once this type of hu-manitarian investment went exclusively for increasing the chances of a donor togo to Paradise. Today medicine is clearly more efficient than it used to be andthis investment is split between a desire to go to Paradise and that which allowsto go there as late as possible.


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These projects are all slow: a second project had begun earlier, around 1995,and has therefore almost reached its conclusion. It is an encyclopedia called“Italian Culture”. I use the word “Culture” in the widest possible sense: every-thing that we learn at any age and from anybody. It is, in substance, the contri-bution to our personality that does not come from our genetic constitution(what we inherit with DNA), but that which comes from the environment inwhich we grew and continue to live, our socialization. From the maternal wombto what we learn from parents and relatives, teachers, schoolfellows, colleagues,friends and enemies, all those we encountered in our lives and who taught ussomething about real life, in writing, through words or examples, and via manyother modes. Today we can study our genetic constitution in depth, even thoughthings are not as simple as we hoped at first, and genetics can be more than plainDNA. And perhaps the contribution of genes and culture can be equally im-portant, or vary a lot in individual cases.I have tried to learn more about how we Italians are made, and why. I paid a lotof attention to history, which is always a great teacher (at the beginning, the ideawas to call the opus “History of Italian Culture”). Perhaps my curiosity wassharpened by having spent much time in other cultures, American, English,French and a little bit German. One of the reasons that impelled me was the dis-agreeable discovery that Italian-Americans are the Americans least interested intheir origin, at least in the US, and have perhaps the least national pride. Oneunderstands the reasons, remembering that they needed much courage to faceenormous difficulties in a new culture, in order to get away from a country thathad condemned them to hopeless poverty, leaving 80% of them illiterate.But also Italians who remained in Italy know little about their countrypeople.Superficially at least, they seem to be divided into two groups: a large one be-lieving they are better than everybody else, and an equally large one, also equal-ly wrong, believing we are worse than everybody else. This work tries to tell usobjectively who we were and who we became, with highs and lows, and tries toanswer many questions that one may ask oneself. It was possible to do it becauseafter many unsatisfactory trials I came across Vittorio Bo, who at the time was adirector at Einaudi publishing house and later founded Codice Edizioni, and hewas willing to take on himself a good share of the directing load. He also con-vinced UTET of Turin, a major publishing house with a great tradition, to ac-cept the challenge. When the work is finished it will consist of twelve large sizevolumes, the last two of which are a very detailed index. The contents of the tenvolumes of the text are: 1. Land and People, 2. Tongues and Languages, 3. City,


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Home, Landscape, 4. Economy and Communications, 5. Structure of society, 6.Food, Games, Holidays, Fashion, 7. Humanistic Culture, 8. Science and Tech-nology, 9. Music, Shows, Photography, Design, 10. Art and the Visual. Five vol-umes are already out and the remaining five should come out next year. The vol-umes are in large size, with paper of excellent quality that allows to enjoyentirely the great colors that only some Italian publishers can produce. As sci-entific director I am already fairly familiar with the contents, but I must confessthat this reading, the first in its final form, gives me extraordinary pleasure,which almost worries me because I am indulging in it so much that I am gettinglate with various urgent commitments.


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Are there Limits to Knowledge?

by Luigi Luca Cavalli-SforzaForMem RS, Geneticist, Stanford University

Balzan Symposium 2002MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF THE FUTURE

A Discussion between “The Two Cultures” Royal Society, London; 13 May 2002

On one hand, I resent even this question being asked. It looks like an attempt attrying to limit my freedom of inquiry. It reminds me of the Great Inquisition, thecondemnation of Galileo. Is someone trying to decide what I am allowed tolearn and what I should not even try to learn? In a totally different perspective,it reminds me of the irrepressible impression of ignorance which every honestscientist feels when comparing the extent of what we know and what we don’tknow in our own field of knowledge. On a less emotional footing, there is, ofcourse, Heisenberg’s principle of indetermination. But all the innumerable at-tempts at applying it out of context are probably unacceptable. Nevertheless,we might wonder how many other comparable principles exist in other fields,ones that we have violated out of ignorance. I find it more interesting, however,to take a wholly pragmatic approach, and ask: what are the practical limits toknowledge? Here I find many real limitations.I find at least three important limits to knowledge. The first and most seriousone is the ambiguity of language. Almost every word has, in most languages, anenormous variety of meanings. English probably has the greatest number ofwords of all languages. This would seem to guarantee that it is closer to an idealsituation, that there is only one meaning for each word, but the opposite is true.I know of no statistics, but I suspect that English also has the greatest numberof meanings for each word. We think we are clear when we explain things, andthat we understand what other people tell us. The expectation is usually correctin most real instances, but I suspect that it loses meaning when we approachphilosophy, where the use of words of a high degree of abstraction is commonand probably increasing. Examples are the verbs ’to be’, ’to exist’, ’to cause’,and substantives derived from them. It may be because of personal limitations


