The Latest in the Science Wars..

Marshall Sahlins, author of such works as Evolution and Culture, Stone Age Economics, and The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology, and one of the most renowned living anthropologists, resigned from the National Academy of Sciences last Friday, citing the organization's relationship with the military and the recent admittance of Napoleon Chagnon into the academy as the impetus behind his decision.

For the sake of the uninitiated, I will provide some background. Napoleon Chagnon is an American anthropologist who became infamous in the field due to the unethical practices he employed while conducting his ethnography of the Yąnomamö Indians—a small, relatively isolated, horticulturalist tribe which resides in territory between Venezuela and Brazil. (Those of you who would like to know more about this history should view José Padilha's excellent documentary film Secrets of the Tribe.) Among other contentious claims, Chagnon states that the Yąnomamö are a "fierce" people, prone to engaging in warfare over control of the tribe's nubile females.

The methodology Chagnon utilized while coming to these conclusions was, of course, fraught with errors (apparently contamination caused by the observer effect is a foreign concept to him), and virtually all of his empirical claims have been thoroughly refuted since the publication of his research. Nevertheless, since his theories align with the inclusive fitness narrative advanced by sociobiologists, he became an instant celebrity among genetic determinists.

Much like the hereditarians in race and intelligence debate and many evolutionary psychologists, Chagnon attributes his disrepute among his peers to be the result of anthropology's alleged hostility toward the "hard sciences" and preference for "politically correct" explanations of human behavior. The reality, however, is that he is simply a substandard ethnographer that attempted to make a name for himself by forwarding provocative, but ultimately baseless, hypotheses. Moreover, if any discipline can be charged with putting ideology over science, it's sociobiology/evolutionary psychology—the very field that endorses Chagnon's dubious work. And as much as the sociobiologists bemoan the "harassment" they received during the 1980s, they are certainly not above behaving in a similarly contemptible manner themselves. Take, for instance, what happened to John Horgan while he was preparing a review of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (which details Changnon's misconduct) for the New York Times Book Review:

"I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer.

I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm—that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists."
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Returning to Sahlins, his principled resignation from the NAS was met by the following remarks by Chagnon:

"I am surprised that Sahlins resigned from the NAS to protest my election last year to the NAS. One possible interpretation is that he is displeased with the gradual swing back to the academic principle that scientists should tell the truth in their publications. . . . Sahlins was elected to the NAS in 1991, but he had published his Use and Abuse of Biology in 1976, which should have made clear to the members of the NAS how antiscientific Sahlins was."

David Graeber, a former student of Sahlins's, responded by saying:

"Chagnon's defenders operate almost entirely by diversion, they never seriously engage with the core objections to what Chagnon did, which is to vilify a group of human beings so that enormous violence could be unleashed on them.

"Marshall Sahlins is a man of genuine principle. He's never had a lot of patience for shirtless macho Americans who descend into jungles, declaring their inhabitants to be violent savages, and then use that as an excuse to start behaving like violent savages themselves—except with command over infinitely greater technological resources."
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CounterPunch just published a brief interview with Sahlins regarding the whole ordeal, which I recommend to those of you following this debate.