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Approved February 2009 I. Preamble Anthropological researchers, teachers and practitioners are members of many different communities, each with its own moral rules or codes of ethics. Anthropologists have moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession. They also have obligations to the scholarly discipline, to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the environment. Furthermore, fieldworkers may develop close relationships with persons or animals with whom they work, generating an additional level of ethical considerations. In a field of such complex involvements and obligations, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the need to make choices among apparently incompatible values will arise. Anthropologists are responsible for grappling with such difficulties and struggling to resolve them in ways compatible with the principles stated here. The purpose of this Code is to foster discussion and education. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) does not adjudicate claims for unethical behavior. The principles and guidelines in this Code provide the anthropologist with tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all anthropological work.

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Tierney never claimed, then, that Chagnon was the sole cause of the violence he recorded. Tierney's research—and that of others, such as Brian Ferguson—does show that some of Chagnon's actions had the effect of promoting conflicts that he then attributed to the ferocity of the people he was studying. (Tooby writes, irrelevantly, that other pre-state societies have higher rates of violence, but he never refutes Tierney's argument that Chagnon's account of warfare among the Yanomamö was exaggerated.) Tierney pointed out that missionaries gave machetes to the Yanomamö, beginning in the '50s, and that it was a cause of warfare. But Chagnon's machete trade was distinctive, Tierney showed, and distinctly destabilizing. Chagnon provided machetes in exchange for the names of dead relatives, a violation of tribal taboos, and in doing so, he contributed to discord among the Yanomamö. Chagnon also gave some Yanomamö villages a large number of machetes at once in exchange for their participation in his research projects. In one case, Tierney reported, he created an alliance between two villages which resulted in a raid on a third village and a death. In another case, which Chagnon describes in his book Yanomami: The Fierce People, the act of choosing one village over another for collecting blood samples in exchange for machetes resulted in conflict. According to one tribal leader Tierney spoke to, Chagnon promised machetes to those who would take part in an alliance that Chagnon created in order to make the film The Feast.

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.

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.

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science, published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. In this work, Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Scientific progress had been seen primarily as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.

What is arguably the most famous example of a revolution in scientific thought is the Copernican Revolution. In Ptolemy's school of thought, cycles and epicycles (with some additional concepts) were used for modeling the movements of the planets in a cosmos that had a stationary Earth at its center. As accuracy of celestial observations increased, complexity of the Ptolemaic cyclical and epicyclical mechanisms had to increase to maintain the calculated planetary positions close to the observed positions. Copernicus proposed a cosmology in which the Sun was at the center and the Earth was one of the planets revolving around it.

Copernicus' contemporaries rejected his cosmology, and Kuhn asserts that they were quite right to do so: Copernicus' cosmology lacked credibility.

Hence Neel’s terrible experiments on the Yanomami, in a kind of grim downgrade of the Malthusian ethics of “Survivor.” He wanted to disprove the vulnerability of small, isolated groups to epidemics, seeking to show that though a disease such as measles might wreak awful havoc, his alpha-dominated males would be better adapted to evolve genetic immunity to these “contact” diseases. Many might die but the survivors would be of ever more superior stock. In their letter to the head of the Anthropological Association Turner and his colleague Sponsel write carefully that “Tierney’s well-documented account, in its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic was in all probability deliberately caused as an experiment designed to produce scientific support for Neel’s eugenic theory.”

We began this study assuming that, in Turner and Sponsel's words, we would be investigating 'an impending scandal' concerning flagrant wrongdoing by two celebrated scholars. Almost immediately, however, we discovered published evidence that the most serious allegations were false. Neel was not a eugenicist, did not cause the 1968 measles epidemic, and did not run nefarious experiments on unsuspecting human subjects. What he did was what any responsible physician would have done: vaccinate as many people as he could in a circle around the mission where the epidemic began. That these facts were available in the medical literature 30 years ago (Neel et al. 1970) made us wonder why Tierney had so badly distorted the facts. Perhaps it was because he had become an 'advocate,' to use his own words.

The first has to do with Tierney's use of an article by G. S. Wilson ("Measles as a Universal Disease," Amer. J of Diseases of Children 53: 219-23, 1962) to back up his claim that the Edmonston B measles vaccine is contraindicated. This is crucial to his broader argument that James Neel intentionally started a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo in 1968 by using this vaccine, and that he did this in order to observe its effect and test a eugenic theory.

Patrick Tierney's recent book Darkness in El Dorado makes very serious accusations of wrongdoing against Napoleon Chagnon, James Neel, and other scientists. Neel is accused of starting an epidemic among the Yanomamo in 1968 in order to observe its course as part of a secret experiment to test a eugenic theory. Chagnon is accused of aiding him, of fudging data, of staging events for his ethnographic films among other things, somehow causing the warfare that characterizes the Yanomamo.