[evol-psych] FWD: Yanomamo experimentation

["James M. Blaut" <70671.2032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-------------Forwarded Message-----------------

From:   "Timothy M. Hall", INTERNET:mccajor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To:     , INTERNET:evolutionary-psychology@xxxxxxxxxxx

Date:   9/19/100  6:57 AM

RE:     [evol-psych] FWD: Yanomamo experimentation


The following is the text of an open letter to the president and president-
elect of the American Anthropological  Association, in regard to possible
experimentation (perhaps to test certain sociobiological theories) on
the Yanomamo of Brazil.  While I suspect that the American public's
reaction will be rather less than the authors expect, the point remains
that something very wrong may have been done to thousands of individuals
in the name of social science.

-- Timothy Hall, UC San Diego

>>>>

To:  Louise Lamphere, President, American Anthropological  Association
(lamphere@xxxxxxx <mailto:lamphere@xxxxxxx)  Don Brenneis, President -elect,
American  Anthropological Association  (brenneis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:brenneis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx  )

From: Terry Turner, Professor of Anthropology,  Cornell University.
Head of the Special Commission of the American Anthropological Association
to Investigate the Situation of the Brazilian Yanomami,  1990-91
(tst3@xxxxxxxxxxx)

Leslie  Sponsel, Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Hawaii,  Manoa .
  Chair of the AAA Committee for Human Rights 1992-1996 (sponsel@xxxxxxxxxx)

In re: Scandal about to be caused by publication  of  book by Patrick Tierney
(Darkness in El Dorado. New York. Norton.  Publication  date: October
1, 2000) .


   Madam President, Mr. President-elect:  We write to inform you of an
impending scandal that will affect the American Anthropological profession
as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and
calls for action among members of  the Association .

  In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption it is
unparalleled in the history of Anthropology. The AAA will  be called upon by
the general media and its own membership to take  collective stands on the
issues it raises, as well as appropriate  redressive actions. All of this
will obviously involve you as Presidents of the Association-so the sooner
you know  about the story that is about to break, the better prepared you
can be to deal  with it .

  Both of us have seen galley copies of a book by Patrick Tierney, an
investigative journalist, about the actions of anthropologists and
associated scientific researchers (notably geneticists  and medical
experimenters) among the  Yanomami of Venezuela over the  past thirty-five
years.  Because of the sensational nature of its revelations, the notoriety
of the people it exposes, and the prestige of the organs  of the academic
establishment it implicates, the book  is bound to be widely read both
outside and inside the profession. As both an indication and a vector of its
public impact, we have learned that The New Yorker magazine is planning to
publish an extensive  excerpt, timed  to coincide with the publication of
the book (on or about October 1st) .

   The focus of the scandal is the long-term project for  study of the
Yanomami of Venezuela organized by James Neel, the human  geneticist, in
which Napoleon Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists
took part. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the
Yanomami but is not part of Neel-Chagnon project, also figures in a
different scandalous capacity .

   One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami
project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic  Energy Comissions
secret program of experiments  on human subjects James  Neel, the originator
and director of the project, was part of the medical and  genetic research
team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the  days of the
Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of  researchers
responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects. He
personally headed the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima
and  Nagasaki bombs on survivors,. He was put in charge of the study of the
effects of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later was involved
in the studies of the effects of the radioactivity from the experimental A
and H bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands on the natives (our colleague May
Jo Marshall has a lot to say about these studies in the Marshalls and
Neel's role in them) .

  The same group also secretly carried out experiments on human subjects in
the USA. These included injecting people with radioactive  plutonium without
their knowledge or permission,in some cases leading to  their death or
disfigurement ( Neel himself appears not to have given  any of these
experimental injections) .

  Another member of the same AEC group of human geneticists and medical
experimenters, a Venezuelan, Marcel Roche, was a close colleague of Neel's
and spent some time at his AEC-funded center for Human Genetics at Ann
Arbor. He returned to Venezuela after the war and did a study of  the
Yanomami that  involved administering doses of a  radioactive isotope of
iodine and analyzing samples of blood for genetic data .

