Born That Way

by William Wright

  Among the ideas Scarr has championed is the concept of children molding their own environments. She also belongs to the growing group of psychologists who believe most environments have a confounding genetic component in that they are fashioned in part, if not by the individual, by biologically related humans. Either way, genes are involved. The most recent data, she feels, convincingly demonstrates that nonshared environments influence development but that the environment shared with other family members has negligible effect. This would seem to indicate that the genetically loaded environment the child fashions is of far greater importance than the genetically more neutral family setting. Beyond these refinements of her overall view of child development is the conviction that a child’s genetic endowment is of overriding importance to the adult he or she will become, provided the child is raised in what she calls a normal range of environment.

  Her “normal-range” concept and spin-off notions like “good-enough parents,” although sounding vague and unscientific, dominate her view of child development. She believes that unless a child is subjected to environmental extremes, such as constant hunger or abusive or neglectful parents, the child will develop along lines set out by its DNA. She also believes that rearing variations within this “normal range”—such enhancements as special attention from parents, superior schooling, stimulating friends—have little effect on the final product. Yes, she says, echoing the Minnesota researchers, the environment can alter development; no, it generally doesn’t. Looking at this idea from the broadest possible range, she said, “Fortunately, evolution has not left development of the human species, or any other, at the easy mercy of variations in their environments.”

  This idea was an affront to those who had erected entire social programs, if not political systems, on the belief that personalities and behavior were direct products of the environment, that even slight improvements in the rearing matrix will produce improvements in the developing human. (The rearing environment’s negligible benefits will probably also come as bad news to the parents who have pulled strings and sacrificed to send mediocre children to Princeton and Vassar.) Because of Scarr’s longtime study of day care and other intervention programs for children, her thumbs-down on such efforts had more than the usual political resonance. Her conclusions about the genome’s power and the environment’s lack of it, drawn from her own studies and those of others, have provoked much controversy.

  Like Kagan and many psychologists educated in the heyday of environmentalism, Scarr now deplores what she calls the “banishment” of biology and genetics from the behavioral sciences for decades. She is less perturbed than other behavioral geneticists, however, by the virulent resistance of die-hard environmentalists. She admits to having a contrarian nature and says it pleases her when her scientific findings go against prevailing beliefs, calling this characteristic her “intellectual perversity.”

  She discovered this appetite for bucking received wisdom as an undergraduate at Vassar when environmental behaviorism ruled the day. She was particularly irked when she was told there were no biological causes for differences in I.Q., that the differences were all environmental. “I knew that wasn’t true,” she told me many years later. “It couldn’t be true. Parents know it’s not true. I couldn’t stand it. I knew it was an absurd position. So I went to graduate school at Harvard, where the attitude was pretty much the same, but I found Irving [Gottesman], who was there at the time, and I began doing research with him.” She later added to her condemnation of her chosen branch of social science in the years she entered it: “Psychology was defending positions which the public knew were untrue.”

  In 1964, well aware she was challenging her superiors’ formulations, Scarr did a twin study to establish a genetic basis to motivation—the need for achievement. At the same time, her intellectual soul mate, Gottesman, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the heritability of personality. These mid-sixties, genetics-oriented efforts were a decade before the publication of E. O. Wilson’s landmark Sociobiology and fifteen years before Bouchard began his study of reared-apart twins. For that day, Scarr and Gottesman were two lonely genetics voices crying in the behaviorist dreamland.

  Much of the prominence Scarr has earned over three decades in child developmental psychology derives not only from her research projects and papers but also from her voracious reading of the literature, her broad knowledge of all the most relevant studies, and her painstaking analyses of this sea of data. Her plunge into the cauldrons of race and I.Q. was not only motivated by her appetite for battle. “It is no accident,” she wrote in 1981, when at Yale, “that I chose to study genetic differences in behavior—even the possibility of race differences. From my educational and social background, those seemed to be pressing social issues, ones that had been neglected in scientific research.”

  Politically she describes herself as “a mainstream academic liberal.” Since her senior year at Vassar, she has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and throughout her life she has supported feminist and other causes dedicated to a more equitable society. In spite of her belief in the power of genes, she is highly skeptical, as both a scientist and a woman, about genetic generalizations, especially those concerning group differences, and is acutely aware of the injustice such generalizations can inflict on individuals. For a close-to-home refutation of such inferences, she cites the studies that say men are better at math than women. Then with the pride of an intellectually perverse mother, she points out that her son is poor at math, while her daughter is a whiz.

  Although an active liberal, Scarr feels strongly that her political positions should not intrude on her science—nor that other people’s politics should influence hers. In 1981 she wrote: “There is no more dangerous idea than the thought that someone, somewhere, can determine what I can study and say about my research.” Her career as a scholar reveals an overriding interest in learning what is, what the givens of the human condition may be. Only after arriving at a valid understanding of reality, Scarr feels, can the scientist then apply this knowledge to implement a political vision for a more just world—or hope that others will utilize the knowledge the scientist has helped develop to beneficial social ends.

