Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [47]
The most important point Kurtz makes in The Transcendental Temptation comes toward the end in his discussion of the meaning and goals of skepticism. It is an admonition we should all bear in mind, a passage to be read once a year.
[I]f there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world—if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within.
Amen, brother!
PART II
SCIENCE AND THE MEANING OF BODY, MIND, AND SPIRIT
5
Spin-Doctoring Science
Science as a Candle in the Darkness of
the Anthropology Wars
THERE is A MAXIM anthropologists often cite about the geopolitics of diplomacy and warfare among indigenous peoples: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In reality, of course, the maxim applies to virtually all groups, from tribes and villages to city-states and nation-states—recall the temporary friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 that promptly dissolved into the cold war upon the defeat of the common enemy.
I thought of this maxim on Monday, November 20, 2000, when I interviewed journalist Patrick Tierney for the science edition of NPR affiliate KPCC’s Airtalk, when he was in Los Angeles on tour for his just published book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and journalists Devastated the Amazon.1 Tierney had just flown in from San Francisco where, the previous day, he was pummeled by a panel of experts in front of a thousand scientists gathered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Among the many scientists Tierney goes after, none takes more hits than the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose study of the Yanomamö people of Amazonia is arguably the most famous ethnography since Margaret Mead’s Samoan classics. Since I knew Chagnon’s reputation as an intellectual pugilist who has accumulated a score of enemies over the decades, I fully expected that, in obedience to the maxim, they would have rallied around Tierney in a provisional alliance. With a couple of minor exceptions, however, there was almost universal condemnation of the book. A British science writer told Skeptic senior editor Frank Miele, who was in attendance: “If I had taken such a beating as Tierney I would have crawled out of the room and cut my throat.”2
Tierney did seem shell-shocked, as he timorously tiptoed into the studio with a subdued countenance. On the air he seemed almost apologetic for his book, emphasizing that he was not presenting the final word on the subject of the mistreatment of the Yanomamö but, rather, he was merely suggesting the need to investigate the scandalous charges against Chagnon and others that he had gathered in his decade of research.
A wispy thin man with an edge of wilderness about him left over from a waiflike nomadic lifestyle spent chasing down what he thought might be (and his publisher trumpeted as) the anthropological scandal of all time, Tierney struck me as a conciliatory man ill suited for the fight he had instigated. Indeed, he seemed the very embodiment of the type of man Rush Limbaugh would call a bleeding-heart, tree-hugging liberal, and someone environmentalists would call a friend. His publicist at W. W. Norton told me