This exchange was shortly after publication of journalist Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused Chagnon of inciting warfare and spreading a deadly measles epidemic among the Yanomamö. In December 2000 I went to Chagnon’s home in Traverse City, Mich., to interview him. Chagnon was famous for his studies of the Yanomamö people of Amazonia and his use of biology, rather than culture, to explain the violent conflicts he observed among them. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has died at the age of 81.