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that I often feel that I cannot comprehend what philosophers say, but it may al-so be that they often use words they do not define, which can be understood ina great number of different ways. The admiring listener or reader is prepared tounderstand, or thinks he understands. By contrast, the sceptic may have a men-tal block. Probably both are wrong, and we are all victims of ambiguity, which isvery difficult to avoid.The failure of most automatic translations is notoriously the consequence of am-biguity, which can be resolved (when that is possible) only by appropriate con-sideration of the context. There are many entertaining examples. A famous oneis the sentence ’Out of sight, out of mind’ which when translated from Englishinto Chinese and back from Chinese into English became ’invisible idiot’. Aprobable therapy for the frequent failure of machine translation will be the useof an intermediate language completely devoid of ambiguity. This may reduceerrors, especially for translation from this artificial language into a natural one,but translation into it from a natural language may always involve errors. A com-plete catalogue of idiomatic expressions in the language of origin could proba-bly help to avoid most mistakes, but it remains very likely that a translation freedof ambiguity will always be horrible. It is said that translations are like women:if they are faithful they cannot be beautiful, and if they are beautiful they cannotbe faithful. I apologize for an inexcusable macho joke.I would not have brought up the problems of automatic translation if I did notthink that lack of understanding, or the frequency of misunderstanding, areamong the major causes of unhappiness among people and even among nations.Communication is the greatest asset of humans compared with other species,but even in our species it is far from complete. Because of the great multiplicityof languages, the chance that two random individuals can understand each oth-er is very small. And the chance of real understanding, implying a good knowl-edge of a common language by both individuals, is much lower. However, mu-tual understanding is increasing on one hand, and on the other, automatictranslation of simple sentences is more and more able to be done. The cessationof misunderstanding at the higher levels of philosophical discussion is less like-ly to occur, but is also less necessary. Now I must ask the philosophers for for-giveness.

One limit to our knowledge which is most distressing, especially for my work, isthe impossibility of repeating history. I began my research as an experimenter,and I used to be convinced that science can lead to truth, because you can al-


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ways repeat an experiment and convince yourself, and others, that it is correct.But when I shifted to the study of human evolution, I was clearly trying to re-construct past history, and there is no chance of repeating it when we would liketo do so to solve problems that seem insoluble. There are, however, as Vico said,courses and recourses of history, so that there is a little room for using analogy,but it requires great caution. Another resource is more useful: interdisciplinaryresearch. By and large, for major historical events history must be only one ap-proach, and the same events may be traced by different routes from differentdisciplines, though there is always some shared ground, and synthesis is morepersuasive than any single story. Thus it has been very productive for the histo-ry of human expansions of the last 100,000 years to put together informationfrom many different disciplines: the genetics of living human populations, ar-chaeology, and a hybrid between them, archaeogenetics – an important part ofwhich is the study of fossil DNA – and even linguistics. It has been very gratify-ing to see how pieces from the various disciplines seem to be interwoven to-gether in a single mosaic. There is a mutual complementarity that makes inter-disciplinary research particularly useful. The same general picture of evolutionis obtained for the last 100,000 years from different sources of information. Inthe last few years, we have seen some aspects of cultural evolution, especially themost conservative traits like family and social structure, joining the band-wagon.Even the evolution of some bacteria and viruses common in modern humansseems to follow the routes of their long expansion from their place of origin inEast Africa some 100,000 years ago, first through all of Africa, and then, be-tween 40,000 and 60,000, to Asia by both a southern and a northern route, andfinally from Asia to the other three continents. Why is there this concordance?The explanation is simple: many of these traits, be they cultural like language, ormany of those familiar to cultural anthropologists, or parasitic diseases, are mostprobably transmitted not only by contact imitation, as in the accredited cultur-al route, but also, and sometimes predominantly, from parent to child, or moregenerally within the family. This is expected especially for traits acquired in theearliest years, a pattern well known to be true for mother tongues. As transmis-sion from parent to child (also called vertical) is the only way by which genes aretransmitted, it is not at all surprising that patterns of evolution determined byexpansions, followed by divisions and periods of independent evolution in dif-ferent territories, will be similar for elements that may have no mutual causal re-lations, like genes and languages or other cultural traits, but simply correlationsdue to a common general history of resettlement.


