Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Publications of R. C. Lewontin
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Historical foundations and perspectives
- Part II Genotypes to phenotypes: new genetic and bioinformatic advances
- Part III Phenotypes to fitness: genetics and ecology of populations
- Part IV Genes, organisms, and environment: evolutionary case studies
- Part V Applied population biology: biodiversity and food, disease, and health
- 17 Conservation biology: the impact of population biology and a current perspective
- 18 The emergence of modern human mortality patterns
- 19 Units of selection and the evolution of virulence
- 20 Evolutionary genetics and emergence of RNA virus diseases
- 21 A scientific adventure: a fifty years study of human evolution
- 22 Geneticists and the biology of race, 1900–1924
- Index
21 - A scientific adventure: a fifty years study of human evolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Publications of R. C. Lewontin
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Historical foundations and perspectives
- Part II Genotypes to phenotypes: new genetic and bioinformatic advances
- Part III Phenotypes to fitness: genetics and ecology of populations
- Part IV Genes, organisms, and environment: evolutionary case studies
- Part V Applied population biology: biodiversity and food, disease, and health
- 17 Conservation biology: the impact of population biology and a current perspective
- 18 The emergence of modern human mortality patterns
- 19 Units of selection and the evolution of virulence
- 20 Evolutionary genetics and emergence of RNA virus diseases
- 21 A scientific adventure: a fifty years study of human evolution
- 22 Geneticists and the biology of race, 1900–1924
- Index
Summary
Fifty years ago I began dedicating my attention to the study of human evolution, and it gradually became my only interest. In this chapter, I summarize my personal experience in this venture. As a student and shortly after my degree I worked in bacteriology, bacterial genetics, immunology, Drosophila genetics, and plankton populations. Between 1948 and 1950 I went back to microbial genetics in Cambridge (UK), at the invitation of R. A. Fisher, but my earliest training with Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, and early contacts with N. W. Timofeeff-Ressowsky had already given me a taste for population genetics. Fisher was, with J. B. S. Haldane and S. Wright, one of the three fathers of the mathematical theory of evolution, so in my stay at Cambridge I divided my time between bacterial genetics and evolutionary theory.
The role of random genetic drift in human variation
My specific interest in human evolution began as a sideline when I was introduced to documents of the Roman Catholic Archives by Father Antonio Moroni, a student of my first course in Genetics at the University of Parma, Italy, in 1951–52.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Evolution of Population Biology , pp. 411 - 427Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004