Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [52]
Chagnon, by contrast, is a synthetic, big-picture thinker, and thus it is that the ethics of his research have come under closer scrutiny. Anthropologist Kim Hill from the University of New Mexico, for example, was strongly critical of Darkness in El Dorado, yet he expressed his concern about many of the ethical issues the book raises.
I was concerned about the negative attitude that many Yanomamö I have met seem to have towards Chagnon, and despite the fact that much of this attitude is clearly due to coaching by Chagnon enemies I do believe that some Yanomamö have sincere and legitimate grievances against Chagnon that should be addressed by him. The strongest complaints that I heard were about his lack of material support for the tribe despite having made an entire career (and a good deal of money) from working with them, and his lack of sensitivity concerning some cultural issues and the use of film portrayals. However, 1 think most of Chagnon’s shortcomings amount to little more than bad judgment and an occasional unwise penchant for self promotion (something which seems to infuriate Yanomamö specialists who are less well known than Chagnon).21
Since evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker published a letter in defense of Chagnon in the New York Times Book Review (in response to John Horgan’s surprisingly uncritical review of Tierney’s book there), I queried him about some of the specific charges. “The idea that Chagnon caused the Yanomamö to fight is preposterous and contradicted by every account of the Yanomamö and other nonstate societies. Tierney is a zealot and a character assassin, and all his serious claims crumble upon scrutiny.” What about the charge of ethical breaches? “There are, of course, serious issues about ethics in ethnography, and I don’t doubt that some of Chagnon’s practices, especially in the 1960s, were questionable (as were the practices in most fields, such as my own—for example, the Milgram studies). But the idea that the problems of Native Americans are caused by anthropologists is crazy. In the issues that matter to us—skepticism, scientific objectivity, classic liberalism, etc.—Chagnon is on the right side.”22
The carping over minutiae in Chagnon’s research methods and ethics that has dogged him throughout his career, however, is secondary to the deeper, underlying issue in the anthropology wars. What Chagnon is really being accused of is biological determinism. To postmodernists and cultural determinists, in calling the Yanomamö “fierce” and explaining their fierceness through a Darwinian model of competition and sexual selection, Chagnon is indicting all of humanity as innately evil and condemning us to a future of ineradicable violence, rape, and war. Are we really this bad? Are the Yanomamö?
Erotic or Fierce?
Anthropology is a sublime science because it deals with such profoundly deep questions as the nature of human nature. This whole “fierce people” business is really tapping into the question of the nature of human good and evil. But to even ask such questions as “Are we by nature good or evil?” misses the complexity of human affairs and falsely simplifies the science behind the study of human diversity. (The propensity to do so is very probably grounded in the tendency of humans to dichotomize the world into unambiguous binary categories.)
Thus, the failure of Tierney’s book has less to do with getting the story straight and more to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the plasticity and diversity of human behavior and a lack of understanding of how science properly proceeds in its attempt to catalog such variation