Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  I had decided to carefully investigate Chagnon’s story because his was said by scientists I now trusted to illuminate like no other the dangerous intellectual rot occurring within certain branches of academe—the privileging of politics over evidence. Chagnon’s appeared to be a story of what happens when liberal hearts bleed so much that brains stop getting enough oxygen. Although I had no hope of curing this pathology now infecting parts of the ivory tower, I thought it might at least be useful to study and describe an index case.

  Long before accusations against him started making front-page news, Napoleon Chagnon had gained worldwide renown for his groundbreaking studies of the Yanomamö, an indigenous people who live in sparsely populated rain forest where Brazil meets Venezuela. Besides living among the Yanomamö and learning their language, myths, and rituals, in the 1960s Chagnon began gathering gigantic amounts of data on Yanomamö genealogies, movement of villages, gardening and hunting practices, infanticide, nutrition, causes of mortality, and on and on. While many of his colleagues in cultural anthropology were collecting and producing largely qualitative data—stories of various peoples—Chagnon wanted to make his study as aggressively scientific as possible. He seized all available opportunities to study the Yanomamö quantitatively, looking precisely, for example, at how causes of death correlated with age and sex, at protein intake, and at kinship patterns. Indeed, Chagnon was so oriented to the quantitative that he was one of the first anthropologists to bring a computer to a remote field site. This extraordinarily deep and broad work on a relatively isolated indigenous people was a boon for science.

  From the 1970s to the 1990s, pretty much every American college student who took an introductory anthropology course learned some part of Chagnon’s work. Many other Americans came to know his work via popular magazines like National Geographic. But Chagnon’s growing public fame had been steadily matched by growing infamy within his own field. That was in part because Chagnon had been an early and boisterous defender of sociobiology, the science of understanding the evolutionary bases for behaviors and cultures. Even so, by Chagnon’s time, all anthropologists believed in human evolution, and so his interest in studying humans as evolved animals might never have gotten him in so much trouble were it not for a couple of other things.

  First, Chagnon saw and represented in the Yanomamö a somewhat shocking image of evolved “human nature”—one featuring males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference. Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family. Not the kind of image that will win you friends among those cultural anthropologists who see themselves primarily as defenders of the oppressed subjects they study, especially if you’re suggesting, as Chagnon was, that the Yanomamö showed us our human nature.

  So Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomamö as “the fierce people” alone could have gained him a fair number of academic enemies within anthropology, especially as cultural anthropologists moved en masse into political advocacy, including feminist and antiwar endeavors. But exacerbating tensions was the fact that Chagnon had the classic Galilean personality, complete with political tone dumbness—that inability (or constitutional unwillingness) to sing in tune. Indeed, descriptions of Chagnon provided to me by both his friends and enemies sounded eerily reminiscent of Galileo: a risk-taker, a loyal friend, a scientist obsessed with quantitative description, a brazen challenger to orthodoxy. When I came along, there remained an open question among Chagnon’s colleagues as to whether he was such a rough character because he spent his formative adult years among the Yanomamö, or whether he was able to study the Yanomamö precisely because he was already such a tough character. (Most colleagues guessed the latter.) But no one who knew Chagnon personally imagined him to be the kind of guy who could ever have had a polite academic conversation with colleagues whose political sensibilities caused them to challenge Chagnon’s view of the world.

  The battles within anthropology between Chagnon and his detractors had finally exploded onto the world scene when, in 2000, following up on Chagnon’s disciplinary critics, the self-styled “journalist” Patrick Tierney started publicly alleging that, beginning in the 1960s, Chagnon had committed one atrocity after another against the Yanomamö. Tierney called his book on the subject Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The work focused chiefly on Chagnon and James V. Neel Sr., a famous physician-geneticist who had collaborated with Chagnon in South American fieldwork. Neel, who many people knew had been suffering from terminal cancer, died just before Tierney’s work came out, and people said the timing of Tierney’s publications wasn’t a coincidence; a dead man can’t sue for libel. But Chagnon was alive, and Tierney’s claims made his life a living hell, largely because of the decision by Chagnon’s colleagues in the leadership of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to take Tierney’s book and run with it.

