Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association

Abstract

In September 2000, the self-styled “anthropological journalist” Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney’s claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney’s claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA’s problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney’s falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles.

Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism

“…Few wish to run the gauntlet of criticizing poorly conducted, highly subjective "science" which is purported to help, or indeed, of daring to question the basis of problematic scientific paradigms that arise in part from good intentions. Edward O. Wilson ran into just such a well-meaning buzz saw with the publication of his Sociobiology, as did Judith Rich Harris with The Nurture Assumption and Napoleon Chagnon with his studies of rates of violence among the Amazonian Yanomamö (10,79,80).…”

Warfare and reproductive success in a tribal population

“…However, evolutionary anthropologists have commonly argued that warriors may receive fitness benefits that ultimately motivate their participation (3)(4)(5)(6)(7). This hypothesis has a contentious history, in part because of concerns that a positive association between warfare and reproductive success may suggest biological proclivities to engage in violence (8,9). Although such a relationship would be unsurprising in other mammalian species with similar patterns of lethal intergroup relations (10,11), the fact that humans also have the capacity for sustained peaceful relations between groups has sometimes been interpreted as suggesting that warfare has a different function than intergroup conflict in other species (12)(13)(14).…”

Postmarital Residence and Bilateral Kin Associations among Hunter-Gatherers

“…This move occurred before collection of the data used in these analyses, and confirmation of the relatedness of individuals in this founder group compared with their original community membership is beyond the reach of the current genealogical data. Following the consequences of the Darkness in El Dorado scandal (Borofsky 2005;Dreger 2011;Gregor and Gross 2004;Tierney 2000), genetic testing is unlikely to be permitted by government ministries in Venezuela to resolve this issue. Informants, however, are clear in their statements that they moved to their current location as less-related families from their source residence.…”