“Anthropologists go wrong, he wrote, when they ignore evidence that aggression among men in tribal societies is so highly rewarded that it becomes an inherited trait.”

“Yanomami life was one of ‘incessant warfare,’ he wrote. His data, collected over decades, he said, showed that 44 percent of Yanomami men over 25 had participated in killing someone, that 25 percent of Yanomami men were killed by other Yanomami men, and that men who killed were more highly esteemed and had more wives and children than men who did not. 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.’ Other anthropologists rejected these assertions as exaggerated and even racist, saying they could do harm to the tribe by casting it in a bad light. Many argued that human behavior was best explained not by genetics and evolution but by the social and natural environments in which people live.“

From “Napoleon Chagnon, 81, Controversial Anthropologist, Is Dead/His studies of an Amazon people made them famous, and put him at the center of a scholarly storm” (NYT).

Back at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s, I had 2 friends who took Professor Chagnon’s class and ended up majoring in anthropology. As I remember it, they loved him, and they got lots of us talking about anthropology at the time. But see how anthropology is politically incorrect and invites suppression? There was a major attack on him, a book excerpted in The New Yorker as “The Fierce Anthropologist,” which I won’t attempt to summarize right now, but my understanding is that Chagnon was ultimately vindicated.