240 Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 In our interview, Jane Hill remarked to me, “we did not make an ethical accusation against [Chagnon]. But not everyone read it that way. I think [Chagnon] could have gotten a lot worse from us than he did” (Hill 2009). I am at a loss to explain what Hill is thinking here. Of course the Task Force made ethical accusations against Chagnon. And my conversations with Chagnon suggest, in fact, he could not have had it much worse from the AAA (Chagnon 2009). Ironically, Chagnon might well have been better off had the institution where he is emeritus, University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), done a formal investigation of scientific misconduct rather than letting the AAA go off and run amok. Francesca Bray, who was the Chair of Anthropology at UCSB in 2000, recalled to me that the AAA’s President Louise Lamphere called her to suggest that Chagnon’s department take some kind of action to investigate or censure him. I asked Lamphere to confirm or deny this on the record, and she has not. But Bray remembers quite clearly Lamphere’s call to her, at Bray’s home. Bray wasn’t sure how Lamphere even got her home number. Indeed, considering this extraordinary situation, Bray said to me, “I never thought I’d feel sorry for Nap.” She added that Chagnon “certainly could be rough, but as a colleague at UCSB he was (if often provocative) reliable, straightforward, funny, and generous in his support to colleagues even when he disagreed with their theoretical bent” (Bray to Dreger, personal email communication, October 9, 2009). If UCSB had mounted a formal inquiry, at least then Chagnon might have had a fair review as Neel did, posthumously, at Michigan, under the leadership of Provost Nancy Cantor and Ed Goldman in the General Counsel’s office (Cantor 2000). If done fairly, university investigations, even if mounted in response to questionable politics, can result in clear and convincing findings. Michigan’s outstanding response to Tierney matched in quality the University of Colorado’s top-notch work on Ward Churchill. (I’ll just note here, as a fascinating parallel to the accusations against Neel, that one of the findings of the Colorado team was that Churchill had wrongly accused John Smith of starting an epidemic among “virgin soil” Native Americans in 1616. Churchill’s claims against Smith stood in contradiction to clear evidence that the 1616 epidemic could not have been caused by Smith because Smith “left New England in 1614 and never returned” [Wesson et al. 2006:36].) Gregor and Gross (2004) and others have argued that this whole Darkness mess was a battle between the scientifically-minded evolutionary anthropologists like Chagnon and anti-scientific postmodernists. Although I agree that Chagnon was often despised for his hardcore sociobiology, in fact, the critics of Chagnon and Neel have tried hard sometimes to appeal to documentary evidence, seemingly admitting that documentary evidence can constitute irrefutable, unambiguous proof of their claims. But they have done so selectively, as no scholar should. Indeed, this history raises questions about when sloppiness and selective source use reaches the threshold of misconduct, especially when what is at stake is another scholar’s life’s work. Truly, the fundamental problem here is not a school of thought that denies stable facts or documentation. Postmodernism may have contributed to this mess, but it is not the central problem. The central problem here is ideologically-driven pseudo-scholarship pretending it is real.