Dick Sobsey: So I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the Jukes
other than there was this notion of
pauperism. And pauperism involved being poor
and clearly you can see this as kind of an assult on
the poor and it's another story. But
a lot of these people were cement miners
and, during, about that time
what they mined was natural cement.
There was a discovery of Portland cement which was not nearly as good
as natural limestone cement. But the problem with cement that was used
prior to that time, which still is the best cement in world,
it's called Rosendale cement - I'll advertise for it, help my
Juke brothers out - 
is that it takes about two weeks to harden. Portland cement
or artifical cement that was developed about that time, you could pour it
and you could work with it as a solid product the next day, etc.
And so very shortly Portland cement put the cement
mines, where these people worked, out of business. And so
at the time when the Jukes were studied, they were
dealing with people who were in economic collapse because of the failure of the
cement mines. Interestingly, those cement mines,
like there's entire mountains that were hollowed out by these Juke miners,
today house all of the
underground records for the New York banks,
for Standard Oil. There's an entire city, atomic bomb proof city,
underneath the ground in this hollowed out
area that was actually built by the Jukes.
So if we have a nuclear war, know that
your bank records will be safe. There will still
be a record if you owe the bank any money and you can thank the Jukes for that.
(laughing) They were
principally being criticised for 
intermarriage and of course for having defective handicapped
children. So as a Juke
a hundred years or so later, I can tell you proudly
that I've got a handicapped kid and an interracial marriage and
we're still the same people we always were. (laughing)
So I won't go all through
Dugdale's findings. The one thing I will point out
is that I think it is quite
famous that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
made this decision about the sterilisation
and whether it is constitutional and that decision
was influential in the development of the Alberta Act and other acts
as well. But fifty two years older,
ah earlier, Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior,
his father, actually was writing about eugenics
in the Atlantic and again picking on those Jukes.
We're still at war with the Holmes clan.
So in twentieth century eugenics we
start to get further emphasis on race,
more refined views of intelligence,
belief in the deterioration of the intellect. And one of the things
that was really interesting was as soon as we sort of got this idea of intelligence being
something we could test and measure, we got the idea that
somehow everybody was getting dumber.
Okay. And so this was
partly driven by the fear that all of a sudden we were producing large numbers
of people with less intelligence. Now it's interesting because we could never measure
it before and some people will say that we still can't measure it now. But as soon as
we started to measure it, we assumed that it was getting worse.
Okay. Is anybody here familiar with the Flynn effect?
Basically, what the Flynn effect
says is we're getting smarter.
Nobody knows why we're getting smarter. If you actually
look at intelligence testing and the standardisation of intelligence testing,
they have to keep restandardising tests because
people's scores are going up.
And it's irrefutable. Sort of the
initial reaction. It's happening all over the world.
Okay. And it seems to be happening in spite of all these reasons
that people say that we need to wipe out people in order to
counteract the effect that our intelligence
as a group is going down. It's a huge effect; it's not a small effect.
It's basically about one standard deviation every
fifty years. This basically means a hundred years ago
that the average person would test what would now be
as mentally handicapped. Some people
have tried to say, well maybe it's because of education,
maybe it's Sesame Street, etc.
Interestingly the strongest place you can demonstrate it are on things like Raven's Progressive Matrices
that are entirely nonverbal, noncultural
etc. So that this effect is actually
strongest in measures of intelligence that are not
affected by culture and learning etc. And
why is it happening? Well, I think we need to ask ourselves...
when I started work here, I was
tall. I have probably, you know,
actually shrunk about half an inch,
but when I get on the elevator now with university students, they're all taller than me.
And it's not just that I'm getting smaller.
They're getting a lot bigger. And if you look over
a hundred years the average height has increased drastically.
And why is that happening?
We can sort of say maybe there's nutritional reasons, maybe there's all these reasons.
We don't entirely know the reasons. But
in the same way that we're getting taller, we're getting smarter.
Here, this is only sort of relevent because part of what
was driving the eugenics movement was the belief that just the opposite
was happening. And so in the twentieth century we had
mass institutionalisation, sterialisation,
and in some cases we had actual
euthenasia. And so we had, for example, the T4 program in Germany
where people were actually put in the gas chambers,
and the first gas chambers were actually
developed in the euthanasia program and it was both
the equipment and the personnel from the euthanasia program
that then went on to create the death camps like Treblinka and
Sobibor etc.
So when they got the process down they thought maybe there's all kinds of other undesirable people
that we could get rid of. So
sterialisation
is the most obvious form
that was practiced here in Alberta, however it's not the most prevalent form.
Institutionalisation in fact is the, was
the major tool of eugenics
and stopping people from having children by locking them up
in sexually segregated institutions throughout
their reproductive years was practiced not just in Alberta but
across Canada. And the only
difference is that it was easier to justify
that in some other way. However,
if you look at the discussions about the creation of institutions in Canada and
the United States, the intent is entirely clear
that the purpose is primarily eugenic.
We also had it, and this was a shock to me,
you know I grew up thinking about Clarence Darrow
and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, etc. If you actually
look at Hunter's Civic Biology it's 
a eugenic tome that
I think we would find kind of disgraceful
but it's interesting of that aspect of it
is not sort of carried forward when we look at sort of
our liberal traditions and how that battle was carried out..
