Guido Barbujani is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 population geneticist

Population genetics

Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...

, evolutionist and literary author born in Adria

Adria

Adria is a town and comune in the province of Rovigo in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, situated between the mouths of the rivers Adige and Po....

, who has been working at the State University of New York at Stony Brook

State University of New York at Stony Brook

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, also known as Stony Brook University, is a public research university located in Stony Brook, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island, about east of Manhattan....

 (NY), at the Padua and Bologna Universities, and is now a professor at the University of Ferrara

University of Ferrara

The University of Ferrara is the main university of the city of Ferrara in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. In the years prior to the First World War the University of Ferrara, with more than 500 students, was the best attended of the free universities in Italy...

 since 1996.

Works

A population geneticist

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

 by training, has been working on several aspects of human genetic variation

Human genetic variation

Human genetic variation refers to genetic differences both within and among populations. There may be multiple variants of any given gene in the human population , leading to polymorphism. Many genes are not polymorphic, meaning that only a single allele is present in the population: that allele is...

. In collaboration with Robert R. Sokal

Robert R. Sokal

Robert Reuven Sokal is an Austrian-American biostatistician and anthropologist. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the State University of Stony Brook, New York, Sokal is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...

, he pioneered the statistical comparison of patterns of genetic and linguistic variation, showing that language differences may contribute to reproductive isolation, and hence promote genetic divergence

Genetic divergence

Genetic divergence is the process in which two or more populations of an ancestral species accumulate independent genetic changes through time, often after the populations have become reproductively isolated for some period of time...

 between populations.

His analyses of geographic patterns of genetic variation in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 support Luca Cavalli-Sforza's Neolithic demic diffusion model, i.e. the idea that farming spread in the Neolithic mainly because farmers did, and not by cultural transmission. Two implications of this finding are that most Europeans' ancestors did not live in Europe, but in the Near East, up to Neolithic times, and that in their Westward expansion the early farmers carried with them their genes, their technologies, and possibly their languages too.

His studies of the amount of DNA differentiation among human populations, and of its spatial distribution, led to the conclusion that traditional human racial classification fails to account for most of the existing patterns of genetic variation. Rather, it seems that genetic variation is largely uncorrelated across genes, which, if confirmed, would explain why no consensus was ever reached on a catalog of human biological races. This activity has also resulted in publications for the general public.

His recent DNA studies focus on genetic characterization of ancient human populations, such as Paleolithic anatomically-modern humans of Cro-Magnoid morphology, the Etruscans and the Neolithic (nuragic) Sardinians.

Barbujani is the author of three novels.

Quote

• "The idea that all humans naturally belong to one of a few biological types or races that evolved in isolation was unchallenged for centuries, but large-scale modern studies failed to associate racial labels with recognizable genetic clusters." (Barbujani G., 2005, p. 215)

Scientific Bibliography

• Barbujani G. and Sokal R.R. (1990) Zones of sharp genetic change in Europe are also linguistic boundaries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87:1816-1819.
• Barbujani G., Magagni A., Minch E. and Cavalli-Sforza L.L. (1997) An apportionment of human DNA diversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 94:4516-4519.
• Barbujani G. and Bertorelle G. (2001) Genetics and the population history of Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98:22-25.
• Chikhi L., Destro-Bisol G., Bertorelle G., Pascali V., and Barbujani G. (1998) Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a recent, Neolithic ancestry of the European gene pool. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 95:9053-9058.
• Romualdi C., Balding D., Nasidze I.S., Risch G., Robichaux M., Sherry S., Stoneking M., Batzer M. and Barbujani G. (2002) Patterns of human diversity, within and among continents, inferred from biallelic DNA polymorphisms. Genome Research 12:602-612.
• Barbujani G. and Goldstein D.B. (2004) Africans and Asians abroad: Genetic diversity in Europe. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 5:119-150.
• Dupanloup I., Bertorelle G., Chikhi L. and Barbujani G. (2004) Estimating the impact of prehistoric admixture on the Europeans’ genome. Molecular Biology and Evolution 21:1361-1372
• Barbujani G. (2005) Human races: Classifying people vs. understanding diversity. Current Genomics 6:215-226
• Belle E.M.S., Ramakrishnan U., Mountain J. and Barbujani G. (2006) Serial coalescent simulations suggest a weak genealogical relationship between Etruscans and modern Tuscans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:8012-8017.

External links

• http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Guido/ : Personal webpage, with access to pdfs of scientific articles.
• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060526065706.htm : ancient Etruscans unlikely ancestors of modern Tuscans. Science Daily, April 2006.
• http://www.festivaldellamente.it/pdf/ENG_2007_programme.pdf : taped interview on human diversity (in Italian), October 2007.