[7/4/2011] Will Cuppy Tonight: "The Java Man" from "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes" (continued)

From Wikipedia:

The Jukes family was a New York hill family studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams, that were often quoted as arguments in support of eugenics, though the original Jukes study, by Richard L. Dugdale, placed considerable emphasis on the environment as a determining factor in criminality, disease and poverty.

Dugdale's study
In 1874, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale, a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York, was delegated to visit jails in upstate New York. In a jail in Ulster County he found six members of the same "Juke" family (a pseudonym), though they were using four different family names. On investigation, he found that of 29 male "immediate blood relations," 17 had been arrested and 15 convicted of crimes.

He studied the records of inmates of the thirteen county jails in New York State, as well as poorhouses and courts while researching the New York hill family's ancestry in an effort to find the basis for their criminality. His book claimed Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740, had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients and 2 cases of "feeble-mindedness."

Many of the criminals could also be linked to a woman whom he called "Margaret, the Mother of Criminals," who had married one of Max's sons. Dugdale created detailed genealogical charts and concluded that poverty, disease, criminality had plagued the family. Dugdale estimated to the New York legislature that the family had cost the state $1,308,000. He published his findings in The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity in 1877. Dugdale debated the relative contribution of environment and heredity and concluded that the family's poor environment was largely to blame for their behavior: "environment tends to produce habits which may become hereditary" (page 66). He noted that the Jukes were not a single family, but a composite of 42 families and that only 540 of his 709 subjects were apparently related by blood.

And now back to WILL CUPPY TONIGHT . . .

Memoirs of the Jukes, or Where We Come In:
The Java Man

from How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

The Java Man lived in Java 500,000 or 1,000,000 years ago¹ and was lower than we are. He was Lower Pleistocene and Lower Quarternary and knock-kneed. He was called Pithecanthropus ("Ape-Man") erectus because he walked with a slight stoop. The Java Man consisted of a calvarium, three teeth and a femur belonging to himself or two other Ape-Men. Professor Dubois made him a face which proves that he was dolichocephalic or long-headed instead of brachycephalic or square-headed and that he was 5 feet 6½ inches high and that Barnum was right. The Java Man was more Manlike than Apelike and more Apelike than Manlike. He had immense supraorbital ridges of solid bone and was conscious in spots. Does that remind you of any one?² His Broca's area was low. He could say that the evenings were drawing in and times were hard and his feet hurt. The spiritual life of the Java Man was low because he was only a beginner. He was just a child at heart and was perfectly satisfied with his polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, endogamy, exogamy, totemism and nymphomania. How he ever became extinct is beyond me. The Java Man has been called the Missing Link by those who should know.

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¹Or 250,000 or 750,000.
²Sir Arthur Keith says that Pithecanthropus erectus "was human in everything but the brain." Well, what did he expect?

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TOMORROW IN WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: The Peking Man


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