Criticism
His proposed ambitious Human Genome Diversity Project to gather further genetic data from populations around the world was accused of "cultural insensitivity, neocolonialism, and biopiracy."
Linguist William Poser in Language Log has criticized some of Cavalli-Sforza's comments about linguistics, in particular the suggestion, echoing controversial linguists Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg, that some mainstream linguists are unnecessarily conservative about hypothesized long-range relationships between language families, and an overstatement that Greenberg's critics "have ruled out the possibility of hierarchical classification", which Cavalli-Sforza did not defend when challenged by Poser, but deferred to Ruhlen. Cavalli-Sforza's interest in hypothesized large-scale language families is as a basis for comparison with similarly large-scale postulated genetic classifications of human populations.
Read more about this topic: Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
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