  The whole thing really took off just before Tierney’s work was published. In September 2000, two anthropologists who had long been on Chagnon’s case—Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel—wrote a letter to the heads of the AAA alerting them to Tierney’s soon-to-be-published work, summarizing the charges made against Chagnon and Neel, and sprinkling on lots of rhetorical pepper, including even an allusion to the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. The Turner-Sponsel letter opened by announcing, “In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption, [the scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology.” Turner and Sponsel then recounted Tierney’s most sensational claims, including that Neel had, “in all probability deliberately caused” an outbreak of measles in 1968 by knowingly using a bad vaccine among the Yanomamö to test an “extreme” and “fascistic” eugenic theory. Turner and Sponsel accused Chagnon of supporting Neel’s efforts by carrying out research that “formed integral parts of this massive, and massively fatal, human experiment.” Additional charges included “cooking and re-cooking” data, intentionally starting wars, aiding “sinister politicians” and illegal gold miners, and—perhaps the most inflammatory claim—purposefully withholding medical care while experimental subjects died from the allegedly vaccine-induced measles. This stuff made the charges against Bailey look like a schoolyard brawl, especially because those against Chagnon were coming from scholars in his own field.

  Before the Internet, cooler heads might have prevailed. (Insiders knew this was hardly Turner and Sponsel’s first attempt to pick at the big dog Chagnon.) Instead Turner and Sponsel’s juicy “tell all” letter wound up circulated all over the world virtually overnight, and of course the press didn’t dare sit on such a hot story long enough to find out what was true, much less learn the backstory. Most reporters simply reiterated the charges. A headline in The Guardian screamed, SCIENTIST “KILLED AMAZON INDIANS TO TEST RACE THEORY.” The quotation marks likely would be lost on much of the public.

  At this point, Tierney’s book wasn’t even out yet, nor was the New Yorker article he’d written summarizing his most horrifying claims, but thanks to press attention to the Turner-Sponsel memo, all hell broke loose. The AAA leadership decided to convene a highly publicized special session for the upcoming meeting in November 2000 in San Francisco, and the circus quickly grew so large that it started to require extra tents. Then the AAA leadership upped the ante, creating an El Dorado Task Force to look more deeply into Tierney’s claims. Although Chagnon was obviously being put on trial at the AAA, no one from the association ever issued him a formal invitation to defend himself. He was to be tried in absentia.

  In sharp contrast to the AAA, various other scholarly bodies rose up immediately to object to what they saw as obvious falsehoods in Tierney’s work and by implication in the Turner-Sponsel memo. Fact-based criticisms of Tierney were issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Societ
y for Visual Anthropology. The University of Michigan—where Chagnon had been a graduate student and then faculty member, and where Neel had done most of his work—also issued a devastating point-by-point rebuttal of Tierney’s most problematic claims.

  Why was the response of the AAA so anomalous? The answer can’t be that the AAA leadership remained unaware of factual challenges to Tierney’s claims, including devastating criticisms from Susan Lindee, a senior historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania who had written extensively about Neel. As soon as she got the Turner-Sponsel letter via e-mail, Lindee dropped everything except her class and ran over to Neel’s archives at the American Philosophical Society to see if she had missed something major. On the contrary, she immediately found extensive evidence that Tierney had gotten many things wrong. She issued an open letter saying so, and later reported her findings in person at the AAA meeting. Lindee found clear signs that the outbreak of measles had predated Neel’s arrival with the vaccines, so he could not have caused the epidemic, as Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel suggested. And although Tierney claimed Neel had tried to stop his colleagues from treating the Yanomamö so he could run a Nazi-like experiment to see who would live and who would die, Lindee found substantial evidence that Neel had done all he could to get ahead of the epidemic and save those who were already infected.