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Whether it is called inter-, multi-, or trans-disciplinary, collaboration, especiallythat between the two cultures, is contributing in an important way to our pres-ent understanding of modern human evolution. Each discipline can generateknowledge of different aspects of this process: archaeology can generate espe-cially information on dates, but also on demographic processes. Genetics has al-so contributed to understanding the routes and mechanisms of expansions, in-cluding dates, even if so far with large intervals of error. It will be possible todecrease error substantially in the future by a more organized approach to stud-ies of ethnic groups, especially if the numbers of individuals and of genes stud-ied are very substantially increased. A more systematic analysis of cultural andlinguistic diversity can help us to understand better the sometimes truly surpris-ing vagaries of cultural evolution. It is only a matter of adequate investment,which so far has been very modest. It is clear that this analysis also has the prom-ise of helping us to fight racist prejudice effectively. The mosaic of informationformed with pieces coming from different sciences, which usually fit together inremarkable ways, shows a multidisciplinary agreement that is perhaps the mostpleasant aspect of this research, and also generates the strongest support forconclusions. It supplies an alternative to the desirable, but impossible, experi-mental repetition of history.Nevertheless, there are examples of spontaneous repetitions of history which docontain some useful common information. In the past I have been especially in-terested in the mechanism of the spread of agriculture from its places of origin.About 10,000 years ago, Palaeolithic life came to a crisis in the areas with tem-perate climates where it had been most successful, like the Middle East andTurkey, China, and Mexico. The crisis may have been stimulated by a change ofclimate or by the foraging population (hunting, gathering, fishing) having cometoo close to saturation. Successful attempts were made in all these areas, proba-bly independently, to cultivate local crops, mostly cereals, and to domesticate lo-cal animals where possible. These innovations generated a new, food-producingeconomy which allowed new population growth and favoured expansion fromthe place of origin to neighbouring areas where this agropastoral economy couldflourish. A causal nexus may not be excluded, either: the idea may have trav-elled from one place to another on the back of some courageous traveller. Afterall, someone able to face the perils of the journey and of misunderstanding maymake on foot the tour of the world in a few years. Once, after I had lost my way,I came across a tent in which lived an Iranian family, a husband with his wife andtwo small children, and two goats, who had started out from Iran a year earlier


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and wanted to get to see the Atlantic Ocean. I did not ask why, but I can under-stand them: I, too, am motivated by very strong curiosity. However, the movefrom food gathering to food production, which started in very distant places ataround the same times, about ten thousand years ago, brought about an almostexponential growth in population to a thousandfold increase which is now near-ing its limits. Are we ready for a new crisis: expansion outside Earth, self-de-struction?

The spread of agriculture from its place of origin was very slow. P. Menozzi, A.Piazza and I have been able to calculate its rate fairly exactly in Europe, and itwas possible to explain it by the combination of two demographic phenomena,growth and emigration, to generate population expansion from the area of ori-gin. Population growth was made possible by the increased availability of food,and as soon as it reached a new level of saturation it caused geographic expan-sion by migration, mostly of family groups or small social nuclei, to neighbour-ing areas offering potentially fertile soil. In research in collaboration with ar-chaeologist Albert Ammerman, we suggested the name of demic diffusion forthis process. It took some time to have this hypothesis accepted by archaeolo-gists, especially in northern Europe and the USA, because it was totally oppositeto the trend of thought that had developed there, in opposition to ideas popularin the nineteen-twenties. Clarke, who was mostly responsible for these ideas, ex-plained every archaeological variation by the movement of people. When, afterthe war, the pendulum swung to the opposite pole, the hypothesis of migrationdisappeared. Only traders moved, carrying with them products that have beenfound and used by archaeologists to describe such expansions : a fashion nowcalled indigenism. But the idea that it was really the growth and migration offarmers who brought farming around the nuclear area has been tested by show-ing that there are gradients of genes of Middle Eastern origin across Europe,which follow rather precisely the archaeological paths of the penetration offarming. Dates and rates of expansion are also in agreement with genetic anddemographic calculations. The observed genetic gradient could have formedonly if, in addition to the demic diffusion of farmers, there was adoption offarming by local hunter-gatherers, either by marriage or by acculturation.Cosmologists and astronomers are also afflicted by the problem of the history ofthe world being unable to be repeated. One advantage they have is that they canmake much more precise measurements of their observations, and theoreticalpredictions to test their hypotheses. Biology is beginning to follow this example.


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Genetics is a quantitative science, though errors in measurements and predic-tions are usually much greater. But in the study of human evolution we are be-ginning to have reasonable measurements, for instance, of the rates of expan-sions. [Ten years on, reading this after it was published and translated intoItalian, genome analysis has led to the complete sequencing of DNA, resultingin a level of precision which is one thousand times greater, and precision is in-creasing.] In Europe, the average rate of the advance of farming was of the or-der of one kilometre a year, somewhat faster in the expansion from its area oforigin in the Middle East westwards, via the Mediterranean, than towards thenorth-west, to Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and Central Europe. We have ap-proximate measurements of other rates. That of the Bantus , which started inCameroon about 3,000 years ago and ended around 300 years ago in SouthAfrica, where they met Boer farmers, was 50% faster on average (they were ableto make use of iron). The Malayo-Polynesian expansion originated in South-eastAsia – the precise area of origin is debated – and crossed the Pacific Ocean. Itreached Easter Island about 1,500 years ago, in many jumps from island to is-land, and was about five to six times faster. It also expanded towards the west,reaching Madagascar only slightly later. For earlier expansions we have only oneestimate of some precision: during the last glaciation, between 29,000 and13,000 years ago, the ice covered most of northern Europe and the populationretired into two non-communicating refuges: south-western France, and theBalkans and the Ukraine. At the end of the glaciation Palaeolithic hunters beganresettling the north, at a rate of about 0.7 kilometres a year. This rate must havebeen to some extent controlled by the rate at which ice withdrew. In general,rates of expansion are determined by an average (a geometric mean) of the rateof population growth and that of individual migration. The first extension ofHomo Sapiens from East Africa to South America took approximately 50,000years to cover 25,000 kilometers (0.5 km on average per year), though it is pos-sible that the settlement of South America by hunter-gatherers from Alaska toChile was much faster. The limit to the quality of such estimates is set by thequantity and quality of archaeological findings.