  Roche and his project were apparently the connection that led Neel to
choose the Yanomami for his big study of the genetics of "leadership" and
differential rates of reproduction among dominant and sub-dominant males  in
a  genetically "isolated" human population. There is thus a genealogical
connection between the  the human experiments carried out by the  AEC, and
Neel's and Chagnon's Yanomami project, which was from the outset  funded by
the AEC .

   Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and  Chagnon, on their trip
to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and  probably started, the
epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds, perhaps thousands" (Tierney's
language-the exact figure will never be known) of  Yanomami .

  The epidemic appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and  more
widely spread, by a campaign of  vaccination carried out by the research
team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been
counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no
prior exposure to measles (exactly the Yanomami situation). Even among
populations with prior contact  and consequent partial genetic immunity to
measles, the vaccine was supposed to be used only with supportive injections
of gamma globulin .

   It was known to produce effects virtually  indistinguishable from the
disease of measles itself.  Medical experts, when  informed that Neel and
his group used the vaccine in question on the Yanomami, typically refuse to
believe it at first, then say that it is incredible that they could have
done it, and are at a loss to explain why they would have chosen such an
inappropriate and dangerous vaccine. There is no record  that Neel sought
any medical advice before applying the vaccine. He never informed the
appropriate organs of the Venezuelan government that his  group was planning
to carry out a vaccination campaign, as he  was legally required to do.
Neither he nor any other member of  the  expedition, including Chagnon and
the other anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine was used,
despite the evidence that it actually caused or  at a minimum greatly
exacerbated the fatal epidemic .

   Once the measles epidemic took off, closely following the  vaccinations
with Edmonson B, the members of the research team refused to provide any
medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on explicit orders from
Neel .

  He insisted to his colleagues that they were only there to observe and
record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as
scientists, not provide medical help .

   All this is bad enough, but the probable truth that  emerges, by
implication, from Tierney's documentation is  more  chilling .

  There was, it turns out, a compelling theoretical motive for Neel to want
to observe an  epidemic of measles, or comparable "contact" disease, or at
least an outbreak  virtually indistinguishable from the real thing-precisely
the  effect that the vaccine he chose was known to cause-and to produce one
for this purpose if necessary. This motive emerges from Teirney's
documentation of Neel's extreme eugenic theories and his documented
statements about what he was hoping to find  among the Yanomami, interpreted
against the background of his long  association with the Atomic Energy
Commission's secret experiments on human subjects .

  Neel believed that  "natural" human society (as it existed everywhere
before the advent of large-scale a gricultural societies and contemporary
states with their vast populations)  consisted of small, genetically
isolated groups, in which, according to his eugenically slanted genetic
theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for
"leadership" or "innate ability") would have a selective advantage, because
male carriers of this gene could  gain access to a disproportionate share of
the available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more
frequently than less "innately able" males. The result,  supposedly, would
be the continual upgrading of the  human genetic stock .

  Modern mass societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic
"herds" in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not  be eliminated by
selective competition and superior leadership genes would  be swamped by
mass genetic mediocrity. The political implication of  this fascistic
eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding
isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance,
eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for
leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females .

   A big problem for this program, however, was the  tendency, generally
recognized by virtually all qualified population  geneticists and
epidemiologists, for small breeding isolates to lack  genetic resistance to
diseases incubated in other groups, and their consequent vulnerability to
contact epidemics .

  For Neel, this meant that the emergence of genetically superior males in
small breeding isolates would tend to be undercut and neutralized by
epidemic diseases to which they would be genetically vulnerable, while the
supposedly  genetically entropic mass societies of modern democratic states,
the  antitheses of Neel's ideal alpha-male-dominated groups, would be better
adapted for  developing genetic immunity to such "contact" diseases .