  Lindee had hardly been alone in quickly and publicly presenting evidence that challenged Tierney’s most shocking claims. Thomas Headland, a missionary and anthropologist with contacts in the region, gathered and presented additional evidence that the 1968 epidemic predated the expedition’s arrival. Historians of science Diane Paul and John Beatty presented evidence that—contrary to the implications that Neel’s funding from the Atomic Energy Commission meant he was up to an extraordinary bit of no good—about half of all federally funded American geneticists at the time had AEC funding. Lindee, Paul, and Beatty, historians with essentially no horse in this race, also challenged the portrayal of Neel as a Nazi-like eugenicist.

  Meanwhile, one scholar of the Yanomamö after another showed evidence that, contrary to the claims of Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel, Chagnon had not invented the Yanomamö reputation for ferocity, fighting, and abducting women. In spite of Tierney’s portrayal of Chagnon as the bringer of strife to a naturally Edenic people, various anthropologists and historians pointed to evidence for Yanomamö conflict and the kidnapping of fertile women dating back to long before Chagnon was even born.

  Yet in spite of all these clear declarations that Tierney’s book amounted to a house of cards, the AAA had gone full steam ahead. That meant the AAA essentially bolstered Tierney’s claims against Chagnon and the late Neel and provided PR for Tierney’s book and New Yorker article, too. The Tierney-inspired free-for-all conducted under the auspices of the AAA enabled “scholars” to stand up at microphones and debate whether Chagnon was a “swashbuckling misogynist” and a fomenter of violence, to claim that various American and European scientists had been responsible for spreading Ebola around Africa, and to use the AAA Web site to throw up utterly undocumented charges against colleagues.

  Some anthropologists did try to fight back. In 2003, Tom Gregor of Vanderbilt University and Dan Gross of the World Bank launched a referendum in the AAA explicitly criticizing Tierney’s book and the AAA El Dorado Task Force (and thus implicitly criticizing Turner and Sponsel) for misrepresenting the Yanomamö measles vaccine history in such a way as to undermine ongoing vaccine campaigns that otherwise had the potential to save vulnerable people all over the world. The referendum passed by a ratio of 11 to 1. Then in 2005, Gregor and Gross put forth another referendum to withdraw the AAA’s acceptance of the Task Force Report. The motion passed by a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. Impressive, particularly considering that by then a fair number of science-oriented anthropologists apparently had quit the AAA because of what its leadership had done to Chagnon, Neel, and science itself. (One of my closest friends in East Lansing, a scientific anthropologist at Michigan State, told me that he had dropped his AAA membership right after the AAA had tried Chagnon in the kangaroo court held at the San Francisco meeting.)

  But those referenda, coming fairly late in the game, couldn’t possibly undo the damage done to Chagnon’s and Neel’s reputations. Indeed, in some ways, they simply muddied the filthy waters more. When I came to the story, in spite of the AAA membership’s vote four years earlier to rescind acceptance of the Task Force Report—to essentially take back any hint of a guilty verdict—the report remained up on the AAA Web site, without any attached notice of the rescission. It included a number of ruinous (and completely unsupported) claims, including the allegation that Chagnon had paid his Yanomamö subjects to kill each other.

  As for Chagnon, it seemed pretty clear his career had essentially been halted by the whole mess. He was supposed to have retired with his wife Carlene to this house in the Michigan woods so he would have a place to hunt, to fish, to run his dogs, and to write his memoirs. But from what I was hearing, his memoirs seemed to be stalled. And perched on a bluff, reachable only down a long driveway, this house seemed to me less like a sanctuary than a fortress.

