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and to generalize from behavioral particulars to categorical universals. Upon finishing the book I let it sit for a couple of days and then plowed through the 147-page rebuttal published on the Internet by the University of Michigan, as well as the many other responses by Chagnon and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara.23 I also reread Chagnon’s classic work Yanomamö. Tellingly, the fourth edition dropped the subtitle The Fierce People (although Tierney, characteristically, refers to the book only by the old subtitle). Had Chagnon determined that the Yanomamö were not “the fierce people” after all? No. He realized that too many people were unable to move past the moniker to grasp the complex and subtle variations contained in all human populations, and he became concerned that they “might get the impression that being ‘fierce’ is incompatible with having other sentiments or personal characteristics like compassion, fairness, valor, etc.”24

In fact, the Yanomamö call themselves “waiteri” (“fierce”) and Chagnon’s attribution of them as such was merely attempting “to represent valor, honor, and independence” that the Yanomamö saw in themselves. As he notes in his opening chapter, the Yanomamö “are simultaneously peacemakers and valiant warriors.” Like all people, the Yanomamö have a deep repertoire of responses for varying social interactions and differing contexts, even those that are potentially violent: “They have a series of graded forms of violence that ranges from chest-pounding and club-fighting duels to out-and-out shooting to kill. This gives them a good deal of flexibility in settling disputes without immediate resort to lethal violence.”25

Chagnon has often been accused of using the Yanomamö to support a sociobiological model of an aggressive human nature. Even here, returning to the primary sources in question shows that Chagnon’s deductions from the data are not so crude, as when he notes that the Yanomamö’s northern neighbors, the Ye’Kwana Indians—in contrast to the Yanomamö’s initial reaction to him—“were very pleasant and charming, all of them anxious to help me and honorbound to show any visitor the numerous courtesies of their system of etiquette,” and therefore that it “remains true that there are enormous differences between whole peoples.”26 Even on the final page of his chapter on Yanomamö warfare, Chagnon inquires about “the likelihood that people, throughout history, have based their political relationships with other groups on predatory versus religious or altruistic strategies and the cost-benefit dimensions of what the response should be if they do one or the other.” He concludes: “We have the evolved capacity to adopt either strategy.”27 These are hardly the words of a hidebound ideologue. In fact, in 1995 Chagnon told Scientific American editor John Horgan that because male aggression is esteemed in Yanomamö culture, aggression as a human trait is highly malleable and culturally influenced, an observation that might have been made by Stephen Jay Gould, considered by most sociobiologists to be Satan incarnate. “Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things,” Chagnon surprisingly concluded.28

Even when he is talking about the Yanomamö casually and not for publication, Chagnon carefully nuances and contextualizes everything he says. For example, at the Skeptics Society 1996 Caltech conference on evolutionary psychology Chagnon delivered a fact-packed lecture mixing anecdotes and data, including the graphs from his now-famous Science article revealing the positive correlation between levels of violence among Yanomamö men and their corresponding number of wives and offspring. “Here are the ‘Satanic Verses’ that I committed in anthropology,” Chagnon joked, as he reviewed his data:

I didn’t intend for this correlation to pop out, but when I discovered it, it did not surprise me. If you take men who are in the same age category and divide them by those who have killed other men (unokais) and those who have not killed other men (non-unokais), in every age category