Freeman responds about Mead-Freeman controversy: on the ethics of skeptical inquiry - anthropologist Derek Freeman's response to James E. Cote's 'Much Ado About Nothing: The 'Fateful Hoaxing' of Margaret Mead' and Paul Shankman's 'Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Issue of Evolution,' 'Skeptical Inquirer,' November/December 1998

In a special section "The Mead-Freeman Controversy: A Fresh Look," the November/December 1998 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER carried two articles criticizing anthropologist Derek Freeman's arguments about Margaret Mead's Samoan research and her views on evolution. They were James E. Cote, "Much Ado About Nothing: The 'Fateful Hoaxing' of Margaret Mead, "and Paul Shankman, "Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Issue of Evolution. "In this issue we publish Freeman's response to those two articles, followed by brief replies from Cote and Shankman.

Derek Freeman

To be scientifically acceptable, skeptical inquiry must honestly and conscientiously take into account all of the relevant evidence. My meticulously researched book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research was published by Westview Press in November 1998. Yet, astonishingly, the November/December 1998 issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER gives great prominence to two uninformed and scurrilous articles written without knowledge of the extensive evidence that has been published for the first time in this book of mine. In asserting, on the utterly untrustworthy footing of these two articles, that "Freeman's conclusions are deeply flawed," the editor of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER has violated the fundamental principal on which all skeptical inquiry, if it is to be scientifically acceptable, has to be based: the principle that all of the relevant evidence has to be honestly and conscientiously taken into account.

That this violation of ethics of skeptical inquiry has occurred in a magazine published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal is greatly surprising, but, alas, frighteningly true.

Shankman claims to have demonstrated that "on the fundamental issues of biology, culture and evolution, Mead and Freeman are in substantial agreement."

This is a quite unhistorical and entirely false claim.

In my book I advocate the adoption of an interactionist anthropological paradigm that "takes note of the tested findings of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, and on this basis studies the social and cultural adaptations of the human species."

This is a stance that was never advocated by Margaret Mead at any time in her anthropological career. Evolutionary psychology has only emerged as a distinct discipline since her death in 1978.

After her researches in Samoa, Mead reached two demonstrably false conclusions. One was the totally unevolutionary conclusion that "human nature" is "the rawest, most undifferentiated of raw material." The other concerned what Mead, following Boas, called "the phenomenon of social pressure and its absolute determination in shaping the individuals within its bounds."

These are the principal assumptions of Boasian culturalism, and they were adhered to by Margaret Mead as long as she lived. Jean Houston (A Mythic Life, 1996, p. 247) reports Dr. Mead as having said to her in 1978: "I helped create the current paradigm, and I'm one of the few people who understands how it works. As long as that paradigm is working I am needed and I cannot die. I will die only when a newer paradigm comes along that I don't understand."

As the relevant historical documents show, I have, since the early 1960s, in all of my anthropological thinking, totally rejected the assumptions of Boasian culturalism. Dr. Mead died on November 15, 1978. Twenty years on, as I chronicle in my book, a new anthropological paradigm is indeed at hand.

On this crucially significant issue and in numerous other ways, Shankman has flagrantly misrepresented my anthropological views.

And to what end? Quite explicitly it is because he is intent on ad hominem denigration, as is clearly evident in his aspersion that I am merely "an intellectual speedbump in the way of our understanding of Samoa, the work of Margaret Mead and the state of anthropology today." Such is the critical thinking of Associate Professor Shankman.

Associate Professor Cote's principal charge against me is, that by selectively quoting from Mead's letter to Boas of March 14, 1926, I am guilty of what he calls (with idiosyncratic hyperbole) "a form of academy perjury"! If he had consulted my book he would have discovered that the text of Mead's letter to Boas of March 14, 1926 is published there in full.

In his assessment of the significance of Mead's letter to Boas of March 14, 1926, Cote relies on Orans's book Not Even Wrong (1996). In so doing Cote entirely fails to record Orans's conclusions that Mead's "profoundly unscientific" and "seriously flawed" work on Samoa is "filled with internal contradictions and grandiose claims to knowledge that she could not possibly have had," and, that Mead's writings on Samoa are "so mistaken" that "she is not even wrong"! Nor does Cote mention Orans's conclusion that in making her claims about "the acceptability of premarital sex for unmarried adolescent females" Mead "knew better," and that "rather than being misled she is misleading." In other words it is Orans's view that Mead's conclusions about adolescent sexual behavior in Coming of Age in Samoa and elsewhere involved deliberate falsification. These crucial omissions from Cote's article are the clearest possible indication of his lack of responsible scholarship. Furthermore, with his talk of "Freeman's attempt to bully his way into intellectual history," Cote, like Shankman, is primarily intent on ad hominem denigration.