Thinking of the genetics of the future, a very serious limit is set by ethical andpractical considerations. Today we know about 10,000 genetic diseases. Theyare all Mendelian, that is, they follow Mendel’s laws for characters determinedby single genes; fortunately, they are very rare, as almost all are very serious. Themost important and common diseases, like arthritis, diabetes, hypertension,


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many immunological diseases, schizophrenia, manic-depressive syndrome, arevery poorly known. We are sure there is a genetic component, but there is po-tentially a multitude of genes involved in each one, as well as external factorsthat are difficult to pin down. Knowledge of the human genome will help, butthere is still much work to do. This ’polygenic or multifactorial inheritance’ canbe studied in animals, in which controlled crosses and experimental treatmentsunthinkable in humans are possible, so there is hope, and there has already beensome success in getting help from animals for solving human genetic problems.But there are serious ethical limits to understanding human physiology andpathology, caused by the unacceptability of almost all experimentation.

Even so, when I try to imagine what science and technology can do in the re-mote future, I find it very difficult to foresee serious limits to our knowledge. Allthe imaginations of Jules Verne have come true, plus many more. Perhaps what-ever limits we picture today will be food for laughter among our descendants.The most serious limit to growth is of another kind: will the world survive themachinations of a technologically very knowledgeable, very depressed Luddite?There is a finite probability, fortunately very small for the time being, that thismay cause the end of the only part of the universe where, as far as we know, sci-ence is being practised.


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Biographical and bibliographical data

LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI-SFORZA, born on 25 January 1922 in Genoa, is adual citizen of Italy and the United States. MD in Medicine and Surgery (1944)from the University of Pavia, and MA (1950) from the University of Cam-bridge, UK. Director of Research in Microbiology, Istituto Sieroterapico Mi-lanese, Milan (1950-1957); Lecturer in Genetics and in Statistics, Faculty ofSciences, University of Parma and University of Pavia (1957-1960); Professorof Genetics, University of Parma (1960-1962); Professor of Genetics and Di-rector of the Institute of Genetics, University of Pavia (1962-1970); at StanfordUniversity: Professor of Genetics (1970-1992), Chairman of the Department ofGenetics (1986-1990), and, at present, Professor Emeritus at the School ofMedicine (since 1992). He returned to settle permanently in Milan in Septem-ber 2008.

From among his many honours:

– Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica italiana (2000)– Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Huxley Lecture

in Anthropology, Londra (1972) – R.A. Fisher Memorial Lecture, Londra (1974) – Premio Ibico Reggino, Reggio Calabria (1976) – Weldon Medal in Biometry, University of Oxford (1978) – Premio Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Roma (1982) – Fifth International San Remo Prize for Human Genetics, Berlin (1986) – Allen Award in Human Genetics (American Society of Human Genetics,

1987) – Medaglia d’oro del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Italiano (1990) – International Catalonia Award (1992)– Fyssen International Award (1994)– Premio Nonino (1996) – Premio Chiron, Accademia Italiana di Medicina (1998)

– President of the Biometric Society (1967-1968) – Vice President of the International Congress of Genetics, Tokyo (1968) – Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

(1973) and of the Japanese Society of Human Genetics (1977)


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– Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (1978) – Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge UK (1982) – President of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989) – Membre associé du Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris (1990) – Socio Nazionale dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1991)– Foreign Member of the Royal Society, Londra (1992) – Doctor Honoris Causa of Columbia University, University of Cambridge and

of the Italian universities of Calabria, Bologna, Cagliari, Roma and Sassari.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is the author and co-author of many scientific booksand articles, as well as Popular Science publications.

