by Alice Dreger
Everything became a bit clearer when I received a batch of photocopies from Sarah Hrdy, a primatologist who had been invited to join the task force but had declined. In the stack of documents Hrdy sent me, I found what was supposed to have been a confidential e-mail exchange dated April 2002 between Hrdy and Jane Hill, the chair of the task force. (To Hill’s credit, when I asked, she gave me permission to quote her message in my work.) A good friend of Hames and a supporter of Chagnon, Hrdy had written to Hill, after Hames resigned, to express concern over what was going on. Hill replied:
Burn this message. The book is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.
So this was the heart of it: The task force knew “the book is just a piece of sleaze,” but in their view, Chagnon had to be strung up to save anthropology from Tierney’s bad rap.
Meanwhile, another source gave me a tip that Louise Lamphere, then the president of the AAA, had actually suggested that Chagnon’s own university investigate or censure him. This was pretty extraordinary—the head of a scholarly association reaching out to push a university to investigate or censure a scholar even as other scientific societies were denouncing the accuser in chief. I wrote to Francesca Bray, who then was chair of Anthropology at UCSB, Chagnon’s academic home.
One remark from her pretty much said it all: “I never thought I’d feel sorry for Napoleon Chagnon.” Bray recalled to me that Lamphere had called her at home on a Sunday morning to suggest that UCSB might want to do something about Chagnon. Trusting her perceptions, I pushed her to give me a sense of how she saw Chagnon, after years of dealing with him personally. In a follow-up e-mail to me, she wrote this: “He certainly could be rough, but as a colleague at UCSB he was (if often provocative) reliable, straightforward, funny, and generous in his support to colleagues even when he disagreed with their theoretical bent.”
That matched my sense. And, boy, I never thought I’d feel sorry for someone like Napoleon Chagnon either.
• • •
THERE SEEMED ONE most logical place to present my research on the Tierney-Chagnon controversy: the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Because of the way academic conference cycles work, I had to propose to present my work at the December 2009 meeting—scheduled for Philadelphia, of all places—many months before I knew what I’d ultimately find. So sometime early in 2009, I wrote a relatively vague proposal that promised simply to report in December on my findings. As part of that proposal, I invited Terence Turner and Tom Gregor to provide formal responses. (This was Gregor of the Gregor and Gross duo behind the referendum rescinding acceptance of the Task Force Report.) I didn’t want to see Turner shut out of the panel as I had been at the National Women’s Studies Association panel about my work on the Bailey history. And for all I knew as I wrote my proposal in the spring, by the time of the December meeting, I might find evidence of serious ethics violations by Chagnon and Neel, which was why I wanted to be sure either Gregor or Gross could also, if necessary, answer for what they had missed. I promised Turner and Gregor that I would get my presentation paper to them at least ten days in advance, so that they could fully prepare their responses.
When the time came, in November 2009, to write it all up, I knew I also had to show what I had to Nap and Carlene, in part so that we could discuss how much they were willing to let me say about what had happened to their family because of all this. I realized that, during what might be a stressful visit, Nap and Carlene might both benefit from having a good friend along, someone who might help them remember the better times. So I asked Raymond Hames (who had been friends with them for over thirty years) to fly up from Nebraska and join us. I also figured that if I got into an argument with Chagnon—we did have a tendency to snap at each other over various points and issues of methodology—Hames could help me win. I’d pick up Hames at the Grand Rapids airport on the way north and drop him back at the airport on my return home.
I’d met Hames in person a few months earlier, at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Fullerton, California. HBES is the home organization of sociobiologists, or more specifically evolutionary anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. Chagnon had been one of the founders. Never in my life would I have thought I’d want to go to an HBES meeting, much less present at one. But after my first set of interviews with Chagnon, it occurred to me that he and I could both benefit from an HBES session about my work. I could run my initial ideas past the scientists most directly implicated by this project and try to encourage them to be more careful and more organized in defense, and Chagnon could come out of his Michigan exile and be back in Southern California with his old buddies.
Given that I still had a lot of work to do on the Darkness history in May, and given that I’d have only about a half hour to present at HBES, I proposed to relate there only the most basic outline of each controversy and then to point to the common themes in these matters. We would then have several scientists respond, including Chagnon, Mike Bailey, Randy Thornhill, and Craig Palmer. Chagnon and I coordinated our flights so that we would both leave out of Grand Rapids. From the start of the trip, his excitement over seeing numerous old friends made him giddy, and as a result, he was driving me nuts. First off, he kept joking to everyone that I was his assistant. When he told this to the TSA agent at Grand Rapids, I explained that I was actually a full professor at Northwestern’s medical school.
“I get very qualified assistants,” Chagnon loudly whispered to the TSA guy.
