Word: chagnon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...missionary at one time near the geographical center of the Yãnomamö Indians, and knowing them as friends, I am aware of contradictions to Dr. Chagnon's conclusions. Here, simplified for brevity, are just a few: 1) hearing of female infanticide surprised the Yanomamo people; 2) wars seldom begin by wife stealing; 3) families of warlike men are not necessarily larger than those of less warlike...
Implied in Chagnon's findings so far is a notion startling to traditional anthropology: the rather horrifying Yãnomamõ culture makes some sense in terms of animal behavior. Chagnon argues that Yãnomamõ structures closely parallel those of many primates in breeding patterns, competition for females and recognition of relatives. Like baboon troops, Yãnomamõ villages tend to split into two after they reach a certain size...
Through wife capture and polygamy, aggressive Yãnomamõ males produce the most children. Says Chagnon: "What the Yãnomamõ are doing makes a good deal of sense if you view it as a strategy to maintain reproductive fitness." The winners in Yãnomamõ wars -the largest villages-have the highest birth rates and the most inbreeding...
Long Effort. In Darwinian terms, animals compete for the unwitting purpose of getting as many of their genes as possible into the next generation. "In primates and all mammals," says Chagnon, "internal social organization results from the breeding system, and there's no reason to believe it's not true of humans. It's possible that war and marriage make sense in zoological terms, and Darwinian theory is applicable to human behavior...
However tentative and guarded, Chagnon's work is significant because it aligns him with the sociobiologists-a loose collection of zoologists, geneticists and social scientists who argue that evolutionary animal behavior can explain human behavior today. In extending the earlier findings of the ethologists, whose ideas a generation ago became popular with Konrad Lorenz, the sociobiologists assert that despite man's centuries-long effort to insist that he is distinctively different from his fellow animals, one proper study of mankind is beast...