Napoleon Chagnon has died. It is unfortunate that Chagnon is known to many for the fact that he became involved in a controversy triggered by the activism of a polemical journalist. It will surprise none of the readers of this weblog I agree with Alice Dreger’s take on the whole issue.
If you want to familiarize yourself with Chagnon, I would recommend Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists. It was written at the end of Chagnon’s life, so it summarizes his research and overall views.
I will be frank and state that I am much more skeptical of the generality of some of Chagnon’s inferences using an evolutionary psychological framework than I was 20 years ago. If Chagnon’s critics had focused more on the science everyone would have benefited. As it is, they went the easy route with political food fights.
Chagnon asked the right questions, even if I now judge that he came to some wrong answers. Such is science.
I didn’t know Napoleon Chagnon before, but what exactly do you mean with:
“If Chagnon’s critics had focused more on the science everyone would have benefited.”
and
“I am much more skeptical of the generality of some of Chagnon’s inferences using an evolutionary psychological framework than I was 20 years ago.”
From the article I can just agree with him, though I don’t know whether he made certain behaviours to “laws” which appear everywhere, but he was certainly right according to the article with assertations like:
“In his paper “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” published in the journal Science in 1988, Dr. Chagnon — though the surname is French, his family used an Anglicized pronunciation, SHAG-non — asserted that tribal societies were not typically peaceful, challenging a widespread view.”
and
“Dr. Chagnon dismissed as “Marxist” the widespread anthropological belief that warfare in tribal life was usually provoked by disputes over access to scarce resources.
“The whole purpose and design of the social structure of tribesmen seems to have revolved around effectively controlling sexual access by males to nubile, reproductive- age females,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Noble Savages.””
After all young, fertile, healthy and attractive females are always among the highest valued assets available to any human group and men in particular.
If females being traded, they are among the most valuable goods which can be exchanged or bought.
War and aggression are innately human and part of the human success story, because better adapted, more successful genes and behaviours can spread much faster if there is group competition for resources, but even for shere survival and the “conquest of females”.
Most certainly genocidal tendencies, resulting in the hunt for defeated survivors, to eliminate an enemy and threat once and for all are widespread and such incidences happened again and again.
You just have to look at Northern American Indians to prove Chagnons interpretation of the Yanomami right. They are no exception, but they are at one end of the normal variation. Exceptionally peaceful tribal people are the exception and usually more commonly associated with a region, assets and way of life which is simply not competitive and sought for. They being left alone in deserts, jungles and islands where nobody else wanted to go.
Some researchers took these surviving examples as representative for the human state, when they were absolutely not. The Yanomami on the other hand live in a competitive environment in which everything they have, including their females, is sought for by the neighbouring clans and tribes. The winning clans can expand at the cost of the losers – I think that’s the main precondition for a warlike culture like they have. For some hunter gatherers a successful war campaign is by far not as effective in a cost : benefit ratio (considering wounds and losses). Because, for example, they still have to feed the wive(s) and children with what they hunt and gather themselves. The females and children are sometimes not as productive resulting in less children and less wives.
Farming made this much more viable, so did specific gathering societies in which females can largely provide for themselves under the control of a single male protector who adds just specific goods to the union – most important protection and prestige for the children. So warlike behaviour, robbery of females, polygamy and individual aggression should correlate, in theory, more often than not, with independent female provison in a competitive environment on a worldwide scale.
In a lot of societies a taken female was not just the sexual partner and potential mother, but also a provider and workforce you could add to your group’s potential.
So there are different variables to consider for an outcome prediction, like success of large male group’s cooperation, female productivity and independent provision, cost : benefit ratio for violent robberys of females vs. trading and peaceful negotiations, demand for a groups females (f.e. some female slaves were more sought for in Islamic Arabia than others, pointing to trends for ethnic female characteristics of attractiveness) and goods. Unattractive females could make a group more isolated and protected, but at the same time more difficult to get accepted in alliances, get mercy or peace agreements in times of defeat. Because if nothing else, attractive females were always something valuable to offer.
@Obs – As I understand it, one of Napoleon Chagnon’s theories was that, because the more fierce, violent men get more women and have more children, the Yanomamö have evolved to be more violent and warlike, but this is now not supported by science. Not his fault, he worked in the pre-genomics era and it seemed like a plausible theory at the time, but properly conducted studies on heritability could have enabled the theory to be examined more scientifically. But I’m hazy and pretty ignorant on this – corrections welcomed.
Sp it was him with the “Inuit most peaceful, Yanomami most violent” comparison of tribals?
Interesting that we now know Inuits largely annihilated “Palaeo-Eskimo” and Vikings in Greenland as they advanced.
Also, how much about differences in aggression levels between human groups is really known?
But I wouldnt equal individual vs group aggression at all, the correlation might be in some extreme cases even inverted.
Because some key traits in war are male cooperation and discipline, not being the egoistic alpha male which constantly threatens other group members.
There was a theory doing the rounds for a while, being pushed by the ‘race realist’ crowd, that the Maori are prone to violence because they have a ‘warrior gene’, but that didn’t pan out, not surprisingly.
If at all they will find an increase (or decrease = more peaceful) of genetic variants in populations rather than “a warrior gene”, even though some of those variants might be present only in a specific population and absent in others.
But warlike cultures, even populations and individual aggression levels are in my opinion definitely not the same in every respect, though they can be correlated in some cases.