Beastly or Manly?

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's first view of the Yanomamo Indians was partially obscured by a number of drawn arrows aimed at his face. The archers had huge wads of green tobacco jammed between their teeth and lower lips. Long streams of green mucus hung from their noses--the normal flow from a hallucinogenic drug that makes the normally aggressive Yanomamo even more touchy and menacing.

Though the Indians decided to spare Chagnon, who was then 24 and working on a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, he immediately lost all illusions about noble savages.

That was in 1964. Chagnon eventually stayed 15 months with the 15,000-member tribe, which is spread out over 75,000 square miles in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Since then, Chagnon, now a Penn State professor, has spent four years among the Yanomamo, learning the language and chronicling a culture built around persistent aggression--browbeating, goading, ritual displays of ferocity, fighting and constant warfare. One village he visited conducted 25 wars in 19 months against neighboring villages, and a quarter of all adult Yanomamo males die in battle.

Chagnon's findings are anything but quaint notes on a primitive people. For one thing, the Yanomamo culture challenges the reigning academic theory that primitive wars are mainly fought over land, water or some other natural resource. What makes the Yanomamo anthropologically interesting is that all their wars are waged to capture women or in retaliation for such abductions.

Like many primitive peoples, the Yanomamo practice female infanticide --on the grounds that males are more valuable to a people always at war. Yet infanticide sets up fierce competition for marriageable females, both within and among villages, and this in turn produces chronic warfare.

Implied in Chagnon's findings so far is a notion startling to traditional anthropology: the rather horrifying Yanomamo culture makes some sense in terms of animal behavior. Chagnon argues that Yanomamo structures closely parallel those of many primates in breeding patterns, competition for females and recognition of relatives. Like baboon troops, Yanomamo villages tend to split into two after they reach a certain size.

Through wife capture and polygamy, aggressive Yanomamo males produce the most children. Says Chagnon: "What the Yanomamo are doing makes a good deal of sense if you view it as a strategy to maintain reproductive fitness." The winners in Yanomamo wars --the largest villages--have the highest birth rates and the most inbreeding.

Long Effort. In Darwinian terms, animals compete for the unwitting purpose of getting as many of their genes as possible into the next generation. "In primates and all mammals," says Chagnon, "internal social organization results from the breeding system, and there's no reason to believe it's not true of humans. It's possible that war and marriage make sense in zoological terms, and Darwinian theory is applicable to human behavior."

However tentative and guarded, Chagnon's work is significant because it aligns him with the sociobiologists--a loose collection of zoologists, geneticists and social scientists who argue that evolutionary animal behavior can explain human behavior today. In extending the earlier findings of the ethologists, whose ideas a generation ago became popular with Konrad Lorenz, the sociobiologists assert that despite man's centuries-long effort to insist that he is distinctively different from his fellow animals, one proper study of mankind is beast.

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