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that he was flat broke from years of grant-less, salary-less research and that his very survival hinged on the success of this book. Her interpretation of the AAA meeting, which she attended in hopes of this being a comingout celebration for a potential bestseller, was that Tierney had few friends there because he was an outsider, a mere journalist at play in the field of science.3 Who was he to stick his nose in the private business of professionals whose union card—the Ph.D.—was hard earned through the centuries-long system of mentorship and hoop-jumping, not unlike the rites of passage ceremonies young men are put through in many indigenous cultures? Had Tierney simply not paid his scientific dues, or was there something else going on that turned Chagnon’s enemies into his friends?

Despite his lack of scientific training Tierney did spend eleven years researching his book, and since outsiders occasionally do make important contributions to science, I wanted to give him a chance. His on-air stories were eye-popping, and his book is filled with so many stories and anecdotes, charges and accusations, backed by interviews, documents, and seventy pages of endnotes and bibliography, that at first blush one is left thinking that if only half or even a tenth of them are true, there is darkness in anthropology, indeed, in all of science.

Darwin’s Dictum and Damaged Data

Humans are storytelling animals.4 Thus, following what I call Darwin’s Dictum—“all observations must be for or against some view if they are to be of any service”5—we begin by recognizing that Tierney is telling a story against a view he believes has been put forth by certain anthropologists about the Yanomamö and, by implication, about all humanity. Chagnon, he points out, subtitled his best-selling ethnographic monograph on the Yanomamö The Fierce People. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, Tierney notes, calls the Yanomamö “the erotic people.”6 Chagnon and Lizot, of course, are not immune to the human tendency to dichotomize and pigeonhole, but in telling a story—especially one for or against some view—one is obligated to be fair in properly contextualizing observations and conclusions because the data never just speak for themselves. Thus, the substrate of this essay is the relationship between data and theory, and how journalists and scientists differ in their treatment of that relationship.

For example, Tierney spares no ink in presenting a picture of Chagnon as a fierce anthropologist who sees in the Yanomamö nothing more than a reflection of himself. Chagnon’s sociobiological theories of the most violent and aggressive males winning the most copulations and thus passing on their genes for “fierceness,” says Tierney, is a Rorschachian window into Chagnon’s own libidinous impulses. Chagnon is the bête noire of Darkness in El Dorado. In Tierney s pantheon of antiheroes, Chagnon is the anti-Christ of the Yanomamö. The gold miners who kill Yanomamö and destroy their land, and the missionaries who want to “civilize” the Yanomamö by replacing their animistic superstition with a monotheistic one, by comparison, are let off easy.

Indeed, Chagnon is well known in anthropological circles for being tough-minded and occasionally abrasive, and Tierney seemed to encounter no shortage of stories of braggadocio and bellicosity peppered throughout descriptions of a man who himself might best be described as “fierce,” in both the jungles of Amazonia and the halls of academia. In a letter to the Santa Barbara News Press, for example, Chagnon called his critics “so much skunk in the elephant soup”:

I used a metaphor to try to put the nature of academic things into perspective: a soup comprised of one elephant and one skunk. The vast majority of my professional colleagues regard my work with esteem—the elephant part of the soup. . . . But, a highly vocal minority persists in denigrating me and my research in non-academic ways for a variety of reasons, most notably professional jealousy. These represent the acrid flavor that a skunk, even in a very large elephant