Scientific books:

– La teoria dell’Urto e le Unità Biologiche Elementari (con A. Buzzati-Traver-so), 1948, Milano: Longanesi;

– Analisi Statistica per Medici e Biologi, 1961, prima edizione; 1993, terza edi-zione, Torino: Boringhieri;

– The Genetics of Human Populations (with W. Bodmer), 1971, San Francisco:Freeman, 1999, Mineola, N.Y., Dover Publications;

– Genetics, Evolution, and Man (with W. Bodmer), 1976, San Francisco: Free-man; edizione italiana Mondatori 1977;

– Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (with M.W.Feldman), 1981, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press;

– The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe (with A.Ammerman), 1984, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; edizione ital-iana Bollati Boringhieri;

– African Pygmies (ed.), 1986, Orlando, Florida: Academic Press; – History and Geography of Human Genes (with P. Menozzi e A. Piazza), 1994,

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; edizione italiana Adelphi 1997,2000;

– L’evoluzione della cultura, 2004, Milano: Codice edizioni. – Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy (with Antonio Moroni

and Gianna Zei), 2004, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.


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Scientific articles:

Among his over 500 scientific articles, some of the most recent are: – Cavalli-Sforza LL et al., 1988, Reconstruction of Human Evolution: Bringing

Together Genetic Archeologic and Linguistic Data. PNAS. 85:6002-6006; – Cavalli-Sforza LL et al., 1992, Coevolution of Genes and Languages Revisit-

ed. PNAS. 89:5620-4; Mountain JL et al., 1992, Evolution of Modern Humans: Evidence from Nu-clear DNA Polymorphisms. Philos Trans R Soc Lond Biol Sci. 337(1280):159-65;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL et al., 1993, Demic Expansions and Human Evolution. Sci-ence. 259:639-46; Zei et al., 1993, Barriers to Gene Flow Estimated by Surname Distribution inItaly. Ann Hum Genet. 57:123-40;

– Bowcock AM et al., 1994, High Resolution of Human Evolutionary Trees withPolymorphic Microsatellites. Nature. 368:455-7;

– Mountain JL e Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1994, Inference of Human Evolutionthrough Cladistic Analysis of Nuclear DNA Restriction Polymorphisms.PNAS. 91:6515-9;

– Piazza A et al., 1995, Genetics and the Origin of European Languages. PNAS.92:5836-40;

– Seielstad M et al., 1994, Construction of Human Y-chromosomal HaplotypesUsing a New Polymorphic A to G Transition. Hum Mol Genet. 3:2159-61;

– Mountain JL et al., 1995, Demographic History of India and mtDNA-se-quence Diversity. Am J Hum Genet. 56:979-92; Goldstein DB et al., 1995, Genetic Absolute Dating Based on Microsatellitesand the Origin of Modern Humans. PNAS. 92:6723-7;

– Underhill PA et al., 1996, A Pre-Columbian Y chromosome-specific Transitionand its Implications for Human Evolutionary History. PNAS. 93:196-200;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1997, Genetic and Cultural Diversity in Europe. J AnthrRes. 53:383-404;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1997, Genes, Peoples, and Languages. Proc Natl Acad SciUSA. 94:7719-24;

– Barbujani AE et al., 1997, Apportionment of Human DNA Diversity. ProcNatl Acad Sci USA. 94:4516-9;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL e Minch E, 1997, Paleolithic and Neolithic Lineages in theEuropean Mitochondrial Gene Pool [letter]. Am J Hum Genet. 61:247-54;


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– Underhill PA et al., 1997, Detection of Numerous Y chromosome BiallelicPolymorphisms by Denaturating High-performance Liquid Chromatography.Genome Res. 7:996-1005;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1998, The Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project.Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 95:111501-11503;

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1998, The DNA Revolution in Population Genetics.Trends Genet. 14:60-65.

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 1998, Man and the diversity of his genome. An extraordi-nary phase in the history of population genetics. Pathol Biol, Paris. 46: 98-102

– Risch N et al., 1999, A genomic screen of autism: evidence for a multilocus eti-ology.; Am J Hum Genet. 65:493-507

– Jin L et al., 1999, Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 regiondistinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations. Proc Natl Acad SciUSA. 96:3796-800

– Shen P et al., 2000, Population genetic implications from sequence variationin four Y chromosome genes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 97 :7354-9

– Underhill PA et al., 2000, Y chromosome sequence variation and the historyof human populations. Nat Genet. 26:358-61

– Passarino G et al., 2000, Y chromosome binary markers to study the highprevalence of males in Sardinian centenarians and the genetic structure of theSardinian population. Hum Hered. 52:136-9

– Underhill PA et al., 2001, The phylogeography of Y chromosome binary hap-lotypes and the origins of modern human populations. Ann Hum Genet.65:43-62

– Passarino G et al., 2001, The Werner syndrome gene and global sequencevariation. Genomics. 71:118-22

– Underhill PA et al., 2001, Maori origins, Y-chromosome haplotypes and im-plications for human history in the Pacific. Hum Mutat 17:271-80

– Vlad MO et al., 2002, Neutrality condition and response law for nonlinear re-action-diffusion equations, with application to population genetics. Phys RevE Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 65:061110

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, Feldman MW, 2003, The application of molecular geneticapproaches to the study of human evolution. Nat Genet. 33(Suppl):266-75

– McIntire JJ et al., 2003, Immunology: hepatitis A virus link to atopic disease.Nature. 6958(425): 576

