Unfortunately, the authors tend to 

 search through the various PC maps until 

 they find one that supports the argument 

 they are trying to make at the moment. I 

 rather wish that they had played around 

 with the data a little more in order to see 

 how robust the maps are. For example, 

 how much does a PC map change if one 

 important allele like the Duffy variant is 

 dropped from it? The authors emphasize 

 migration, and while they sometimes sug- 

 gest that selection for or against particular 

 alleles and combinations of alleles in dif- 

 ferent regions may have played a role in 

 shaping these maps, my guess is that such 

 selection will turn out to be at least as im- 

 portant as migration. 



The book closes with a plea to gather ir- 

 replaceable genetic information from in- 

 digenous peoples before they are killed, 

 die of starvation and disease, or melt 

 anonymously into the favelas of Third 

 World cities. At times, the argument 

 sounds uncoinfortably like science-at-all- 

 costs, a plea for "immortalizing" the white 

 blood cells of peoples on the brink of ex- 

 tinction as the peoples themselves fade 

 away. But such efforts should not, I think, 

 be supported unless they form a part (a 

 small part) of efforts for culmral preserva- 

 tion and political empowerment of the 

 kind espoused by the Cambridge-based 

 group Cultural Survival, and of efforts to 

 shift priorities at the World Bank and 

 among the Third World governments di- 

 rectly concerned. 



The ABO blood groups were discov- 

 ered in the year 1 900. The History and Ge- 

 ography of Human Genes, arriving nearly 

 a hundred years later, gathers together 

 much of the information that has since 

 been gleaned about human diversity and 

 allows us to see, however dimly, a small 

 part of our evolutionary heritage. The 

 book summarizes this exciting story well, 

 but the really exciting discoveries are still 

 in the future. In the next hundred years we 

 will find the genes that distinguish us from 

 the great apes and perhaps discover how 

 some of them work. And we will, I feel 

 confident, finally be able to determine 

 which one of the many conflicting theories 

 about the evolutionary history of our 

 unique species is correct. 



Christopher Wills is a professor of biology 

 at the University of California, San Diego. 

 His books include Exons, Introns and 

 Talking Genes: The Science Behind the 

 Human Genome Project and, most re- 

 cently, The Runaway Brain: The Evolu- 

 tion of Human Uniqueness. 



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