Then on the plane, Chagnon proceeded to tell me what an overly sensitive person might construe as a racist joke. It was kind of funny, but I told him to keep it down, at which point he got into a joking argument with me about my racist assumption that the joke was racist. Later, while talking with me about his controversy, he said rather audibly, “You know, if you think about it, there was a Jewish conspiracy at work in my case!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked him, turning red.
“Think about it!” he answered. “Hames, Gregor, and Gross—practically everybody who helped me is Jewish!”
When it came time to give my talk to the scientists assembled at HBES, I tried to summarize as best I could what the themes were in these controversies. I talked about the problems of personalities. I talked about identity politics being confused with truth. I talked about how working on sex makes you more likely to get in trouble than just about any other topic. I talked about how Galilean types—men and women who are smart, egotistical, innovative, and know they’re right—tend to get in trouble, especially when there’s a narcissistic nemesis around. I talked about the way Galilean types tend to believe that the truth will save them, and to insist on the truth even when giving up on it might reduce their suffering. I suggested that scientists be offensive in their techniques instead of just defensive; specifically I suggested they watch their language—not use trouble-attracting phrases like “good genes” as a stand-in for “genes that make one more reproductively fit.” I suggested they try to engage the audiences implicated by their work early in the process. I suggested they support each other when baseless charges were thrown about, and not assume that just because a colleague is engulfed in smoke, that he or she has actually set a fire.
Throughout the HBES meeting, both in my session and outside it, various scientists tried to tell me what they thought Chagnon should have done to protect himself. He should have sued. He should have had UCSB (where he was emeritus) defend him the way Michigan had defended him and Neel. He should have gone t
o the AAA and yelled at them in person. All these suggestions reminded me of the reaction people naturally have when someone gets cancer. We try to find a way to blame the individual, I suppose in a psychological attempt to tell ourselves it couldn’t happen to us—we would be more careful; we would not find ourselves in such a situation.
The truth was that there wasn’t a lot Chagnon could have done, because no one had been through anything this crazy before. Everybody had just improvised. At UCSB, three of Chagnon’s colleagues had mounted an exhaustive defense, and at the University of Michigan, the home base for Neel and Chagnon during the epidemic, the provost’s office had moved extraordinarily to issue a formal defense against Tierney. That defense had been largely organized and written by Ed Goldman, a lawyer at the university. Goldman explained to me that the University of Michigan had reviewed the facts in the matter and had announced the obvious conclusion: Tierney’s book was wrong—and insulting. Joel Howell, a university physician and historian of medicine (and friend of mine), had helped Goldman draft the rebuttal to Tierney, the historian Susan Lindee had helped, and Goldman—with the brilliance of a defense attorney—had taken the lead in writing the plain-language point-by-point defense that would emerge in the provost’s name. The University of Michigan had done what it could to set the record straight.
I knew that something just as extraordinary had happened for Chuck Roselli, a neuroscience researcher at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), just a year or so back, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had decided to go after Roselli for his studies of male sheep that prefer sex with other males. PETA got the gay and lesbian activist world all up in arms, claiming that Roselli’s work was intended to become the basis for a kind of eugenics that would prevent homosexuality in the human population. Even Martina Navratilova ended up going after Roselli in the press. Roselli’s university president received something like twenty thousand e-mails objecting to Roselli’s work and calling for his firing.
Luckily, OHSU had a public relations guy up to the challenge, a man named Jim Newman. Newman went into action, setting up an auto-response for the e-mails, answering with the facts about Roselli’s scientific work. If people replied to the auto-response, Newman answered, engaging them, to try to get them to understand the reality. Roselli himself did some media, but as he quickly started burning out from the craziness, Newman took over to some extent, giving extensive interviews and constantly bringing people back to the facts. Newman engaged one blogger after another, writing comments in his real name, pointing people to a page he had set up at OHSU aimed at challenging misrepresentations.
For months, Newman worked on this and virtually nothing else around the clock. Although the university supported his efforts, Newman told me, “For me, it was more about defending Chuck and Chuck’s research more than the university. We wanted to respond because of what they were saying about this researcher, and we have to defend researchers this way.”
You know what? Newman turned the damned thing around. He even managed to get some gay and lesbian activists to say they were angry at PETA for misleading them! When I interviewed Newman and asked him how he thought about the whole thing, it was clear that for him it was a matter of supporting a researcher who was just trying to do good science: “My concern, really, was that Chuck was spending a lot of his time doing this [dealing with the controversy] instead of his work. But at one point he was able to kind of say, ‘OK, I think I can get back to work.’” And that, to Newman, was a sign that they had won—because scientific research could now resume.
But how many Jim Newmans were there out there? One, so far as I knew. One Jim Newman, one Ed Goldman. Well, also one Trudy Turner, one Susan Lindee, one Tom Gregor, one Dan Gross. It was true that Chagnon had not had the benefit of all the things that might have helped. It was true the AAA had gone utterly out of control. But it was also true there were examples of good people who had resisted and fought well for true scholarship in many of these messes. I tried, in the little time I had, to impress this upon the scientists at HBES. I said they had to stand up, for themselves, but especially for each other and for the facts. They had to ask to have Ed Goldmans and Jim Newmans available, and they had to call on the Susan Lindees and Alice Dregers as necessary to see that science was not abused in the service of identity politics (and personal vendettas) run wild.
