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In this new edition of The evolution of culture, Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza updates and expands the manifesto of his historical perspective on human culture. To this day, his study on the parallels between cultural and biological evolution is a crucial introduction for any argumentation about the important themes of genetics in culture and how the natural and cultural spheres effect each other. Above all, it is essential to understand what is culture. Cavalli Sforza paints a fascinating picture of cultural innovation and conservation, offering an alternative to reconstructions centered exclusively on genetic selection, with great consequences on the way we conceive cultural differences and the presumed existence of human ‘races’, national cultures and relationships between them.

Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, an absolute international authority in the field of genetic diversity, is a professor at the University of Stanford, whose Department of Genetics he was head of. The most important aspect of his work is the combination of genetic mechanisms with historic-cultural data, in particular of linguistic basis.