Glayde Whitney
Florida State University, Tallahassee
One of the experiments that Professor Shockley suggested to the National Academy of Sciences at its Spring Meeting of 1968 ("Proposed research to reduce racial aspects of the environment-heredity uncertainty") has been conducted; the results are in, but you won't hear about it in the mainstream media. If recent history is a guide we will first wish the results the death of silence. Pretend they do not exist. If that fails, then yell and scream and call names. Outrage at insensitivity; heap acrimony upon ad hominem (see Pearson, 1991). The unfortunate truth that no one was particularly hoping for is completely at odds with the revealed wisdom of the egalitarian left: when black babies are adopted into middle class bright white families they grow up to function intellectually and emotionally like blacks.
Professor William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989), you will recall, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. That was for research conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories where he was director of solid- state physics research. It was in 1948 that his three-man research team created the point contact transistor; Shockley personally invented the junction transistor, the analog and the junction field-effect transistor, thus ushering in the age of solid state electronics. He and his co-workers shared the Nobel Prize. Shockley left the Bell Laboratories in 1958 and in 1963 was appointed to a named chair at Stanford University. From the mid-'60s until his death in 1989 he devoted much of his scientific efforts to questions of heredity, intelligence, and the welfare of western civilization. He spoke out repeatedly against the "entrenched dogmatism" which prevented open discussion and unbiased research concerning some of the most important issues facing our civilization. For his humanitarian efforts he was excoriated by the left-leaning press and "politically correct" academic scientists alike (Pearson, 1992). While it has become de rigueur to complain about an uninformed and biased media, they merely reflect a deeper problem. The power to destroy civilization lies with the scientists and intellectuals, our modern secular priesthood, who have given up the canons of science - objective observation of the real world combined with honest reporting - in order to accomodate the dogmas of a secular religion. An irrational ideological zealotry that emphasizes the dogmas of socialism at the expense of scientific knowledge has already brought about the downfall of one of the two great superpowers. Can we be far behind if we pervert truth to follow the precepts of the same secular religion?
Roger Pearson has well summarized Shockley's thesis, which scared the political Left. It was simple: intelligence is a quality which is of prime importance to humankind in the struggle to survive - but it is not evenly distributed between individuals and races. The available scientific evidence indicated that the level of an individual's intelligence is predominantly determined by heredity, and also that the less intelligent members of the American population are reproducing more quickly than those genetically better endowed in this vital area of human competency:
Shockley's attempts to bring these facts to the attention of the public, and his campaign for a top-level, government-funded scientific enquiry into the question of human quality, was anathema to liberals and to those on the political Left. The liberals felt that his ideas challenged the doctrine of equality to which they were wedded, and the political Left quickly recognized that they challenged their traditional argument that poverty was due solely to class (and race) exploitation rather than, as Shockley implied, the low intelligence of the inhabitants of the inner city slums who were unable to find employment they could handle in the increasingly technical world of modern America. (Pearson, 1992, p. 18).
It was in the 1960s that the Great Society's War on Poverty got going, in the 1960s that Arthur Jensen first got into trouble for pointing out that Head Start programs had not been successful in raising the intelligence of black youth, and in 1968 that Shockley suggested a "research proposal that might reduce the environment-heredity uncertainty regarding racial differences".
Shockley's Proposal
Shockley told the Academy "I have heard that the drastic environmental change of adoption from a Negro slum into a middle-class New York Jewish family has actually occurred for some 70 orphans."(Shockley, 1968, p. 102). Of Course. The adoption design is the closest that you can come with humans (for ethical reasons) to conventional scientific procedures for separating genetic from environmental causes of the traits of individuals. It's the human analog of the cross-fostering experiment: Take a Pit Bull puppy and have it be raised by a Cocker Spaniel mom (and dad) in a Cocker Spaniel-provided home and social milieu. If the Pit Bull grows up to think like a Cocker Spaniel, or to act like a Cocker Spaniel, then you know that the environment of rearing influenced the traits in question. Now, if the radical environmental change of cross-fostering does not change the Pit Bull into a Cocker Spaniel, then what hope is there for the less drastic and less complete interventions of Head Start and other "enrichment" type programs?
