God of the Gaps
Here is Neil deGrass Tyson explaining "God of the Gaps,"and his opinion that this can be both limiting to one's faith as well as scientific progress:
"The day you stop looking because you're content God did it, I don't need you in the lab."
"Science" of the Gaps
Lately it seems that there are a lot of defenders of sexism and racism who claim that they're simply promoting scientific inquiry and advancement.
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” --Bari Weiss, Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web
My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yetknow quite what the balance is. -- Andrew Sullivan, Denying Genetics Isn't Shutting Down Racism, It's Fueling It
Evolution does not necessarily reward the intelligent. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent an endangered species.--Idiocracy, which I know is fiction but so many people refer to as "totally so true!" despite the fact. That. It. Is. Literally. Eugenics.
The big question is, "Why is there inequality?" And for many people, the answer is "Because it's meant to be this way, because some people are inferior (weaker, dumber, lazier) to others."
And to paraphrase Neil DeGrass Tyson, they are so content in that answer, that they no longer had curiosity to learn how it happened.
Of course there are biological differences between men and women, and intelligence is heritable. But why is there inequality?
The first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States was told that she was denied admission because women were intellectually inferior. In 1970 less than 10% of women were physicians, while today it is over 30%, and women make up 50% of medical school students. A recent study suggested that women physicians are not only equal to their male counterparts, they may have lower mortality and readmission rates.*
So now when someone writes a memo declaring that there are intellectual differences in men and women that account for, say, the uneven distribution of genders in tech, they should probably make sure they're not making the mistake of medical school admissions offices of the 1800s. It's not that talking about differences between sexes and races is completely verboten, but that declaring a group inferior has implications that is just not an innocent discussion of controversial scientific research. It creates at best a hostile work environment and at worst, promotes ideas that get pretty freakin dark.
Believing that you can know who is inferior and that that inferiority is intrinsic is an excuse to not look any further into actual scientific biological differences between people and find actual environmental differences between populations. It is a fake science of the gap that explains inequality and allows people to stop progress. These are literally ideas that supported the Holocaust and slavery, and looking at intergenerational poverty/lower education/other status and declaring it to be Fate Written By Your Genes is making the same mistake, even if the end result is not mass murder
*I owe a lot of this paragraph to this article.
