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By Steve Sailer
02/14/2013
The New York Times Magazine has a long article on the colorful author of The Fierce People
How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist
I wrote about the role of personality in cultural anthropology last fall.
Perhaps anthropologists who become interested in Darwinian perspectives tend to be more masculine than those anthropologists who eschew Darwin in favor of Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Gimbutas, or whomever? Besides Chagnon, I'd mention Robin Fox, Henry Harpending, and Carleton Coon. A delight in hunting might be a common denominator. (Darwin, himself, was an obsessive hunter when young, as was his cousin Galton.)
In general, the Darwinian tradition owes a lot to smart country boys, as I pointed out in a review of Edward O. Wilson’s novel, Anthill. In contrast, Darwinism tends to strike urban intellectuals as suspicious, probably unnatural.
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