Since 1965 over $5.4 Trillion dollars have been spent in the Great Society War on Poverty (Rector & Lauber, 1995), and we find ourselves bracing for the arrival of the Super Predators (Dilulio, 1995). In the meantime, Shockley's experiment has been conducted, more or less, and the results are in.
Adoption Study
For the experiment we are indebted to the eminent child psychologist Dr. Sandra Scarr (recent President of the American Psychological Society and a Past President of the Behavior Genetics Association, among other accolades), and her colleagues (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976). The experiment began in the early '70s when Scarr and her original collaborator Richard Weinberg were faculty at the University of Minnesota. They have pointed out that "The intellectual and social climate of Minnesota is generally conducive to liberal and humanitarian movements such as interracial adoption" (p.727 ). In 1966 an influential organization named the Open Door Society of Minnesota was formed by adoptive parents of black children. The founding president of the Open Door Society was a leading columnist for a Minneapolis daily newspaper who frequently wrote about his multiracial family. In this auspicious social climate Scarr recruited 101 families that lived within a 150-mile radius of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St.Paul) metro area. Many of the participating families were recruited through the Newsletter of the Open Door Society. The 101 families included 321 children who were 4 years of age or older when originally tested in the 1970s. There were 145 biological offspring and 176 adoptees, of whom 130 were black and 25 white. The remaining 21 consisted of children of Asian, American Indian, and Latino ancestry. Further, many of the "black" adopted children could be grouped as to whether they had 2 black biological parents (black/black kids) or one black and one white biological parent (black/white kids). When originally evaluated the average age of the children was seven, and the results were happily reported in many media outlets and reviewed in many standard psychology and child development or educational psychology textbooks. A follow-up study was conducted 10 years later, at an average children's age 17 (Weinberg, Scarr, & Waldman, 1992). Don't expect to see the results of the follow-up study in the textbooks or the mainline liberal media.
National Dilemma
The national dilemma that provides the backdrop for Professor Shockley's experiment is the large gap between black's and white's average intelligence. It is important to note that among serious scholars the IQ gap has never been an issue: It is the reason for the gap - cultural deprivation, genetic differences, etc.- that has been the issue. The racial gap in average IQ is large and important: About 15 points separate the black average of 85 from a white average of about 100. These 15 points represent about one standard deviation of the bell curve of the intelligence distribution. From this it follows that only about 16% of blacks equal or exceed the average of whites, thus by white standards fully 84% of blacks are of below average intelligence. The racial discrepancy is larger the further one gets from the average - blacks are very much over represented among the intellectually disabled and very much under represented among the exceptionally gifted. These facts are essentially what is behind the perceived need for affirmative action and other black preferential social policies, although it is generally quite incorrect to mention outside the confines of the ivory tower - as Charles Murray discovered in the firestorm of criticism for having written (with the late Richard Herrnstein) The Bell Curve. Faced with the racial gap, as well as a wide range of individual differences within each race, the egalitarian priesthood has waged one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in the annals of modern propaganda. IQ went from being one of the brightest stars in the firmament of applied psychology to being deemed useless, misleading, evily oppressively racist, and even outlawed in many settings. (If the race is important and Cocker Spaniels regularly run substantially faster than do Pit Bulls, then viciously attack the stop watch). Antidotes to the ideological zealotry include The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), as well as Arthur Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing (1980) and Stanley Burnham's America's Bimodal Crisis (1993). Of course intelligence is important and of course IQ well predicts performance in many settings.