– Cinniolu C et al., 2004, Excavating Y-chromosome haplotype strata in Anato-lia. Hum Genet 114:127-48


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– Edmonds CA, Lillie AS, Cavalli-Sforza LL, 2004, Mutations arising in thewave front of an expanding population. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 101:975-9

– Vlad MO, Cavalli-Sforza LL, Ross J, 2004, Enhanced (hydrodynamic) trans-port induced by population growth in reaction-diffusion systems with appli-cation to population genetics. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 101:10249-53

– Ramachandran S et al., 2005, Support from the relationship of genetic and ge-ographic distance in human populations for a serial founder effect originatingin Africa. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA

– Kivisild T et al., 2005, The role of selection in the evolution of human mito-chondrial genomes. Genetics 2005

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 2005, Studying diversity. EMBO Rep. 6:713– Vlad MO et al., 2005 Fisher’s theorems for multivariable, time- and space-de-

pendent systems, with applications in population genetics and chemical ki-netics. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA

– Cavalli-Sforza LL, 2005, The Human Genome Diversity Project: past, presentand future. Nat Rev Genet. 6:333-40

– Sengupta S et al., 2006, Polarity and temporality of high-resolution y-chromo-some distributions in India identify both indigenous and exogenous expan-sions and reveal minor genetic influence of central asian pastoralists. Am JHum Genet. 78:202-21

Popular Science publications:

– Chi Siamo - La Storia Della Diversità Umana (con F. Cavalli-Sforza), 1995,2007, Milano: Mondadori;

– Geni, Popoli e Lingue, 1996, Milano: Adelphi; – La Scienza della Felicità (con F. Cavalli-Sforza); 1997, Milano: Mondadori.– Il caso e la necessità - Ragioni e limiti della diversità genetica, 2007, Roma: Di

Renzo Editore.

He has published many articles in Italian daily newspapers such as “La Stam-pa”, “Corriere della Sera”, “Il Sole 24 Ore” and “La Repubblica”.


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International Balzan Foundation

The International Balzan Foundation was established in Lugano in 1956 thanks tothe generosity of Lina Balzan, who had come into a considerable inheritance on thedeath of her father, Eugenio. She destined this wealth to honour her father’s memo-ry. Eugenio Francesco Balzan was born in Badia Polesine, near Rovigo (NorthernItaly), on 20 April 1874, to a family of landowners. He spent almost his entire work-ing life at Milan’s leading daily paper Corriere della Sera. After joining the paper in1897, he worked his way through, from editorial assistant, to editor-in-chief and thenspecial correspondent. In 1903 editor Luigi Albertini made him managing director ofthe paper’s publishing company; he then became a partner and share-holder in thecompany. He was not only a clever and skilful manager but also a leading personali-ty in Milan. In 1933 he left Italy due to opposition from certain milieus hostile to anindependent Corriere. He then moved to Switzerland, living in Zurich or Lugano,where for years he had invested his fortune with success. He also continued his char-itable activities in favour of institutions and individuals. After returning to Italy in1950, Eugenio Balzan died in Lugano, Switzerland, on 15 July 1953*.

Today, the Balzan Foundation, international in character and scope, acts jointlythrough two Foundations: one under Italian law and the other under Swiss law.In Milan, the International E. Balzan Prize Foundation – “Prize” has the aim to pro-mote, throughout the world, culture, science, and the most meritorious initiatives inthe cause of humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples, regardless of nation-ality, race or creed. This aim is attained through the annual award of four prizes intwo general fields: literature, the moral sciences and the arts; medicine and the phys-ical, mathematical and natural sciences. Nominations for the prizes in the scientificand humanistic fields are received at the Foundation’s request from the world’s lead-ing learned societies. Candidates are selected by the General Prize Committee, com-posed of eminent European scholars and scientists. Since 2001, each prize is worthone million Swiss francs (about 620,000 Euros), half of which the prizewinner mustdestine for research work, preferably involving young researchers. At intervals ofnot less than hree years, the Balzan Foundation also awards a Prize for Humanity,Peace and Brotherhood among Peoples, of varying amounts.In Zurich, the International E. Balzan Prize Foundation – “Fund” administers Euge-nio Balzan’s estate.


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* Renata Broggini, Eugenio Balzan 1874-1953. Una vita per il “Corriere”, un progetto per l’umanità, Milano, 2001;Renata Broggini, Eugenio Balzan 1874-1953. A Biography, Milano, 2007.