After I finished my prepared spiel, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill each talked a little about what they thought mattered. Mike Bailey got up and said that he agreed with me that scientists should be offensive—and he clarified that to mean that offending people was a sign of doing important work. (I groaned; exactly not what I meant, but there was that Galilean personality.) Chagnon then got up. He started by talking a little more about what he had been through. And as he did, as seemed inevitable, he started to do that choking up thing again. Which of course choked me up, yet again.
“Damn it,” he said to me in the elevator afterward, “every time I get near you, Dreger, I start bawling like a girl!”
“But, Dr. Chagnon,” I answered, mock-sniffling, “that’s my claim to fame.”
Indeed, his emotion had been noticeable. Several scientists came up to me at the banquet that evening and told me how intense it had been to see the ultimate alpha male choke up like that. “I didn’t really understand what he’d been through,” one said to me. “I guess I still don’t understand it, but it must have been really bad.”
By the time months later, when I went up to Traverse City, this time with Ray Hames to tell Nap and Carlene what I planned to say at the AAA, I knew exactly how bad it had been. But this time there were no tears. We did a fairly clinical run-through of my work. Nap caught one date error, the only item I had not had time to fact-check before leaving home. And we talked about what the AAA session might be like.
At one point in the visit, I had to dip out of our group conversations to take a call. I sheepishly explained to Nap that a fact-checker from the New Yorker needed to verify some material. I’d been helping a writer there with a piece on intersex.
“By all means,” Nap said to me, with understandable sarcasm in his voice. “Imagine if they had bothered to fact-check Tierney’s story on me.”
• • •
ON THE PLANE to Philadelphia to present my findings at the AAA in December 2009, it suddenly became clear I was coming down with a serious respiratory virus. As we taxied from runway to gate, I kept doing the math hoping that if it was the H1N1 flu (which was going around that year), there was no way I could have exposed Nap to it a few weeks before. With the significant respiratory problems he had developed from years spent sitting around cooking fires and smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, the flu might do him in.
By the time of my AAA session the next day, I had started to lose my voice, and I felt increasingly feverish. The adrenaline that came with the session helped a bit. Although I almost never read a paper for a presentation, here I had no choice but to read, to make sure that the work I presented was exactly what I had provided to Turner and Gregor ten days in advance, so that there was no chance they would feel ambushed. Because of what I’d found, the AAA audience had no trouble staying interested. When I finished, Gregor and Turner each got the fifteen minutes at the podium I’d arranged. (Turner spent much of his allotted time complaining that I’d given him only fifteen minutes.) Then the moderator, a well-respected anthropologist peacemaker whom I’d chosen knowing he’d be fair, did exactly what I’d asked of him: During the discussion period, he called first on anyone I had criticized who now wanted to speak. Although by the end I wanted nothing more than to go to bed, I stuck around to talk to the reporters from Science, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Inside Higher Ed, who were looking to get copies of my paper.
By the time I got home the next day, I had a full-blown fever and a terrible cough, a cough that got worse and worse over the next several days. (It turned out to be pertussis. My doctor had forgotte
n to vaccinate me.) As I fell in and out of sleep, I kept thinking back to the one hostile question I’d gotten at HBES, from a man who accused Bailey of being offensive in his work. He had asked me, near the end of our session, whether I thought that perhaps the Galilean personality I was describing also applied to me. I had answered promptly: yes.
And now I knew, better than ever. Yes. Pugnacious, articulate, politically incorrect, and firmly centered in the belief that truth will save me, will have to save us all. Right in the fight but never infallible. Yes, I thought: In Chagnon, I have met the ghost of Galileo. And he is me. He must be all of us.
CHAPTER 7
RISKY BUSINESS
AS I LAY about recovering from whooping cough in late 2009, reflecting on all I had learned in my journeys, I had a vision of how much easier social justice work around scientific research might become if it were consistently evidence-based. Scientists, the vast majority of whom I now understood to care deeply about social justice, would have to respect evidence-based activism. Maybe if everybody just agreed to discuss what we really knew—rather than imagining, assuming, and suspecting based on loyalties to particular theories or persons—disputes could be sorted out peaceably. Researchers and advocates could come together, look at the facts, and—as in the case of climate change, AIDS research, and intersex care—the great majority of researchers and activists would agree on what had happened and what needed to happen. The light of many minds would show a way forward. After carefully investigating and getting reasonable people to see what had actually happened in the Bailey and Chagnon cases, I felt downright optimistic that if we all simply agreed to talk through what we knew and didn’t know, true cases of injustice would be relatively easy to spot, expose, stop, and ultimately prevent.