Childhood Results: Environments Matter [Blacks will be Whites]
Against this anguishing national (and international) backdrop Scarr and Weinberg (1976) reported that when evaluated at an average age of seven, the 99 black and interracial children adopted in the first year of life had average IQ scores of 110. Wonderful. The egalitarian liberals literally jumped for joy. Quickly into virtually all the introductory textbooks in the relevant fields went the findings and the interpretation: Blacks raised in the favorable home and cultural milieu provided by bright middle class white parents not only did well, they actually did substantially better than the national average for whites. Clearly the interpretation was that the abysmal conditions and performance of blacks in general was correctable by the liberal agenda of environmental treatments. Improve the home environments, schools, and general social milieu of blacks and their intellectual performance will substantially benefit. Scarr and Weinberg (1976) interpreted their results thusly: "One reason for the substantial increase in test performance of the black and interracial adoptees is that their rearing environments are culturally relevant to the tests and to the school .... [the] black children in this study have been fully exposed to the culture of the tests and the school,"(p. 737). "There is no question that adoption constitutes a massive intervention, as noted earlier, and that it has a favorable impact on IQ" (p. 738). "The major findings of the study support the view that the social environment plays a dominant role in determining the average IQ level of black children" (p. 739). Of such findings and interpretations are myths created and liberal heroes made.
Although not emphasized, usually not even mentioned in the secondary reports, there were disquieting patterns in the data of the seven year olds. And in fairness to Sandra Scarr and Richard Weinberg it should be noted that they presented the data in an apparently unbiased manner; they are of course free to emphasize whatever interpretations they find appropriate for whatever reasons. The final words of their 1976 report are "that both social and genetic variables contribute to individual variation among them" (p.739).
Other critics found in the study results which were interpretable from a genetic perspective. For instance, the adoptees with two black biological parents (b/b kids) averaged IQ of 98.6; for b/w adoptees the value was 109.0, while white adoptees (w/w) had average IQs of 111.5 and the biological offspring of these unusual middle class parents averaged 116. Well. Here we have approximately 13 IQ points difference, not so far different from the 15 points that separates blacks from whites in the general population:
[w/w 111.5] - [b/b 98.6] = 12.9
Give the b/b a dose of white genetic parentage (b/w) and the average IQ goes up about 10 points. Raised in a white family environment so advantageous that the children born to those white families average an IQ of 116, b/b adoptees only manage an average of 98.6. Of such politically incorrect observations are doubts made. Well, answered the authors, in effect, no single experimental study is perfect in all respects and this one is no exception. There were unfortunate confounding variables in the data that could perhaps have been responsible for the discrepancies. For example, b/b kids tended to have been placed for final adoption somewhat later than others, thus perhaps early perinatal experiences were somehow detrimental to IQ, or, perhaps "expectancy effects" were at play and parents adopting b/b kids didn't expect as much of them as from b/w or w/w kids. The possibilities for equivocation are seemingly endless. But, however, it seemed clear that the b/b value of 98.6 was higher than the black population average of 85, and 98.6, by golly, is awfully close to the general population average value of 100. Bottom line for the interpretations widely accepted from the study conducted at average age seven: Environments matter and "good" environments like those provided by bright white middle class parents increased the IQs of black children. In other words, Pit Bull puppies raised by Cocker Spaniels acted like Cocker Spaniel puppies. But what of their behavior as adults?