Members of the International Balzan Foundation(June 2009)

Board of the “Prize” FoundationBruno Bottai (Italy), Chairman

Carlo Fontana (Italy), Vice-ChairmanMarco Cameroni (Switzerland)Achille Casanova (Switzerland)

Enrico Decleva (Italy)Paolo Matthiae (Italy)

Alberto Quadrio Curzio (Italy)

General Prize CommitteeSalvatore Veca (Italy), Chairman

M.E.H. Nicolette Mout (Netherlands), Vice-ChairpersonWerner Stauffacher (Switzerland), Vice-Chairman

Enric Banda (Spain)Giovanni Busino (Italy/Switzerland)

Nicola Cabibbo (Italy)Étienne Ghys (Francia)

Bengt Gustafsson (Sweden)John Richard Krebs (United Kingdom)

Nicole Le Douarin (France)Paolo Matthiae (Italy)

Erwin Neher (Germany)Antonio Padoa Schioppa (Italy)Dominique Schnapper (France)

Gottfried Scholz (Austria)Dmitry O. Shvidkovsky (Russia)

Quentin Skinner (United Kingdom)Karlheinz Stierle (Germany)

Marc Van Montagu (Belgium)Luzius Wildhaber (Switzerland)

Suzanne Werder (Italy), Secretary General


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Board of the “Fund” FoundationAchille Casanova (Switzerland), Chairman

Bruno Bottai (Italy)Luisa Bürkler-Giussani (Switzerland)Maria Casutt Dietrich (Switzerland)

Carlo Fontana (Italy)Claudio Generali (Switzerland)

Arina Kowner (Switzerland)

Balzan Prizewinners for literature, moral sciences, and the arts;

for physical, mathematical and natural sciences, and medicine

2008 WALLACE S. BROECKER (USA) The Science of Climate Change

MAURIZIO CALVESI (Italy) The Visual Arts since 1700

IAN H. FRAZER (Australia/UK) Preventive Medicine,including Vaccination

THOMAS NAGEL (USA/Serbia) Moral Philosophy

2007 ROSALYN HIGGINS (UK) International Law since 1945

SUMIO IIJIMA (Japan) Nanoscience

MICHEL ZINK (France) European Literature (1000-1500)

JULES HOFFMANN (France) Innate Immunityand BRUCE BEUTLER (USA)

2006 LUDWIG FINSCHER (Germany) History of Western Musicsince 1600

QUENTIN SKINNER (UK) Political Thought; History and Theory

PAOLO DE BERNARDIS (Italy) Observational Astronomyand ANDREW LANGE (USA) and Astrophysics

ELLIOT MEYEROWITZ (USA) Plant Molecular Geneticsand CHRISTOPHER SOMERVILLE

(USA/Canada)

2005 PETER HALL (UK) The Social and Cultural Historyof Cities since the Beginningof the 16th Century

LOTHAR LEDDEROSE (Germany) The History of the Art of Asia


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PETER AND ROSEMARY GRANT Population Biology(USA/UK)

RUSSELL HEMLEY (USA) Mineral Physicsand HO-KWANG MAO (USA/China)

2004 PIERRE DELIGNE (USA/Belgium) Mathematics

NIKKI RAGOZIN KEDDIE (USA) The Islamic world from the end ofthe 19th to the end of the 20th century

MICHAEL MARMOT (UK) Epidemiology

COLIN RENFREW (UK) Prehistoric Archaeology

REINHARD GENZEL (Germany) Infrared Astronomy

ERIC HOBSBAWM (UK/Egypt) European History since 1900

WEN-HSIUNG LI (USA/Taiwan) Genetics and Evolution

SERGE MOSCOVICI Social Psychology(France/Romania)

2002 WALTER JAKOB GEHRING Developmental Biology(Switzerland)

ANTHONY THOMAS GRAFTON History of the Humanities(USA)

XAVIER LE PICHON Geology(France/Vietnam)

DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER (France) Sociology

2001 JAMES SLOSS ACKERMAN (USA) History of Architecture (includingtown planning and landscape design)

JEAN-PIERRE CHANGEUX (France) Cognitive Neurosciences

MARC FUMAROLI (France) Literary History and Criticism(post 1500)

CLAUDE LORIUS (France) Climatology


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2000 ILKKA HANSKI (Finland) Ecological Sciences

MICHEL MAYOR (Switzerland) Instrumentation and Techniquesin Astronomy and Astrophysics

MICHAEL STOLLEIS (Germany) Legal History since 1500

MARTIN LITCHFIELD WEST (UK) Classical Antiquity

1999 LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI-SFORZA Science of Human Origins(USA/Italy)

JOHN ELLIOTT (UK) History, 1500-1800

MIKHAEL GROMOV (France/Russia) Mathematics

PAUL RICŒUR (France) Philosophy

1998 HARMON CRAIG (USA) Geochemistry

ROBERT MCCREDIE MAY Biodiversity(UK/Australia)

ANDRZEJ WALICKI (USA/Poland) History: The cultural and socialhistory of the Slavonic worldfrom the reign of Catherinethe Great to the Russian revolutionsof 1917

1997 CHARLES COULSTON GILLISPIE History and Philosophy of Science(USA)

THOMAS WILSON MEADE (UK) Epidemiology

STANLEY JEYARAJA TAMBIAH Social Sciences: Social Anthropology(USA/Sri Lanka)

