Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

62 PRETEND GENES

family members. Adoptive parents, from the moment of adoption, worry

about the personalities, biological backgrounds, and social histories of

the biological parents of their adopted child, and how these factors aff ect

the parent/ adopted- child relationship. It has also been reported that

adoptive parents hold stronger beliefs about the infl uence of heredity

compared with other parents. Th is may reduce expectations about the

course and targets of adoptees’ development. Some reports also suggest

that adoptive couples strive to enhance the diff erences between their

adopted children and themselves in an eff ort to allow the children free

development. Later, adolescent adoptees can become highly conscious of

their special identity and actually react to adoptive parents’ standards and

values.

(g) Adopted children also look more like their biological parents than

their adoptive parents and may be treated by others accordingly.^31

All of these factors— and many more— further compromise the adop-
tion study as a method for separating the eff ects of genes from those of
environments. Th e only adoption study that would avoid such doubts
would be one in which adoptees were randomly selected from the new-
born population and then randomly assigned to parents, with both groups
blind to the treatment (i.e., not knowing whether they were adopted or
not)— and all the while controlling prenatal environments as much as
pos si ble. All else is little better than guesswork.

DATA STANDARDS

Accounts of this so- called ge ne tic research in the popu lar media, and

even in science magazines, will give readers the impression that the in-

vestigators are involved in precision research producing highly reliable

results. In fact, the area is suff used with a make-do empirical culture

whose results should be treated with caution.

Most outstanding about this culture, of course, is the fact that there is

little agreement among psychologists about what is being mea sured in IQ

tests or other supposed tests of potential. In addition, as already noted,

many compromises have to be made simply to procure twins and attempt

or pretend to randomize/equalize environments. Th is has meant study-

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