If true, these allegations would not only call these men's personal integrity into question but undermine the validity of their research, which has been influential in framing some popular assumptions about human evolution and behavior. Chagnon's work, in particular, has been widely cited as supporting the view that men are the engines of evolutionary improvement because they are inherently violent competitors for sexual access. In this view, the most aggressive "winners" in prehistory had the most sex with the most women, and passed on their superior fighting genes to the largest number of children. As a corollary, this theory says that our evolution was driven by hierarchical processes, so that the most "natural" human social system is one of dominance rather than cooperation.

The political implications of such views are obvious, and Neel and Chagnon have long come under fire because of the uses that could be -- and, in Chagnon's case, have been -- made of their work. Politics, Chagnon and his defenders say, is what is really behind Tierney's book and Turner and Sponsel's letter to the AAA. "The Turner letter is transparently an attempt to destroy a man's career and plow salt into the ruins," says journalist Andrew Brown, author of "The Darwin Wars." Chagnon himself called Turner and Sponsel's letter "extremely offensive" and said that Tierney, Turner and Sponsel have already accused him of many of these crimes, in print and verbally at academic meetings, repeatedly over the past decade. "This is just a more elaborate extension of their long vendetta against me," he said.