Limits of the Family Influence
While questions of racial inequalities and what to do about them, or indeed, what can be done about them, have been festering in the national agenda, quite remarkable progress has been made in the general sciences that deal with human development and behavior genetics. From new data have come new and quite surprising interpretations. The new data are mostly from studies of adoptees evaluated when they are adults, rather than as in most older studies where adopted children were studied in childhood. Also there are many new data concerning adult twins, raised together or raised apart, and other kinds of family arrangements. It now seems that for many physical and psychological traits, including measures of personality, intelligence, and psychopathology, identical twins that have been raised apart in different families resemble one another very closely in adulthood. At the same time, adoptees, although sharing a common family environment across many years, do not resemble each other in adulthood. Quite amazing and quite surprising, even to the scientists who have conducted the studies. Geneticist David Rowe in his recent book The Limits of Family Influence (Rowe, 1994) points out that
Most people believe that different rearing experiences have something to do with differences in the way children turn out. ....... A social scientist opposing this cultural belief would be dismissed as uninformed and possibly dangerous. In response, many people would recount stories from their own lives. Social scientists would mention the massive research literature showing influences of rearing on behavioral development. Nonetheless, many societies once accepted a flat earth; both experts and cultural beliefs, on some occasions, may be wrong. ( p. 1).
This is pretty heady stuff, and Dr. Sandra Scarr has herself been an influential theorist in these new directions.
The traditional view in the social sciences, with roots in centuries-old philosophical speculations, has been that family environments, the social fabric in which individuals grow up, have important and lifetime cumulative influences on how the individuals turn out. Different societies or social class experiences caused differences among the individuals that grew up in them. The problem has always been that by-and-large genetically different people raise their children in their own differing ways, so that when the children grow up to resemble their family and to be different from others, it was impossible to separate the genes from the environments as causes of individual differences. To put it somewhat crassly, it has been known for centuries that, in general, poverty and stupidity tend to go together. The liberal catechism has taken it as central that poverty causes stupidity. However, that may be mostly, if not entirely, wrong. To an important extent stupidity causes poverty, and the "root cause" may be largely genetic. Such heretical thoughts are usually branded as evil, even "racist", by the enforcers of liberal ideological orthodoxy. But science accumulates knowledge, sometimes even in hostile intellectual environments. It takes a cross-fostering experiment - an adoption study, to separate genes and family experiences as causes of individuality. Now that a number of such studies have been done, the newly emerging interpretations run something like the following:
In childhood, adopted children tend to correlate somewhat with the parents who are raising them. This is because children are very importantly under the care, guidance, and coercion of their parents. At average age seven or ten, whether a child plays the piano or shoots hoops on a street corner, depends largely on the interests and involvement of the parents. Does the child know and enjoy camping, fishing and the great outdoors, or music, concerts and the symphony, or beer, booze and dope? It depends very much on what the parents are into and to what the parents expose the child. So, in childhood, adopted children tend to somewhat resemble each other and to resemble the people who are raising them. However, around adolescence/puberty some major changes take place. Biologically some genes active in children turn off and other genes active in adults turn on. One of the consequences is physical and mental maturation: Sex organs grow and sex fantasies grow apace. Another consequence is the "dispersal stage" common to most mammals and manifested among humans as adolescent "rebellion", mild or severe. Most young people begin to more- and-more control their own interests and choose their own activities and their own friends. At 10, who you play with is largely determined by what the parents allow; at 16 most youths much more choose and select their own friends from among a wider field of possibilities, often to the consternation of their parents. Play the piano? At 10 it is parent's choice, by 18 you quit if you wish. The upshot of all this becoming-adult is that individually different people seek out their own individually compatible lifespaces. The surprising outcome is that as adults, individuals that were raised together but are not genetically related (adopted siblings) correlate zero on many measures of intellectual and personality functioning. Similarly, the adopted children, when adult, do not resemble (the correlations are zero order) the parents that raised them. There is little or no evidence for cumulative effects of family environment. Rather, family resemblances, and differences, are importantly influenced by genes. Heresy.