  With this stance she puts herself in direct conflict with those whom she feels, in their visions for a more just world, have decided what the givens should be, then try to control and bend knowledge to that vision. In 1981 she discussed the social injustice that resulted from human variation but said, “It is the suffering that should be addressed, not the genetic differences denied.”

  Scarr has not shied from the areas of greatest controversy. In 1977 she and a colleague, Richard Weinberg, did a study of transracial adoption—black children adopted into white families. The study provoked fierce responses even though the results were mostly favorable to blacks. She found that the black children raised in white families logged I.Q. scores that were higher than the average for the white population—a mean I.Q. of 106. This was surprising, since in the U.S. black children consistently scored lower than white children—which was, in fact, the disagreeable statistic that had been the basis of Arthur Jensen’s inflammatory paper and later The Bell Curve, both of which attributed this discrepancy to genetic differences between races. The Scarr-Weinberg study seemed to say that given decent upbringings, blacks are smarter on average than whites. Confusing things still further, even with the impressively enhanced performances, the adopted black children consistently scored lower than their white siblings, which would indicate that the white kids in the adoptive homes were well above the mean in I.Q.

  The entirety of their data convinced Scarr and Weinberg that the explanation was not that the white, middle-class environment made the black kids smarter, but that the I.Q. tests that suggested such a result are biased toward the white culture. To be sure, the blacks tested better with a white upbringing, but this did not indicate I.Q. enhancement from that upbringing, as might be assumed, only that it offered better preparation for I.Q. tes
t questions. She appeared to be slyly suggesting that intelligence was an entity separate and independent from I.Q. scores, a conclusion that surely delighted the small band of radical environmentalists who claimed there was no such thing as intelligence, that I.Q. tests were bogus instruments, measuring nothing—except the effects of a white, middle-class upbringing.

  The angry reaction to the Scarr-Weinberg paper, in spite of its politically welcome conclusions, indicated that the mere act of addressing racial differences, even if none was found, was forbidden in some quarters. This was just the sort of intellectual taboo that was for Scarr a red flag. In 1981, twelve years after Arthur Jensen ripped open the genes-versus-environment debate with his paper on black-white I.Q. differences, Scarr edited a book of essays courageously titled Race, Social Class and Individual Differences in I.Q.

  To encompass the debate, she invited the most prominent people on both sides to submit chapters—Jensen himself and such opponents as Leon Kamin, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Hirsch, and others of the stop-genes brigade. Scarr also included the results of her black-adoptees study and a number of her earlier papers, with a sampling of opposing commentaries. As the book’s editor, Scarr maintained an impressive balance, only revealing her position when defending her own work. In her no-holds-barred rebuttal of Jensen’s criticisms of her interracial adoption study, Scarr says, “Only the mother of such a study could love it enough to protect it from the arcane statistical threats he presents.” Regardless of which side you were on or how weighty your credentials, it was clearly unwise to mess with Scarr.

  Because Scarr’s book on race was a compilation of papers written over many years, it revealed a substantive shift in her thoughts about the importance of the environment in development. In a chapter that first appeared in Review of Child Development Research, published in 1975 by the University of Chicago Press, she wrote: “The myth of heritability limiting malleability seems to die hard. Until recently, the importance of the genotype’s reaction range was underestimated; it provides alternative phenotypes for the same individual, depending upon crucial environmental factors in the development of that individual. There is no one-to-one correspondence between genotypes and behavior phenotype, regardless of the heritability of a characteristic.” The scholarly lingo translates to: A child can turn out many different ways, depending on its environment.

  This strong environmentalist point of view seemed to have been reversed by the time Scarr wrote a 1978 paper, again with Weinberg, “Family Background and Intellectual Attainment,” which appeared in the American Sociological Review and which she included in the latter part of her book on race and class. The authors wrote, “The conclusion that we feel is justified by our data is that intellectual differences among children at the end of the child-rearing period have little to do with environmental differences among families that range from solid working class to upper middle class.”

  Looked at more closely, these two views are not so much in opposition as they are bridged by a major qualification. The first is saying that the environment can alter genetically influenced traits in important ways. The second says that within a broad range of environments, the inheritance of intelligence (also the topic of the first paper) is not affected by the environment. At first glance it sounds as though Scarr is switching from saying the environment can have an important effect on genetic expression to saying the environment has no effect. But she is not saying the environment can have no effect, only that it rarely does—that within a broad range of environments, the genome will express itself unaltered. This was the same conclusion Bouchard was drawing from his reared-apart twins.