  It is known that Neel, virtually alone among contemporary  geneticists,
rejected the genetic (and historical) evidence for the vulnerability of
genetically isolated groups to diseases introduced  through contact from
other populations. It is possible that he thought that  genetically superior
members of such groups might prove to have differential levels of immunity
and thus higher rates of survival to imported diseases .

   In such a case, such exogenous epidemics, despite the enormous losses of
general population they inflict, might actually be shown to increase the
relative proportion of genetically superior individuals to the total
population, and thus be consistent with Neel's  eugenic program .

  However this may have been, Tierney's well-documented account, in its
entirety,  strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic was in all
probabilty deliberately caused as an  experiment designed  to produce
scientific support for  Neel's eugenic theory.  This remains only an
inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no "smoking gun"
in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel .

  It is nevertheless the only explanation that makes sense of  a number of
otherwise inexplicable facts, including Neel's known interest in observing
an epidemic in a small isolated group for which detailed records of genetic
and genealogical relations were available, his otherwise  inexplicable
selection of a virulent vaccine known to produce effects virtually identical
with the disease itself, his behavior once the epidemic had started
(insisting on allowing it to run its course unhindered by medical assistance
while  meticulously documenting its progress and the genealogical relations
of those who perished and those who survived) and his own obdurate silence,
until his death  in February, as to why he carried out the  vaccination
program in the first place, and above all with the lethally dangerous vaccine .

   The same conclusion is reinforced by considering the objectives of the
anthropological research carried out by Chagnon under  Neel's initial
direction and continued support. Chagnon's work has been  consistently
directed toward portraying Yanomami society as exactly  the kind of
originary human society envisioned by Neel, with dominant males (the most
frequent killers) having the most wives or sexual  partners and offspring .

  If this pristine, eugenically optimal society could be  shown to survive a
contact epidemic with its structure of dominant male polygynists essentially
intact, regardless of  quantitatively serious population losses, Neel might
plausibly be able to argue that his eugenic social vision was vindicated. If
the epidemic was indeed produced as an experiment, either wholly or in part,
the genetic studies  on the correlation of blood group samples and
genealogies  carried out by Chagnon and some of his students thus formed
integral parts of  this massive, and massively fatal,  human experiment .

   As another reader of Tierney's ms commented,  Mr .

   Tierney's analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of the
uncontrolled ego, of  lack of respect for life, and of greed and
self-indulgence. It is  a further extraordinary revelation of malicious and
perverted work conducted under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission .

   Tierney's revelations begin, but do not end, with the  1968 epidemic .

  There are many more episodes and sub-plots, almost equally awful,  to his
narrative of the antics of anthropologists among the Yanomami. Enough  has
been said by this time, however, for you to see that  the Association  is
going to have to make some collective response to this book, both to the
facts it documents and the probable conclusions it implies.There will be a
storm in  the media, and another in the  general scholarly community, and no
doubt several within anthropology itself. We must be ready .

  Tierney  devotes much of the book  to a critique of  Napoleon Chagnon's
work  (and actions). He makes clear Chagnon has  faithfully striven, in his
ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the Yanomami, to represent them as
conforming to Neel's ideas about the Hobbesian savagery  of "natural" human
societies , and how this constitutes the natural  selective context for the
rise to social dominance and reproductive advantage of  males with the gene
for  "leadership" or "innate ability" (thus Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomami
"fierceness" and propensity for chronic warfare, and  the supposed
statistical tendency for men who kill more enemies to have more  female
sexual/reproductive partners). He documents how all these aspects of
Chagnon's account of the Yanomami are based on false, non-existent or
misinterpreted data. In other words, Chagnon's main claims about Yanomami
society, the ones that have been so much heralded by sociobiologists and
other partisans of his work, namely that  men who kill more reproduce more
and  have more female partners, and that such men become the dominant
leaders  of their communities, are simply not true. Thirdly and most
troublingly, he reports that Chagnon has not stopped with cooking and
re-cooking  his data on conflict but has actually attempted to  manufacture
the  phenomenon itself, actually fomenting conflicts betweenYanomami
communities, not once but repeatedly .