Adult Results: Blacks will be Blacks
In this minefield of theoretical readjustments Professor Shockley's experiment sits, waiting to detonate. A ten-year follow-up was done, the children evaluated at an average age of seventeen (Weinberg, Scarr & Waldman, 1992). The results and their interpretation have created a bit of a tempest, so far largely confined to the academic teapot as reported in the scholarly journal "Intelligence". Initially the authors maintained an interpretation of the evidence as supporting environmental influences on the malleability of black's IQ: "These results (demonstrate) the strong effects of the rearing environment on IQ." (p. 131), "the results of the longitudinal follow-up continue to support the view that the social environment maintains a dominant role in determining the average IQ level of black and interracial children" (p. 133). To some it looked like spinning through Alice's mirror, or theoretically jumping through the Politically Correct environmentalist hoop twice. But, after all, genetic interpretations of human race differences in IQ will not get you elected president of the American Psychological Society; they will get you defamed and shunned, at least. After challenge, especially by Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster and Michael Levin of City College of New York (Levin, 1994; Lynn, 1994), the authors wrote that "it is not possible to reach definitive conclusions .... Our findings do not speak directly to genetic and environmental etiologies of racial differences in IQ," (Waldman, Weinberg & Scarr, 1994, pp 41, 42). On the contrary, the results not only speak, they literally shout, but very Incorrect Politically.
When retested as young adults (average age 17) the b/b adoptees displayed an average IQ of 89.4 while the w/w adoptees averaged 105.6 and the white biological children of the adopting middle class white parents scored 109.4. Recall that generally the racial IQ gap nationally is about 15 points, whereas here the gap is:
[w/w 105.6] - [b/b 89.4] = 16.2
This is substantially similar to the previous result when the children were young. What is different in this testing of older adoptees is the b/b average of 89.4. Where is there any evidence for a role of the social environment? Remember the earlier quotation: "There is no question that adoption constitutes a massive intervention .... the black children in this study have been fully exposed to the culture of the tests and the school," (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976, pp 738,737). A lifetime of immersion in middle class white family life sufficient to produce average IQs of 109.4 (biological offspring) and 105.6 (white adoptees), for an average black outcome of 89.4. This may appear to be above the nominal national average for blacks of 85, yet Levin (1994) points out that Minnesota blacks score somewhat above the national average. Parenthetically, the white biological parent dosage effect was maintained in that b/w adoptees averaged an IQ of 98.5:
[b/w 98.5] - [b/b 89.4] = 9.1
As noted above, no single experimental study is perfect, and Scarr and colleagues now emphasize that there were some differences across adoptee groups in pre-final placement experiences. Perhaps Professor Shockley's experiment is important enough that an attempt should be made to replicate it on a large scale and without equivocal confounds. In the meantime, in the main these results are very clear, and very consistent with a wealth of other data and theory. Unfortunately these real data are completely at odds with the revealed wisdom of the egalitarian left. Here in the real world, as a young adult the Pit Bull, after being raised by Cocker Spaniels, acts like a Pit Bull.
An early abstract of the follow-up experiment conducted when the adoptees averaged 17 years of age mentioned social deviance and psychopathology at higher levels than had been found in other adoption studies (Scarr, Weinberg & Gargiulo, 1987). Languishing in two unpublished doctoral dissertations completed by graduate students are some potentially interesting findings. One dissertation, by Kimberly DeBerry (1991), was completed at the University of Virginia where Sandra Scarr is now a Professor. Among other things, the DeBerry dissertation reports the results of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) testing at average age 17. Fully 2/3 of the interracial adoptees that took the test are said to display evidence of maladjustment by having at least one clinical scale elevation on the MMPI. Moreover, the white biological offspring of the middle class white adoptive parents fared just as poorly. These data require some speculative interpretation: Do they mean that Pit Bulls raised by Cocker Spaniels grow up to be at increased risk of psychological maladjustment? Could it be that Cocker Spaniel pups are harmed by being raised in mixed litters with Pit Bulls?
