And Turner continues to hope that some of the allegations made by Tierney will stick. Of course, Chapter Ten has plenty of its own problems. In it, for instance, Tierney makes much of the fact that Chagnon doesn't reveal the names of certain villages he studied. He should know where to find it, because he cites it in his own book. Chagnon will remain a controversial figure, if only because he's a sociobiologist.
Every theoretician makes assumptions about the nature of human nature.
My critics prefer to believe in a myth of a golden age in which people ran around in the forest acting altruistically. If the Yanomamo are an authentic glimpse at what human prehistory might have looked like, of course, Sponsel's theory is dead wrong and Chagnon's empirical observations prove it. And so, by the way, does the vicious behavior of Sponsel, Turner, and Tierney.