The leading population (i.e., race) geneticist of the late 20th Century, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford U., has died at age 96.
His 1994 magnum opus The History and Geography of Human Genes, based on data collected up through 1988, was the summit of population genetics before the new genome scanning technology arrived.
Professor Cavalli-Sforza occasionally indulged in the kind of politically correct Race Does Not Exist obfuscations that seem close to mandatory in our lifetimes. But he was much more forthright with the cover of his big book. As he explained in the text:
“The color map of the world shows very distinctly the differences that we know exist among the continents: Africans (yellow), Caucasoids (green), Mongoloids … (purple), and Australian Aborigines (red). The map does not show well the strong Caucasoid component in northern Africa, but it does show the unity of the other Caucasoids from Europe, and in West, South, and much of Central Asia.”
