Word: chagnon
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...apology from Clinton on Aug. 17. He said, I did it, I lied, now let's forget it. He can obfuscate by blaming Starr all he wants, but it only delays the judgment day of Starr's report to the House, when all payments become due. PAUL R. CHAGNON Springfield...
None of these societies is Nirvana. Indeed, the anthropological record provides little support for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" and rather more for Thomas Hobbes' assertion that life for our distant ancestors was "nasty, brutish, and short." The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has written of his first encounter with the Yanomamo: "The excitement of meeting my first Indians was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage into the village clearing." Then "I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their...
...barbaric violence Chagnon documented is in some ways misleading. Though strife does pervade primitive societies, much of the striving is subtler than a club fight. Our ancestors, it seems, competed for mates with guile and hard work. They competed for social status with combative wordplay and social politicking. And this competition, however subtle, had Darwinian consequences. Anthropologists have shown, for example, that hunter-gatherer males successful in status competition have better luck in mating and thus getting genes into the next generation...
...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...
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...