   In his film work with Asch, for example, Chagnon induced Yanomami to enact
fights and aggressive behavior for Asch's camera,  sometimes building whole
artificial villages as "sets" for the purpose,  which were presented as
spontaneous slices of Yanomami life unaffected by the presence of the
anthropologists. Some of these unavowedly artificial scenarios, however,
actually turned into real conflicts, partly as  a result  of Chagnon's
policy of giving vast amounts of presents to the villages that agreed to put
on the docu-drama, which distorted their relations  with their neighbors in
ways that encouraged outbreaks of raiding. In sum,  most of the Yanomami
conflicts that Chagnon documents, that are the basis of  his interpretation
of Yanomami society as a neo-Hobbesian system of endemic warfare, were
caused directly or indirectly by himself: a fact he invariably neglects to
report. This is not just a matter of bad ethnography or  unreflexive
theorizing: Yanomami were maimed and killed in these conflicts, and whole
communities were disrupted to the point of  fission and  flight.(Brian
Ferguson has also documented some of this story, but  Tierney adds much new
evidence). As a general point, it is clear that Chagnon's whole Yanomami
oeuvre is more radically continuous with  Neel's eugenic theories, and his
unethical approach to experimentation on human subjects, than appears simply
from a reading of Chagnon's works by themselves .

   Chagnon is not the only anthropologist mentioned in Tierney's narrative .

  Some of his students, like Hames and Good, are also dealt with  (not so
unfavorably). The F French  anthropologist, Jaques Lizot, also gets a
chapter. He has had nothing to do with Neel or Chagnon (in fact has been a
trenchant and cogent critic of their work), but he has an Achilles heel of
his own in  the form of a harem of Yanomami boys that he keeps, and showers
with presents  in exchange for sexual favors (he has also been known to
resort to young girls when boys were unavailable). On the sexual front,
there are also  passing references to Chagnon himself demanding that
villagers bring him  girls for sex .

   There is still more, in the form of  collusion by Neel  and Chagnon with
sinister Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain control of Yanomami lands
for illegal  gold mining concessions, with the  anthropologists providing
"cover" for the illegal mine developer as a "naturalist"  collaborating with
the anthropological researchers, in exchange for the  politician's
guaranteeing continuing  access to the Indians for the  anthropologists .

   This nightmarish story  -a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond
theimagining of even  a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef
Mengele)--will be seen (rightly in our view) by the  public, as well as most
anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on  trial .

  As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake
anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to
understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread
their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout
the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as
the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never  be allowed to
happen again .

   We venture to predict that this reaction is fairly representative of the
response that will follow the publication of Tierney's  book and the New
Yorker excerpt. Coming as they will less than two months before the San
Francisco meetings, these publication events virtually guarantee that the
Yanomami scandal will be at its height at the Meetings. This should give an
optimal opportunity for the Association to mobilize the membership and the
institutional structure to deal with it. The  writers, both emeritus members
of the Committee for Human Rights, have arranged with Barbara Johnston, the
present chair of the CfHR, that the open Forum put on by the Committee this
year be devoted to the Yanomami case .

  This seemed the best way to provide a venue for a public airing of the
scandal, given that the program is of  course already  closed.   With
Johnston's consent, we have invited Patrick Tierney  to  come to the
Meetings and be present at the Forum. He has accepted. He has also  agreed
to have a copy of the book ms sent to Johnston, for the  use  of the CfH .

We  have also tentatively  agreed with Barbara that the CfHR should draft a
press release, which the  President (either or both of  you)  could (if  you
and the Executive Board approve) circulate to the media .

  There are  obviously human rights aspects of this case that make the  CfHR
appropriate, but the Ethics Committee, the Society for Latin  American
Anthropology, and  the Association for Latina and Latino Anthropology should
also be  notified  and involved, separately or jointly. These obviously do
not  exhaust the  possibilities--- a lot of thought and planning remains to
be  done. Our  point is simply that the time to start is now .


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Subject: [evol-psych] FWD: Yanomamo experimentation
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