  • • •

  NOT LONG AFTER I ARRIVED, Nap Chagnon offered me a mug of coffee and a chair in his home office, and we sat down to start talking. I first reminded him of what I’d told him earlier regarding my standard interview method: We would talk, I would take notes, and then I’d return the notes to him. He could change them however he wished—add or delete anything—and I would use only what he approved as being on the record. At that, he started his story, and I started typing. Soon he paused to express skepticism that I could type fast enough to actually get down what he was saying. I read back to him exactly what he had said so far, including his skepticism about my typing speed. He raised his eyebrows and we really got down to business.

  Subjects like Chagnon—people who spent their lives as professional interviewers of sources—prepare in advance what they will tell you, and there is no way to redirect them. I knew this, and so I braced myself for waiting out what it was he felt I needed to know, before we could get to what I wanted to know. Chagnon’s story was by turns fascinating and complex, circular and gossipy, important and banal. I felt rather as if I was trying to drink from a fire hose, but I just kept typing and nodding, stopping him only once in a while to ask him to spell a name for me.

  Chagnon’s story tended toward the tribal; that is, it was pretty clear there were people on his side (good guys) and people against him (bad guys). The undercurrent included a story of social class, one that made a lot of sense to me. The physician Neel had been upper-crust and well established. He’d been a man who tended to keep his whites white even in the jungle, a man who had immodestly titled his autobiography Physician to the Gene Pool. Chagnon, by contrast, came from a large working-class family and had had to struggle to make his way into the world of universities. Chagnon seemed to have understood from the start that he’d never really be welcomed into the blue-blooded Ivy League anthropologists’ club, no matter how important his work became. I got the sense that, down in Venezuela, Chagnon had more readily related to the Yanomamö than to some of the American academics on the expeditions. He knew what it was like to hunt for your food, to get tispy with your chums around a campfire, and to sit around telling lewd stories.

  Chagnon completely immersed himself in life with the Yanomamö, quickly becoming vastly more conversant in their rich language than Neel ever would. Chagnon’s 1968 monograph tells of his hardships, his adventures, and his scientific findings, portraying neither himself nor the Yanomamö as heroes or saints. In fact, Chagnon admitted in that book to having been fooled by the Yanomamö during data collection. They took advantage of his inexperience to introduce all sorts of scatological jokes into the eager young anthropologist’s records, such that Chagnon lost months of work that had to be completely done over. The book tracks the lives of “the fierce people,” focusing in depth on
the forms of and motivations for fighting, including especially women-stealing. From it, I understood why Chagnon got pissed off when people referred to him as Neel’s assistant or graduate student. He had been neither, but more to the point, he’d been pretty damned ballsy to do the work he’d done out there in the name of anthropology. And he’d brought back an astonishing store of scientific data.

  As we talked, Chagnon fleshed out for me just how far back Terence Turner’s obsession with him went. Tierney’s book had hardly been the start of Turner’s attacks; it had simply been the best ticket Turner had ever gotten to ride. Now at Cornell, Turner had been trying for more than a decade to go after Chagnon with claims of bad behavior, and to some extent, he had joined with South American anthropologists, who (Chagnon said) didn’t appreciate Chagnon’s competition in “their” area. They had all made it harder and harder for Chagnon to get research permits in the area, until finally he had had to give up. That led to his decision to retire from the University of California–Santa Barbara (UCSB). He wasn’t interested in endless teaching and committee work without any prospect of getting back to the indigenous people he’d come to know and make known.

  A few years before he left UCSB, though, Chagnon had gotten hints about what might be coming from Tierney. A book rep from Norton had stopped by during a visit to another faculty member to warn Chagnon confidentially. After talking to the rep, Chagnon wrote to Neel and another colleague who was implicated—a Venezuelan physician named Marcel Roche—to warn them. Apparently in response to Chagnon’s letter, Neel pulled his relevant field notes and related materials, items that could prove conclusively what happened in 1968, and put photocopies of them all in a single folder marked YANOMAMA-1968-INSURANCE—insurance against lies. In 2000, that message-in-a-bottle from the late Neel was one of the key folders in the American Philosophical Society archives in Philadelphia that Lindee used to counter Tierney’s claims.