Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [58]
Figure 5.1. Yanomamö men duel over a woman. Despite Patrick Tierney’s claims that Napoleon Chagnon exaggerated the level of aggression and rape among the Yanomamö, both behaviors have been documented.
Figure 5.2. Yanomamö war scar. Many Yanomamö men have deep scars on their heads from such battles.
Considering his reputation I half expected Chagnon to explode over the phone when I queried him about these charges. Not only did he respond with dispassionate coolness, he had nothing critical at all to say about Good, commenting only that it is entirely possible that he and his former student did see different behaviors: “Good spent much of his time trekking with the Yanomamö, going on hunting trips outside of the village. If a village contains, say, one hundred and fifty people in a complex web of relations, but you are spending most of your time with just a dozen or so away from the village, of course you are going to make different observations.”47
In Yanomamö Chagnon notes that such variation in violence observed by different scientists can be accounted for by a concatenation of intervening variables, such as geography, ecology, population size, resources, and especially the contingent history of each group where “the lesson is that past events and history must be understood to comprehend the current observable patterns. As the Roman poet Lucretius mused, nothing yet from nothing ever came.”48
After reading through the literature and interviewing many on all sides of this issue, my conclusion is that Chagnon’s view of the Yanomamö—while in the service of some view (a Darwinian one)—is fundamentally supported by the available evidence. His data and interpretations are corroborated by many other anthropologists who have studied the Yanomamö. Even at their “fiercest,” however, the Yanomamö are not so different from many other peoples around the globe (recall Captain Bligh’s numerous violent encounters with Polynesians, and Captain Cook’s murder at the hands of Hawaiian natives), even when studied by tender-minded, non-fierce scientists. (I do find it ironic, however, that in their attempts to portray the Yanomamö as Rousseauian noble savages—in defense of a view of human nature as basically benign and infinitely flexible—a few anthropologists have proven themselves to be fierce and persistent warriors in their battles with Chagnon.)
Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, for example, told me that he found the role of warfare among the peoples of New Guinea that he has studied over the past thirty years quite similar to Chagnon’s depiction of the role of warfare among the Yanomamö.49 And, judging by the latest archaeological research presented in such books as Arthur Ferrill’s The Origins of War and Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, Yanomamö violence and warfare are no more extreme than those of our paleolithic ancestors who, around the world and throughout the past twenty thousand years, appear to have brutally butchered one another with all too frequent abandon.50 Finally, if the past five thousand years of recorded human history is any measure of a species’ “fierceness,” the Yanomamö have got nothing on either Western or Eastern “civilization,” whose record includes the murder of hundreds of millions of people.
Homo sapiens in general, like the Yanomamö in particular, are the erotic-fierce people, making love and war far too frequently for our own good as both overpopulation and conflict threaten our very