To interpret the MMPI results from the adoptees requires a consideration of the characteristics of the test. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was one of the most reliable and most widely used assessment devices for identifying abnormalities of personality. However, like any psychological test it was not perfect and has been revised to become MMPI-2. The first version of the MMPI was used in the DeBerry version of Professor Shockley's experiment. The normative group for the original MMPI was 724 people at the University of Minnesota hospital tested in the late 1930s and early '40s. It was reportedly a good match for the 1940 Minnesota census. Dr. Ned Megargee, a noted MMPI expert, once checked those census data and estimated that there might have been 1.5 black people included in the 724 (Megargee, 1996). It is well established that generally blacks tend to have elevated scores relative to the standardization norms. Also, younger people tend to have elevated scores on some of the scales. Of the 10 basic MMPI scoring scales, the four with the most reported elevations in DeBerry's dissertation were, in order of frequency, 9, 5, 8, and 4. The standard characterizations of high scorers on these scales are:
9 (Ma) Mania - High scorers are called sociable, outgoing, impulsive, overly energetic, optimistic, and in some cases amoral, flighty, confused, disoriented; 5 (MF) Masculinity-Femininity - High-scoring males are described as sensitive, aesthetic, passive, or feminine. High-scoring females are described as aggressive, rebellious, and unrealistic; 8 (Sc) Schizophrenia - High scorers are often withdrawn, shy, unusual, or strange and have peculiar thoughts or ideas. They may have poor reality contact and in severe cases bizarre sensory experiences - delusions and hallucinations; 4 (Pd) Psychopathic Deviate - High scorers often are rebellious, impulsive, hedonistic, and antisocial. They often have difficulty in marital or family relationships and trouble with the law or authority in general. (adapted from Rosenham & Seligman, 1984, p.163).
Without a matched age and race comparison group it is difficult to know what to make of the finding that 2/3 of the tested transracial adoptees had clinical elevations relative to the norms. It could simply be that these young people, although raised in the home and social milieu provided by middle class white parents, are performing like typical blacks raised under usual conditions. In other words, as was the case with the IQ data, the personality results indicate that Pit Bulls raised by Cocker Spaniels grow up to be Pit Bulls.
Does it Hurt Whites?
The elevated scores of the white biological children of this sampling of middle class white parents are problematic. Of the many possible interpretations, three likely possibilities come to mind. One is that it is hard on the white biological children to be raised alongside black adopted siblings. It would not be the first time that well-intentioned liberal humanitarian endeavors turned out to have unanticipated consequences (a fascinating book-length account of the effects of The Great Society is titled Paved with Good Intentions (Taylor, 1992)). We really don't know the consequences for the white siblings. We do know that there are many physical traits and maturational rates that are different between black and white children, beyond the psychological variables that were the chief focus of the study. Would it affect the personality of a bright white child to be raised with a different race sibling that tended to be stronger, had denser bones and better physical coordination, matured sooner and was more boisterous and less intelligent (Rushton, 1995)? A recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (concerned with nutritional needs in childhood) reports that black children experience their growth spurt two to five years earlier than white children. By age 7 for boys and 6 for girls, blacks have accelerated muscle and bone development. They sooner grow taller and heavier and mature sexually about three years earlier than whites (Nando.net, 1996). A very extreme across-species adoption study was conducted back in the 1930s by the animal psychologists Winthrop and Louella Kellogg. They reported their findings in a 1933 book The Ape and the Child: A Study of Environmental Influence Upon Early Behavior. When their first child Donald was born they located a baby Chimpanzee named Gua. Donald and Gua were raised together as siblings and treated as alike as possible, until being separated when Gua was 16.5 months of age and Donald was 19 months. We have no way of knowing if there were any long range effects of this experience for Gua or Donald. Anecdotally, a scientist who knew him has reported that Donald had a gait with a definite simian lope. Tragically, Donald committed suicide as a young man.
