Cavalli-Sforza
Cavalli-Sforza initiated a new field of research by combining the concrete findings of demography with a newly available analysis of blood groups in an actual human population. He also studied the connections between migration patterns and blood groups.
Writing in the mid-1960s with another genetics student of Ronald A. Fisher, Anthony W. F. Edwards, FRS, Cavalli-Sforza pioneered statistical methods for estimating evolutionary trees (phylogenies). Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza wrote about trees of populations within the human species, where genetic differences are affected both by treelike patterns of historical separation of populations and by spread of genes among populations by migration and admixture. Many of these influential and fundamental early papers were reprinted in 2018 in a volume focusing on A. W. F. Edwards, and dedicated to Cavalli-Sforza and Ian Hacking.[2] In later papers, Cavalli-Sforza has written about the effects of both divergence and migration on human gene frequencies.
While Cavalli-Sforza is best known for his work in genetics, he also, in collaboration with Marcus Feldman and others, initiated the sub-discipline of cultural anthropology known alternatively as coevolution, gene-culture coevolution, cultural transmission theory or dual inheritance theory. The publication Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981) made use of models from population genetics and infectious disease epidemiology to investigate the transmission of culturally transmitted units. This line of inquiry initiated research into the correlation of patterns of genetic and cultural dispersion.