  Despite Scarr’s near dismissal of the environment except in extreme instances, she ended her book with a strongly anti-Jensen assertion: “So far, I see no evidence for the hypothesis that the average difference in intellectual performance between U.S. whites and blacks results primarily from genetic racial differences.” It was an interesting agreement with Leon Kamin, who felt that unless the evidence was 100 percent foolproof, an impossibility with studies of humans, no conclusions could be drawn. If Scarr’s position appeared to be antigenetic she counteracted this impression in the book’s final paragraphs; she complained of the hypercritical, microscopic scrutiny given the behavioral genetics data and of the critics’ failure to see a hardwood forest because of a few scrub pines.

  In 1986 Scarr was elected president of the Behavioral Genetics Association, and five years later she was elected president of the Society for Research in Child Development. For her presidential address for the latter organization, she wrote a major statement on her overall views on human nature that, in their forthright downgrading of the family-rearing environment in a child’s development, upset the most fundamental tenets of her field and, not surprisingly, produced furious reactions. Her talk was not just a behavioral genetics manifesto; it was a declaration of war on the obstructionist tactics of the environmental traditionalists.

  The address’s opening shot was her endorsement of the notion, first advanced by R. Q. Bell in 1968, that children play a large role in constructing their own environments and a refinement of that idea—that parents respond in specific ways to different children. This was an immediate gauntlet tossed at traditional psychologists since it deposed the environment as the monolithic, external force it had been considered to be for decades and replaced it with an environment that, to a large degree, was molded by innate differences in the children themselves, which is to say by their genetic endowments. Genes not only make the kids, she was saying; they have a big hand in creating their own environment as well. In a succinct summation of children’s influence on their environment (or more succinctly, their selection of it), Scarr said, “Parents don’t buy their kids heavy metal.”

  She then cited behavioral genetics studies that indicate variations in children that are not genetic but that are instead caused by nonshared environmental factors, that is, factors specific to the individual child but not to his or her siblings. Since these one-child factors explained most of the variation not explained by genes, environmental factors common to the entire family were relegated to insignificance. This brushed aside such longtime favorites with traditional psychologists as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and educational levels. With her gloves now off, Scarr said: “Being reared in one family rather than another, within the range of families sampled, makes few differences in children’s personality and intellectual development.”

  This assertion was guaranteed to infuriate the environmentalists, all the men and women who had devoted their lives to studying differences in family-rearing environments. Her sweeping, stable-cleaning assertions on the unimportance of family always stressed her crucial proviso: as long as the rearing environment fell within the “normal range” for that species. Without citing any studies, Scarr defined the normal range for human infants as “environments that include protective, parenting adults and a surrounding social group to which the child will be socialized.” Not a word about Dr. Seuss books, scout camp, or Little League. Extremely broad, her definition of normal range seemed to embrace every rearing situation except those of children who are locked in closets, starved, abused, and dropped on their heads. It did not specifically address such dire environmental factors as poverty, malnutrition, understimulation, and drug-addicted parents, but the implication was that such conditions would be considered extreme, outside the normal range.

  Broadly inclusive as was her definition of okay environments, it was another broadside at prevailing psychological orthodoxy, which held that variations in rearing techniques can have indelible effects on children. Indeed, philosophies of child-rearing had been founded on that very premise, important careers built upon it, and best-selling books written about it. None of these rearing variations was important, Scarr claimed, and hammered home her point by saying, “Most families provide sufficiently supportive environments that children’s individual genetic differences develop.”

  After elaborating on this id
ea, Scarr then attacked the studies of environmental effects on children by saying they never factored out the degree to which an environment might have roots in the parents’ genes, which of course the parents share to a degree with the child. She gave the example of a book-filled home of an upper-middle-class family, a situation that had been previously taken as an environmental element plain and simple, and pointed out that the books were probably reflections of the parents’ genes and not strictly environmental. If a child from such a family grows up to love books, there is no way to sort out whether the love stemmed from the book-lined environment or from inheriting book-loving genes from the parents. With this addition to Scarr’s system, we now had the environment as part function of the parents’ genes, in addition to being part function of the children’s genes. In the old nature-versus-nurture paradigm, nurture turned out to be full of nature.

  Stating her “normal range” of environment concept in a different way, Scarr said that, “ordinary differences between families have little effect on children’s development, unless the family is outside of a normal developmental range.” Citing a study by D. C. Rowe at the University of Arizona, Scarr added, “Good enough, ordinary parents probably have the same effects on their children’s development as culturally defined super parents.” Perhaps fearing she had been too hard on conscientious parents, she added that this finding meant parents no longer had to knock themselves out for their children. Maybe even better news for low-energy parents was that Scarr’s theory absolved them of guilt if things turned out badly. Instead of kicking themselves for screwing up, parents could say instead they had been dealt some bad seeds.