Dick Sobsey: And it's also interesting that the way
 that it was often being interpreted 
when people explained evolution they 
talked about tool use, weapon use, 
etc. In a sense, they described the 
ascent of man largely in terms of his 
ability to control and kill less fortunate
 human beings or other species. 
Now it's interesting that more recent 
views of evolution, partly based in 
anthropology suggest that it was the 
development of cooperative behavior, 
of families, of communities, etc... 
When I first heard the concept in 
anthropology, that the reason that 
people learned to walk on two legs 
instead of four was so that they could
 carry groceries home, I thought that 
they were being, I thought they were 
kidding. But that's a serious concept. 
One of the really interesting things 
along this line, Meev Leeky who was the
curator at the National Museum of Kenya
 and one of the people in finding 
this Turkana Boy who is the oldest
 complete homo erectus skeleton,
about a million years old. And a lot of
 times you hear about the discovery 
of skeletons they're talking about the 
discovery of a few little bone 
fragments and from that they reconstruct
 it, but this is a virtually intact
skeleton of about a 12 year old homo 
erectus that lived a million years
ago. Now not all anthropologists agree
 with Leeky, but what she was saying 
was that this homo erectus skeleton was
 of a severely handicapped child, 
that there was severe scoliosis, that 
this 12 year old could not have 
hunted or gathered etc. And her interest
 in this is that what she suggests
is that this actually demonstrates that
 there were families and 
communities at that time, because this 
individual could not have survived
 without that. So it's interesting to 
see that at least in some cases now 
and some people would say this represents
 the feminist entry into science, 
that rather than whether or not you can 
manipulate an electric drill or 
Colt .45 is no longer being seen as the 
critical thing, but whether you can 
engage in cooperative behavior etc. And 
in fact one of the very clear 
things in terms of the development of 
intelligence that I think everybody 
agrees with is that part of the ability
 of humans to develop a higher level 
of intelligence is based on having 
infants that are born where their 
central nervous system is not fully 
developed and has a couple more years 
of development and this means that 
unlike a horse that can get up and walk 
around and eat on its own hopefully 
shortly after it's born, that human 
beings in order for survival of the 
species depend on care-giving etc. So,
but certainly the idea we had of evolution
 at the time tended to focus much more 
on a harder kind of competition. 
And finally I would talk about intellectualism.
 And Galton, as some of you
may know, some of you may be familiar 
with this notion of rating people on 
how good-looking they are on a scale 
of 1-10. This was another invention of 
Galton. And Galton went around England
 on the trains with a little card 
that he poked pins into rating everybody
 on whether they were 1-10 etc. and 
concluded that Scots were the ugliest 
people in the United Kingdom. Please, 
don't take that from me, that was 
Galton's conclusion (audience laughter) on a 
scientific basis. But the point I 
want to make about this, I think while 
some of us might engage in something
 like this, that person's a 10, that 
person's a 2, or whatever, I don't think
 many of us today see that as a
highly scientific process. What I want
 to point out is that when Galton 
was starting his work in intelligence, 
intelligence, beauty, athleticism, 
were all seen as concepts which were 
kind of vaguely defined. I mean, 
people agreed that you could be more 
intelligent or less intelligent, 
people agreed you could be more 
beautiful or less beautiful, but 
interestingly with intelligence we 
actually decided that not only could we
have a 10 point scale, but we could 
have a 100 point scale. And that we 
would be able to measure intelligence as
 a unitary factor. I think right 
now if we tried to measure athleticism
 as a unitary factor, basketball 
players would have one idea of what 
athleticism was, hockey players would 
have a slightly different idea of what
 athleticism was. If we tried to say 
that there's one, instead of a "g" as we
 have in intelligence, as the one 
central core that we have in intelligence,
 that there's one central core in 
beauty and it might play out in different
 ways etc., I think people would 
be uncomfortable with that. Nobody 
denies that there's such a thing as 
beauty. Nobody denies that there's 
such a thing as athleticism. And I 
certainly wouldn't deny that there's 
such a thing as intelligence. But the 
idea that this is a discrete single 
characteristic that can be measured as
1 particular number that characterizes
 an individual, didn't start to 
exist until largely through Galton's 
work and the people who followed him. 
So, we had at the same time these 
family degeneracy studies, or virtually 
at the same time, and I'll talk about 
them a little bit more. And there 
were permeating racial and class structures,
 both in the roots that came 
from Galton and the UK and also in these
 degeneracy studies that started at 
least in the United States. Interestingly,
 the Jukes, the first family 
degeneracy study was officially published
 in 1877 when Dougdale says he 
discovered the Jukes. However, it had 
already been in the New York Times by 
1874, not necessarily called the Jukes 
etc. So the Times were on the ball 
as usual. Talking about these groups of
 families, and particularly about 
Margaret, the mother of criminals. I 
mentioned to a group of people 
yesterday that I'm particularly proud
 to have discovered that my ancestry 
actually intersects with the Jukes and
 who were at the time, if you read 
the New York Times, the principle 
moral failing of the Jukes was 
intermarriage. The proof that they 
were morally inferior was that they 
intermarried with Indians and blacks,
 and that was particularly a problem, 
even in New York State at the end of 
the Civil War in a lot of people's 
minds. Interestingly the word Juke, 
although nobody really knows where it 
came from, Dougdale never really 
talks about that, none of the others 
actually talk about that, is a Gullah
 word. Some of you may know the word 
jukebox. Juke is an African word that
 in Gullah and many African languages 
that means "wicked place" and so what 
happened was during slave days and 
after the slave days there were places 
that people went to drink and dance
 etc. that were not really the official
 pubs, etc. often out in the woods, 
hidden places, etc. and those were the 
places that grew into what were 
called jukes later on and when they 
came up, they often didn't have bands,
and when they came up with these 
automated machines for music, those were 
the first places those were installed
 and that's where the name jukebox
 came from. 
