So much so that my own participation in the Academy has become an embarrassment. At best, his election to the NAS was a large moral and intellectual blunder on the part of members of the Academy. At the same time, his “scientific” claims about human evolution and the genetic selection for male violence–as in the notorious study he published in 1988 in Science–have proven to be shallow and baseless, much to the discredit of the anthropological discipline.

“By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities among whom he did research. He issued the below statement explaining his resignation: Sahlins states that he resigned because of his “objections to the election of Chagnon, and to the military research projects of the Academy.” Sahlins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. Last Friday, esteemed University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States’ most prestigious scientific society.

Napoleon chagnon