[ED NOTE: The following EDGE event took place April 29th in Cambridge. It's not
hyperbole to say that it's one of the most significant events in our sixteen
year history. Great reading and viewing, all 30,000 words and several hours of
video. Get busy! -JB]
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"Napoleon Chagnon is a Living World Treasure. Arguably our greatest
anthropologist." - Richard Dawkins, from the Introduction
NAPOLEON CHAGNON: BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT
An Edge Special Event
Napoleon Chagnon, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, Daniel C. Dennett, David Haig
Introduction by Richard Dawkins
Permalink: http://www.edge.org/conversation/napoleon-chagnon-blood-is-their-argument
[Thanks to Steven Pinker for initiating and facilitating this Edge Special Event
with Napoleon Chagnon, the last of the great ethnographers.]
THE REALITY CLUB: Lionel Tiger, Paul Seabright, Dominic Johnson, Azar Gat,
Daniel Everett
----------
INTRODUCTION
By Richard Dawkins
Chagnon's extraordinary body of work will long be mined, not just by
anthropologists but by psychologists, humanists, litterateurs, scientists of all
kinds: mined for . . . who knows what insights into the deep roots of our
humanity?
Napoleon Chagnon is a Living World Treasure. Arguably our greatest
anthropologist, he is brave on two fronts. As a field worker in the Amazon
forest he has lived, intimately and under conditions of great privation, with
The Fierce People at considerable physical danger to himself. But the wooden
clubs and poison-tipped arrows of the Yanomamö were matched by the verbal clubs
and toxic barbs of his anthropologist colleagues in the journal pages and
conference halls of the United States. And it is not hard to guess which
armamentarium was the more disagreeable to him.
Chagnon committed the unforgivable sin, cardinal heresy in the eyes of a certain
kind of social scientist: he took Darwin seriously. Along with a few friends and
colleagues, Chagnon studied the up-to-date literature on natural selection
theory, and with brilliant success he applied the ideas of Fisher, Hamilton,
Trivers and other heirs of Darwin to a human tribe which probably ran as close
to the cutting edge of natural selection as any in the world. It is sobering to
reflect on how unconventional a step this was: science bursting into the
quasi-literary world of the anthropology in which the young Chagnon was trained.
Still today, in many American departments of social science, for a young
researcher to announce a serious interest in Darwin's dangerous idea—even an
inclination towards scientific thinking at all—can come close to career suicide.
In Chagnon's case the animosity spilled over from mere academic disagreement to
personal slander, which was not merely untrue but diametrically opposite to the
truth about this ethnographer and his decent and humane relationship with his
subjects and friends. The episode serves as a dark lesson in what can happen
when ideology is allowed to poison the well of academic study. While it is
thankfully in the past, it blighted Chagnon's career, and I don't know whether
the lesson for social science has been adequately learned.
Chagnon came along at just the right time for the Yanomamö and for scientific
anthropology. Encroaching civilisation was about to close the last window on a
tribal world that embodied vanishing clues to our own prehistory: a world of
forest "gardens", of kin-groups fissioning into genetically salient sub-groups,
of male combat over women and trans-generational revenge, complex alliances and
enmities; webs of calculated obligation, debt, grudge and gratitude that might
underlie much of our social psychology and even law, ethics and economics.
Chagnon's extraordinary body of work will long be mined, not just by
anthropologists but by psychologists, humanists, litterateurs, scientists of all
kinds: mined for . . . who knows what insights into the deep roots of our
humanity?
In his unique role as salon-host and impresario for science, John Brockman has
performed what will come to be seen as an enduring service, by bringing Napoleon
Chagnon together with four of today's leading Third Culture intellectuals:
Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and David Haig. Separately and
in teams, these penetrating minds, combining deep scholarship with a rare
ability to communicate and entertain, converse with Napoleon Chagnon and shed
and reflect light on the life-work of a great anthropologist and a brave man.
—Richard Dawkins
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PART ONE: NAPOLEON CHAGNON & STEVEN PINKER (WITH DANIEL C. DENNETT & DAVID HAIG)
"I first walked into the Yanomamö village thinking I was going to do the
perfunctory one-year field research or maybe less, go back to my university,
write my doctoral dissertation, publish a book maybe, after two or three years
of thinking about it, then return to the tribe ten years later and do the
expected thing about, "Woe is me, what has the world and technology done to my
people?" But the minute I walked into my first Yanomamö village I realized that
I was witnessing a really precious thing, and I knew I would have to come back
again and again. And I did." EDGE Video [1:00:58]
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DISCUSSION: CHAGNON, PINKER, DENNETT, HAIG
Edge.org
JUne 10, 2013
http://www.edge.org
"The Yanomamö are very valuable now as a commodity. They are the largest most
interesting and romanticized tribe in the entire Amazon basin, maybe in the
world. They live in an area that is threatened by ecological destruction, so
there are people who are interested in saving the rain forest, and people who
are interested in saving the natives. And these groups collaborate with each
other. Everybody wants the Yanomamö in their portfolio." EDGE Video [30:43]
-----------
PART TWO: NAPOLEON CHAGNON & RICHARD WRANGHAM (WITH DANIEL C. DENNETT & DAVID
HAIG)
"What I've discovered is that life was very much filled with terror of your
neighbors, constantly in a position—sort of like Hobbes’ argument—foul weather
is not a shower or two but a tendency thereto for months on end. So you always
have your eye open to the frontier and try to make sure that the guys out there
are on the other side of the moat." EDGE Video [33:52]
----------
DISCUSSION: CHAGNON, WRANGHAM, DENNETT, HAIG
Big villages lord over small villages. So if you're seeking an ally who will
protect you from the buggers up the hill who are bigger than you, you're at a
disadvantage because in order to get allies, you've got to give women to them.