A second possibility to account for the elevated clinical scales on the MMPIs of the biological children of the middle class white parents that took part in transracial adoptions would be to invoke normal familial relationships. Unfortunately we do not have the data for the biological parents and thus cannot make the necessary comparisons. However, a likely possibility is that these youth are simply displaying the well-known phenomenon of familial correlations. Without casting any aspersions on the adopting adults, one must ask what kinds of middle class white couples in the social environment of 1960's Minnesota initiated cross-racial adoptions? Undoubtedly caring adults who felt a social commitment and followed through with quite unusual behavior. Such adopting was a very rare event and was "not normal" in just this sense of being rare. People who engage in very unusual behaviors, whether socially desirable or socially undesirable, tend to be unusual in a wide variety of ways, including personality traits. Thus it is entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the MMPI results of their biological children might simply reflect the well known familiality of personality characteristics. This parental- resemblance hypothesis is less likely to account for the elevated deviancy rates of the black adoptees because in other studies personality characteristics of young adult adoptees have been found to not correlate with those of their adoptive parents or adoptive siblings (Rowe, 1994).
The third possible interpretation of the elevated rates of psychopathology reported for both black adoptees and the white biological children in DeBerry's dissertation is simply that the findings may be spurious. That is, they may not replicate nor generalize. These results could be due to any number of quirky events that might be unique to this particular study. For instance, at the 17-year old follow up, not all of the adoptees or biological offspring from the original study took the MMPI. Was there selective participation that led to the particular pattern of findings reported? Because the results and interpretations are of potentially great importance, Professor Shockley's experiment probably should be replicated.
In a dissertation completed at the University of Minnesota, L. Fischer (1991) related patterns of family functioning to MMPI characteristics of both the transracially adopted and the biological offspring. She noted generally that the white "Biological children showed significantly more psychopathology than transracial adoptees" (p. 73). So again an indication that Cocker Spaniels do not thrive when raised as littermates with Pit Bulls. Two of the dimensions of family environment are labeled "Adaptability" and "Cohesion". Cohesion has to do with the emotional bonding among the family members. The members of high cohesion families are said to be "enmeshed", while low cohesion families are "disengaged". When measured by deviancy of MMPI scores, the white offspring seemed to be better in highly cohesive families and worse with low cohesion. For the transracial adoptees, family cohesion was not as important as was adaptability. The adaptability dimension has to do with the tendency of a family to change its rules and relationships (power structure, roles, etc.) in various situations. Adaptability involves the discipline, roles, rules, and control systems of the family. Very high adaptability is called "chaotic" which grades through "flexible" to "structured" to "rigid" for low adaptability families. The transracially adopted young adults clearly did better, as measured by MMPI deviancy, with low adaptability. With rather rigid, structured roles and rules they appeared better overall and for them cohesion was unimportant. Without getting into the conundrums of directionality of causation (psychologically healthy adoptees create rigid family rules, or families with rigid rules tend to develop psychologically healthy adoptees, or both are parallel manifestations of genetic predisposition), it is potentially important to note that the relationship between kind of family structure and the apparent well-being of the children was different for the white biological offspring and the transracial adoptees. Consistent with the historical observations of such disparate commentators as Albert Schweitzer and traditional Southern County Sheriffs, one interpretation is that Pit Bulls do best with rather strict and inflexible rules. On the other hand Cocker Spaniels respond favorably to emotional bonding.
What is to be Done?
One of the experiments that Professor Shockley suggested to the National Academy of Sciences at its Spring Meeting of 1968 has been conducted and the results are in. What is to be done? As suggested at the beginning of this article, if recent history is a guide we will first wish the results the death of silence. Pretend they do not exist. If that fails, then yell and scream and call names. Outrage at insensitivity; heap acrimony upon ad hominem.
The unfortunate truth that no-one was particularly hoping for is completely at odds with the revealed wisdom of the egalitarian left: When black babies are adopted into middle class bright white families they grow up to function intellectually like blacks. Less clear is what happens emotionally and in terms of personality adjustment. Whatever, there is no evidence that either the white children or their black adopted siblings grow up better adjusted, and there might be substantially more social deviancy and psychopathology than without the mixed-race adoptive experience. These data are consistent with a large and growing body of other findings.
