Darkness in El Dorado

Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon is a book written by author Patrick Tierney in 2000 that accuses geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, among other allegations, of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo people of the Amazon Basin and conducting human research without regard for their subjects' well-being while conducting long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians that live in the border area between Venezuela and Brazil.

The book was nominated for a National Book Award. Its publication provoked scandal, outrage and public hearings, and has been a source of significant academic controversy. These allegations were also explored in the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe by Brazilian director José Padilha.

Tierney's accusations against anthropologist Chagnon were accepted as fact by the New York Times book reviewer John Horgan and prompted Chagnon's early retirement. But at least one reviewer, the anthropologist John Tooby, saw the book as a work of "fiction", despite the massive documentation, interviews numbering into the hundreds, academic articles cited, successful Freedom of Information Act requests, and his own visits to the Yanomamö. Reviewer John Tooby refers to its "sensation allegations", rooted out by fact checkers. Tooby calls Tierney "comically self-agrandizing", presenting as his own discoveries those of others.

Tierney's book was criticized by a number of professional associations, including the a statement from the president of the National Academy of Sciences, who deemed it "critical to correct several statements that are misleading or demonstrably false" (and whom Tierney implicated in unethical medical studies during the American occupation of Japan), and the American Society of Human Genetics (for its charges against Neel, though it declined to address the accusations against Chagnon). The American Anthropological Association commissioned an "El Dorado Task Force" to inquire into allegations made in Tierney's book: the final report, published in 2002, determined that Neel's use of measles vaccine was beneficial and had saved many lives, but was critical of Chagnon's professional ethics. However, in 2005 the Association's membership voted to rescind this report (admitting that "the investigating Task force ignored basic principles of fairness and due process, yet found its targets guilty of specific acts of inappropriate conduct including, in Chagnon’s case, violating the code of professional ethics").

Claims

• That Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel directly and indirectly caused a genocide in the region through the introduction of a live virus measles vaccine.
• That the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Commission's secret program of experiments on human subjects.
• That Chagnon's account of the Yanomami are based on false, non-existent or misinterpreted data, and that Chagnon actually incited violence among them.
• That French researcher Jacques Lizot, protégé of anthropology icon Claude Lévi-Strauss, engaged in sex acts with Yanomamo boys (including oral and anal sex, as well as having the boys masturbate him).
• That Kenneth Good married a Yanomami girl who was barely entering her teens.

Investigation and results

Patrick Tierney is an American freelance writer based in Pittsburgh.

In 2000, Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, which accused geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo people, among other damning allegations. This work received good reviews and was nominated for a National Book Award. Tierney's accusations against anthropologist Chagnon were accepted as fact by the New York Times book reviewer John Horgan and prompted Chagnon's early retirement. However, at least one reviewer, John Tooby, saw the book as a work of "fiction", despite the massive documentation, interviews numbering into the hundreds, academic articles cited, successful Freedom of Information Act requests, and Tierney's own visits to the Yanomamo people.

Several investigations of the veracity of Tierney's allegations against Neel and Chagnon in Darkness in El Dorado were conducted by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and outside evaluators. Tierney's book was condemned by a number of academic researchers and professional associations, including the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Society of Human Genetics, The ultimate conclusion was that the allegations made by Tierney against Neel and Chagnon were fraudulently presented.

Tierney's charges against Neel and Chagnon were initially investigated by the Peacock Commission, later known as the El Dorado Task Force, formed by the AAA. It supported Tierney and questioned the conduct of Neel and Chagnon; its findings were accepted by the AAA board in May 2002.

Because of dissension within the organization, the AAA subsequently requested an outside investigative team, which determined in a preliminary report that the "book appears to be deliberately fraudulent", and that "Patrick Tierney has misconstrued or misrepresented his primary sources to a considerable degree in an effort to support his allegations." The investigators concluded it was not Chagnon who committed any wrongdoing, but Tierney, who fraudulently altered evidence to support a story he either at best imagined or at worst manufactured.

In 2004 Thomas A. Gregor and Daniel R. Gross published their investigation of the AAA's behavior, and in 2005 called for the membership of the AAA to rescind the organization's support of the book. It passed overwhelmingly, 846 to 338.

A detailed investigation of Tierney's charges by a panel set up by the University of Michigan found the most serious charges to have no foundation and others to have been exaggerated. Almost all of the lengthy allegations made in Darkness in El Dorado were publicly rejected by the Provost's office of the University of Michigan in November 2000. Sponsel and Turner, the two scientists who originally touted the book's claims, admitted that their charge against Neel "remains 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." Reviewer John Tooby, through fact checking, characterized the book as a work of "fiction", despite Tierney's massive documentation, interviews numbering into the hundreds, academic articles cited, successful Freedom of Information Act requests, and Tierney's own visits to the Yanomamö. Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year of research that Tierney's claims were false and the AAA was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

The AAA has since rescinded its support of the book and acknowledged fraudulent and improper and unethical conduct by Tierney. The association admitted that "in the course of its investigation, in its publications, in the venues of its national meetings and its web site, [it] condoned a culture of accusation and allowed serious but unevaluated charges to be posted on its website and expressed in its newsletter and annual meetings" and that its "report has damaged the reputations of its targets, distracted public attention from the real sources of the Yanomami tragedy and misleadingly suggested that anthropologists are responsible for Yanomami suffering".

The accusations of medical improprieties contained in Tierney's book were investigated by the Medical Team of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and found to be false.

Since the controversy over Darkness in El Dorado, Tierney's profile has been low and he has rarely appeared in public to defend it.

In a 2011 peer-reviewed publication in the Journal Human Nature, Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science and an outsider to the debate, concluded that Tierney's claims were largely false and that AAA was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods while failing to protect "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges".

Sources

• Borofsky, Robert (2005). Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-93856-4.
• Pels, Peter (4 June 2005). "' Where There Aren't No Ten Commandments': Redefining Ethics during the Darkness in the Darkness in El Dorado Scandal". In Pels, Peter; Meskell, Lynn (ed.). Embedding Ethics: Shifting Boundaries of the Anthropological Profession. Berg. pp. 69–99. ISBN 978-1-84520-047-3. Retrieved 30 August 2013.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)

External links

• Darkness in El Dorado at Google Books
• The controversy and the broader issues at stake, Chapter one of Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It (California Series in Public Anthropology) (2005) R. Borofsky et al. University of California, Berkeley ISBN 0520244044
• A comprehensive repository of links to relevant documents compiled by Douglas Hume
• Chapter One of Darkness in El Dorado (requires login)