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18, 1861. The full quote reads: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

6. Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, p. 15. See also J. Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

7. See http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/chagnon.html.

8. Sharon Begley, “Into the Heart of Darkness,” Newsweek (November 27, 2000): 70–75.

9. Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, p. 130.

10. Ibid., p. 131. Different authors use different spellings of the people’s name, the two most common being Yanomamö and Yanomami. According to Chagnon, the “ö” is similar to the German “oe” and pronounced as it is in the German poet “Goethe.”

11. Chagnon joked about the analogy with the film The Gods Must Be Crazy when he spoke at the Skeptics Society’s 1996 Caltech conference.

12. Interview with Kenneth Good, December 5, 2000.

13. Kenneth Good, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 5.

14. Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, December 12, 2000.

15. Derek Freeman, “Paradigms in Collision: Margaret Meads Mistake and What It Has Done to Anthropology,” Skeptic 5, no. 3 (1997): 66—73. This entire issue of Skeptic is devoted to anthropological controversies.

16. Interview with Bill Durham, December 1, 2000.

17. American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics, from “Section A. Responsibility to people and animals with whom anthropological researchers work and whose lives and cultures they study.”

18. Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, pp. 132–33.

19. M. Roosevelt, “Yanomami: What Have We Done to Them?” Time (October 2, 2000): 77–78.

20. Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, December 12, 2000.

21. Statement by Kim Hill is at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/chagnon.html.

22. Personal correspondence with Steven Pinker, December 1, 2000.

23. Go to http://www.anth.ucsb.edu to begin searching. Links and search engine scans under the names of the various anthropologists will net hundreds of pages of relevant documents.

24. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1992), pp. xii–xiii.

25. Ibid., p. 7.

26. Ibid., p. 10.

27. Ibid., p. 206.

28. John Horgan, “The New Social Darwinists,” Scientific American (October 1995): 150-57.

29. Napoleon Chagnon, “The Myth of the Noble Savage: Lessons from the Yanomamö People of the Amazon,” presented at the Skeptics Society Conference on Evolutionary Psychology and Humanistic Ethics, March 30, 1996.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Interview with Donald Symons, November 28, 2000.

34. Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, December 12, 2000.

35. Good, Into the Heart, p. 42.

36. Interview with Kenneth Good, December 5, 2000.

37. Good, Into the Heart, p. 115.

38. Ibid., p. 116.

39. Ibid.

40. Chagnon, Yanomamö, p. 190.

41. Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, p. 31.

42. Good, Into the Heart, p. 128.

43. Ibid., p. 129.

44. Ibid., p. 185.

45. Interview with Kenneth Good, December 5, 2000.

46. Ibid.

47. Interview with Napoleon Chagnon, December 12, 2000.

48. Chagnon, Yanomamö, p. 1.

49. Interview with Jared Diamond, November 27, 2000.

50. L. H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). A. Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).

9. Exorcising Laplace’s Demon

1. See chapter 10, “What If?” in this volume.

2. Michael Shermer, “The Chaos of History: On a Chaotic Model that Represents the Role of Contingency and Necessity in Historical Sequences,” Nonlinear Science 2, no. 4 (1993): 1-13.

3. Personal correspondence, May 6, 1993.

4.