It’s an economics game where the smaller village has to pay up front for the
privileges of the alliance, and the bigger village tends to default on many of
its agreements. So big villages tend to exploit small villages. It's always a
good idea to live in a big village; however, it's like living in a powder keg.
EDGE Video [20:47]
----------
NAPOLEON CHAGNON is a renowned anthropologist who is most widely recognized for
his study of the Yanomamö tribes in the Amazon. He is a professor of
anthropology at the University of Missouri; Author, Noble Savages: My Life Among
Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.
STEVEN PINKER, psychologist, is Johnstone Family Professor, Department of
Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Better Angles of Our Nature: Why
Violence Has Declined; The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
RICHARD WRANGHAM is Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, Curator of
Primate Behavioral Biology at Harvard University; Author, Catching Fire: How
Cooking Made Us Human; (coauthor) Demonic Males: Apes, and the Origins Of Human
Violence.
DANIEL C. DENNETT is Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, & Co-Director,
Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Intuition Pumps and
Other Tools for Thinking; Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life.
DAVID HAIG, evolutionary geneticist/theorist, is Associate Professor of Biology
in Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, with an interest
in conflicts and conflict resolution within the genome, and genomic imprinting
and relations between parents and offspring; Author, Genomic Imprinting and
Kinship.
RICHARD DAWKINS, evolutionary biologist, is Emeritus Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, The Greatest Show on Earth; The
Selfish Gene. He was recently ranked #1 in Prospect Magazine's poll of "World
Thinkers 2013".
----------
THE REALITY CLUB
Lionel Tiger: "This began as an exhilarating exercise celebrating the verve and
intelligence of a colleague and friend who has made serious contribution to
understanding human beings. However it unexpectedly veered to a mood of rue and
woe about the stolid incompetence of countless disciplineless scholars as they
survey the human condition." ...
Paul Seabright: "Probably no single phrase cost Napoleon Chagnon more enemies
than when he wrote that the Yanomamo live « in a state of chronic warfare ».
More than four decades on, the evidence that many human societies without a
state have lived with high levels of violence over long periods is now very
strong." ...
Dominic Johnson: "Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states
because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the
conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition
of anarchy." This was Kenneth Waltz, one of the fathers of international
relations, writing about the behavior of nation-states in the international
system. But it could just as well have been written about the Yanomamo, the
"fierce people" of the Amazon." ...
Azar Gat: "Napoleon A. Chagnon's made a seminal and supreme contribution to both
anthropology and the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of
human society. I shall not repeat the lavish praises justly bestowed on his
life's work, to which we are all hugely indebted. Instead, I would like to point
out one misstep he took in the course of his controversies on the causes of
primitive warfare, which somewhat diverted the argument in a wrong direction
with respect to both that subject and the actual meaning and significance of
evolutionary theory."
Daniel L. Everett: "...What impressed me about Nap's writing was what has
impressed generations of anthropologists, students, and other intellectuals—his
effortless interweaving of personal experience with rigorous ethnographic
description of the people he was living among, the "sons of god" (what
"Yan–omam" means in English, according to one Yanomam, Davi Kopenawa whom I met
many years ago, though I haven't seen this definition elsewhere)." …
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Follow EDGE on Twitter: https://twitter.com/edge
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IN THE NEWS
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THIS WEEK
Fareed Zakaria's 6 favorite books
June 2, 2013
1. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin, $20). A monumental
achievement. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, draws on 5,000 years of
historical evidence to explain in fascinating detail how violence has declined
across human history. More broadly, he shows that human beings have learned to
treat each other better in general.
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16).
Most "idea books" are bloated essays; this one, from a Nobel Prize–winning
economist, is worth reading all the way through. Kahneman offers a fascinating
set of ideas about how human beings think and reason, for better and worse.
3. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (Vintage, $16). A brilliant mixture of
political philosophy and sociology. According to Haidt, two reasonable people
can find themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum based on the
relative importance each assigns to just six values. The book explains why we
embrace certain ideologies better than any other I've read. . . .
[ED NOTE: Pinker, Kahneman, and Haidt on EDGE:
Steven Pinker: "A History of Violence" EDGE Master Class 2011
http://is.gd/LKqMzj
Daniel Kahneman: "A Short Course In Thinking About Thinking" EDGE Master Class
2007 http://is.gd/WRUYVw
Jonathan Haidt EDGE Seminar "A New Science of Morality" http://is.gd/piu6w8]
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FOLHA DE S.PAULO
Beauty and Science
June 6, 2013
By Hélio Schwartsman
Every year, the Edge.org website, run by a group of scientists and intellectuals
in the U.S., presents a provocative question the responses to which are then
collected in a book that is invariably instructive and surprising, since the
contributions are heavyweights from various fields of academia and the world of
the arts. "What is your favorite explanation is that deep, elegant or
beautiful?" was the question proposed in 2012. Almost 200 responses are
collected in the volume This Explains Everything, launched earlier this year.
One of the texts that particularly caught my attention is the novelist and
philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, she remembers that there is in
principle no connection between the fact that a theory is beautiful and it is
true, and yet we tend to use aesthetic criterion for deciding between competing
explanations. ...
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