Comments on Bell Curve video

The Bell Curve is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein

Comments are about this video http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/BellC

(1)

I think at the core, there's a pain that humans have to deal with: survival of the fittest seems immoral.

Survival of the fittest is probably a major creative force. Ironically, it's the creative force that people usually assign to someone like God of the new testament, who is loving. We want the creator to be loving.

(If God is reading this email, I should be clear that the creation is amazing, whatever it is, even if I don't understand the how or the why of everything... and it's a privilege just to be an observer.)

The idea of welfare is that we don't want children to go without food. However, welfare makes no sense for evolution. It pretty much breaks the force (of evolution) that created us.

Still... (for example) Steven Hawkins would have been wiped out by ancient evolutionary pressure... he survived and made major contributions... because people had love and weren't Nazi's about it. And... actually love evolved out of survival of the fitness.

It's pretty complicated. Although I have to agree that welfare could be limited, and that would probably help. I heard from homeless people that churches give away better food anyway. I think the government is more likely to cause problems than regular human kindness.

(2)

Something about this guy's speaking sort of disturbs me. Mostly he makes sense. But, he loosely uses words like smart and dumb, just drops people into those categories. I have a friend who has some serious issues with school and learning basic math skills for some reason. But the thing is, she just uses a calculator, and when you get past that, she has a great sense of humor, and she's fun to be around. She's arguably one of the most-fun-to-be around people I know. So, what's up with that... this guy doesn't recognize that there's more going on in life than IQ scores. I'm not really criticizing his thesis here... just sayin.. we do NOT want to evolve into mere problem solving machines.. do we? Isn't that what artificial intelligence is for?