In a rational civilized and civily humanitarian culture there might be a call for further investigation and study of the implications of the best scientific information that is available. In a civilization that is experiencing a phase of irrational ideological zealotry the response would be quite different.
In 1961 a president of the American Psychological Association, Henry Garrett, called the egalitarian dogma that blacks and whites are genetically equal in cognitive ability the "scientific hoax of the century" (Garrett, 1961). In 1967 the Nobel laureate William Shockley lamented the "entrenched dogmatism of inverted liberals" that prevented open discussion and unbiased research (Shockley, 1967). In 1995 the sociologist Robert Gordon referred to the "degradation ceremony" which is held to heap acrimony on anyone who deviates from "one-party science" (Gordon, 1995). The Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton has experienced attempts to criminalize him because of his research (Whitney, 1996). Charles Murray in his "afterword" for the 1996 soft-cover edition of The Bell Curve opines "The social science that deals in public policy has in the latter part of the twentieth century become self-censored and riddled with taboos - in a word, corrupt." (Murray, 1996, p. 575) The inquisitional zeal with which the secular priesthood attacks any apostate from the egalitarian fiction would be ludicrous if the consequences were not so serious.
Science and Socialism
The current state of affairs in the social sciences is not unprecedented in recent scientific history. The conditions of soviet science under socialism are only just now becoming known in the west. There have been a spate of books, one is the 1994 Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science by Valery N. Soyfer (translated by Leo and Rebecca Gruliow). Under socialism, the genetics that forms the basis for individual and race differences was first attacked, then ridiculed and essentially outlawed as an anti-egalitarian invention of Western capitalists that was inherently evil because it was inconsistent with Marxist-Leninism. In America The Science and Politics of IQ, or Not in Our Genes, or Ever Since Darwin will give you the flavor (Gould, 1977; Kamin, 1974; Lewontin, Rose & Kamin, 1984). The absurd anti-factual structure which developed was able to dominate all of the biological and social sciences in the Soviet Union and its client states for a period of decades. This perversion was not the work of any one man, not the great Lysenko, rather it required the active involvement and support of many of the leading scientists and intellectuals. It is a fundamental structural flaw of socialism, to claim to establish reality on the basis of the scripture according to Marx. Genes and heredity did not influence differences between individuals, or races, or eventually even species. Instead, conditions of rearing were all-important. Everyone knows fertilizer is important, so manipulate the early experiences of the puppies in order to change their development. "Vernalization" was the name for one sort of head start program, sure to transform winter wheat into spring wheat. No need, or time for basic research, there was a pressing national need that called for intervention now. So, throw money at nice-sounding intervention programs. Then, without evaluation introduce nation-wide applied programs. Discourage any mention of genetics - it represents the Hell of Capitalism, the Devil's work in total contrast to the Paradise of Egalitarian Socialism. Inheritance and genetics is Nazi-tainted evil; its practitioners must be despicable racists. When one program after another fails, simply give them more rubles, or quietly close them down while touting with much fanfare yet another enrichment. It is truly scary; the parallels between Soviet practice under socialism and environmentalist - egalitarianism in American social policy. Egalitarian agriculture and the food shortages it caused played no small role in the demise of the Soviet Union.
Soyfer says it well:
In any society, there are charlatans and people who are simply mistaken. They may try to deceive their fellows, either by design or out of ignorance. But in a healthy society, others will call attention to their errors, test their assumptions, and make objective appraisals. Shams are exposed, and no one punishes those who do the exposing; members of the government or secret police do not hurl political accusations against seekers of scientific truth. But that is what happened when an alliance of the Lysenkos, the Stalins, and the Berias was part of the onrushing, bloody chariot of socialism.(p.300)
One of Professor Shockley's suggested experiments has been done and the results are in. Now after 30 odd years and over $5.4 Trillion dollars, perhaps it is not too late to dust off some of his other suggestions.