1996 ARNO BORST (Germany) History: Medieval Cultures

ARNT ELIASSEN (Norway) Meteorology

STANLEY HOFFMANN Political Sciences: Contemporary(France/USA/Austria) International Relations


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1995 YVES BONNEFOY (France) Art History and Art Criticism(as applied to European Artfrom the Middle Ages to our times)

CARLO M. CIPOLLA (Italy) Economic History

ALAN J. HEEGER (USA) Science of New Non-BiologicalMaterials

1994 NORBERTO BOBBIO (Italy) Law and Political Science(governments and democracy)

RENÉ COUTEAUX (France) Biology (cell-structure with specialreference to the nervous system)

FRED HOYLE (UK) Astrophysics (evolution of stars)and MARTIN SCHWARZSCHILD

(USA/Germany)

1993 WOLFGANG H. BERGER Paleontology with special reference(USA/Germany) to Oceanography

LOTHAR GALL (Germany) History: Societies of the 19th

and 20th centuries

JEAN LECLANT (France) Art and Archaeologyof the Ancient World

1992 ARMAND BOREL (USA/Switzerland) Mathematics

GIOVANNI MACCHIA (Italy) History and Criticism of Literatures

EBRAHIM M. SAMBA (Gambia) Preventive Medicine

1991 GYÖRGY LIGETI Music(Austria/Hungary/Romania)

VITORINO MAGALHÃES GODINHO History: The emergence of Europe(Portugal) in the 15th and 16th centuries

JOHN MAYNARD SMITH (UK) Genetics and Evolution


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990 WALTER BURKERT (Germany) Study of the Ancient World(Mediterranean area)

JAMES FREEMAN GILBERT (USA) Geophysics (solid earth)

PIERRE LALIVE D’EPINAY Private International Law(Switzerland)

1989 EMMANUEL LÉVINAS Philosophy(France/Lithuania)

LEO PARDI (Italy) Ethology

MARTIN JOHN REES (UK) High Energy Astrophysics

1988 SHMUEL NOAH EISENSTADT Sociology(Israel/Poland)

RENÉ ETIEMBLE (France) Comparative Literature

MICHAEL EVENARI (Israel/France) Applied Botanyand OTTO LUDWIG LANGE (including ecological aspects) (Germany)

1987 JEROME SEYMOUR BRUNER (USA) Human Psychology

RICHARD W. SOUTHERN (UK) Medieval History

PHILLIP V. TOBIAS (South Africa) Physical Anthropology

1986 OTTO NEUGEBAUER (USA/Austria) History of Science

ROGER REVELLE (USA) Oceanography/Climatology

JEAN RIVERO (France) Basic Human Rights

1985 ERNST H.J. GOMBRICH History of Western Art(UK/Austria)

JEAN-PIERRE SERRE (France) Mathematics

1984 JAN HENDRIK OORT (Netherlands) Astrophysics


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JEAN STAROBINSKI (Switzerland) History and Criticism of Literatures

SEWALL WRIGHT (USA) Genetics

1983 FRANCESCO GABRIELI (Italy) Oriental Studies

ERNST MAYR (USA/Germany) Zoology

EDWARD SHILS (USA) Sociology

1982 JEAN-BAPTISTE DUROSELLE (France) Social Sciences

MASSIMO PALLOTTINO (Italy) Sciences of Antiquity

KENNETH VIVIAN THIMANN Pure and Applied Botany(USA/UK)

1981 JOSEF PIEPER (Germany) Philosophy

PAUL REUTER (France) International Public Law

DAN PETER MCKENZIE, Geology and GeophysicsDRUMMOND HOYLE MATTHEWS

and FREDERICK JOHN VINE (UK)

1980 ENRICO BOMBIERI (USA/Italy) Mathematics

JORGE LUIS BORGES (Argentina) Philology, Linguisticsand Literary Criticism

HASSAN FATHY (Egypt) Architecture and Urban Planning

1979 TORBJÖRN CASPERSSON (Sweden) Biology

JEAN PIAGET (Switzerland) Social and Political Sciences

ERNEST LABROUSSE (France) Historyand GIUSEPPE TUCCI (Italy)

1962 PAUL HINDEMITH (Germany) Music

ANDREJ KOLMOGOROV (Russia) Mathematics

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON (USA) History

KARL VON FRISCH (Austria) Biology


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Balzan Prizewinners for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood among peoples

2007 KARLHEINZ BÖHM (Austria/Germany)

2004 COMMUNITY OF SANT’EGIDIO

2000 ABDUL SATTAR EDHI (Pakistan/India)

1996 INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS

1991 ABBÉ PIERRE (France)

1986 UNITED NATIONS REFUGEE AGENCY (UNHCR)

1978 MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA (India/Macedonia)

1962 H.H. JOHN XXIII (Vatican City/Italy)

1961 NOBEL FOUNDATION


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