The American Anthropological Association’s Witch Hunt

Last month, a paper by Alice Dreger was published by Human Nature about the scandal that erupted in 2000 surrounding the publication of Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado and the subsequent investigation by the American Anthropological Association. I very strongly recommend reading the paper, which I found gripping.

Before continuing, I want to note that although I know one of the main figures in the episode a little – I met Napoleon Chagnon when I was at UCSB – I have no special information about any of this, and my comments are based only on Dreger’s piece and other published materials.

So. In 2000, Patrick Tierney, who refers to himself as an “anthroplogical journalist,” published a book entitled Darkness in El Dorado: How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon. Shortly before the book was released, Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel wrote a memo to the leadership of the American Anthropological Association alerting them to what Tierney claimed in his book, including the charge (quoting Dreger, including her quotes of the memo):

the geneticist James Neel had “in all probability deliberately caused” an outbreak of measles by using a contra-indicated vaccine among the Yanomamö to test an “extreme,” “fascistic” eugenic theory.

Tierney similarly accused Napoleon Chagnon of (again quoting Dreger, including her quotes of the memo):

“cooking and re-cooking” data, intentionally starting wars, aiding “sinister politicians” and illegal gold miners, and purposefully withholding medical care while subjects died

I won’t reiterate all Dreger’s analysis here, but the short version is that individuals and organizations that checked the material in the book found there to be errors, falsehoods, misrepresentations and so on. (To take one example, here is some material from the National Academy of Sciences.) The consensus was that the book was factually incorrect, and the accusations were false.

Dreger focuses on this AAA investigation. One of the most damning pieces of evidence surrounding the AAA’s reaction to the book is an email correspondence between Sarah Hrdy and Jane Hill, who led the AAA Task Force checking Tierney’s claims. Hill, who begins her email with “Burn this message” – apparently Hrdy did not – calls the book “a piece of sleaze,” but an investigation of the charges made in the book was begun nevertheless. The subsequent investigation by the Task Force found two causes for complaint, one that Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanamamo harmed them and, second, the Task Force took issue with Chagnon’s association with a particular Venezuelan foundation. In 2005, the membership of the AAA voted to rescind acceptance of Task Force Report.

This short summary does only poor justice to Dreger’s piece, and even less justice to what happened in 2000, which was something of a media storm, with The New Yorker having a major role.

I do not have special information about this, as I indicated at the top of this post. But, why Neel and Chagnon? Why was the AAA so credulous, particularly given the ease with which the Tierney accusations turned out to be able to be refuted?

Dreger writes: “Gregor and Gross (2004) and others have argued that this whole Darkness mess was a battle between the scientifically-minded evolutionary anthropologists like Chagnon and anti-scientific postmodernists.” And, she says, “The central problem here is ideologically-driven pseudo-scholarship pretending it is real.”

The rest of this post is editorializing, so I encourage those not interested in my opinion to simply read the Dreger piece. For what it’s worth, here’s my take.

My guess is that Gregor and Gross are nearly right, but that it’s not just that Chagnon was scientifically-minded, but that he was biologically minded. In my experience, it has been, and to some (lesser) extent still is that case that attacks on social scientists who take a biological/evolutionary are still likely to be tolerated, even, it seems to me, consumed gleefully.

The same year Darkness came out, I read Stephen and Hillary Rose’s book, and was pretty astonished at the extent they were willing to distort the truth, even to the point of attributing a quotation to David Barash that made him appear to be a sexist. To take just one more example, I’m continuously surprised at the way that the Thornhill and Palmer work is (mis)portrayed. In their book, their clear statement about agnosticism about whether rape is an adaption is a byproduct – (“Although the question whether rape is an adaptation or a by-product cannot yet be definitively answered… ” p. 84) – is frequently portrayed as the claim that it is an adaptation. This claim was made by Elisabeth Lloyd – (“They begin by assuming that rape is a single trait, and that this trait is an adaptation,” p. 1542, italics original) – and recently repeated by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg (2009, p. 72). Yes, their quote of Lloyd is accurate, but it reminds me of Dreger’s quote about the AAA: “had Sponsel and Turner and the AAA leadership bothered to pause and check—had they elected to act like scholars and not like mere reporters— the journalists promoting Tierney’s work might have soon realized how wrong it was…” (I do have a personal connection to this. In 2007, I alerted MW to Lloyd’s error in her characterization of the Thornhill and Palmer position, but the quote was left in the paper.)

It seems to me that studying human behavior from an evolutionary perspective still carries, from the perspective of at least some audiences, a moral stain, which means that accusations, including those that carry massive representations, might be met with enthusiasm rather than condemnation.

Neel and Chagnon were obviously victimized in a way that goes well beyond being misquoted or misrepresented. And the work done by scholars to clean up the mess made by the AAA – including this excellent piece by Dreger – has helped to some degree in vindicating them and restoring their reputations.

Was the attack on Neel and Chagnon driven by antipathy toward sociobiology? Are attacks against social scientists given more credence – and less scrutiny – if the researcher in question is biologically-minded?

References

Leiter, B. & Weisberg, M. (2009). Why Evolutionary Biology is (so Far) Irrelevant to Legal Regulation. Law and Philosophy, 29, 31-74.

Lloyd, E. (2001). Science gone astray: evolution and rape. Michigan Law Review, 99, 1536–1559.

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