ABSTRACT
It is truly an honor to contribute to this Festschrift for Sandra Scarr. As I reflected on what I might cover in my contribution, it occurred to me that there are several noteworthy themes that characterized Sandra Scarr’s career as a developmental psychologist and behavior geneticist. Among these, perhaps the most salient and important were her pursuit of knowledge regardless of the controversy it might engender, her willingness to rigorously investigate topics regarded by many as taboo, and her concern with increasing the research on and welfare of under-represented populations. Rather than provide a medley of hits from our work on the Transracial Adoption Study (TRA), thus reviewing some of Sandra’s many past accomplishments, in this chapter I will offer some conjectures regarding substantive areas of research and specific designs that Sandra may have been involved in if she were coming of age as a burgeoning developmental behavior geneticist in the current genomics era. Although she did not predominantly conduct molecular genetic research, one such study is particularly notable as it represents Sandra’s investigation of topics that were not only important and timely but also controversial. Specifically, to address the hypothesis that Black–White differences in IQ could be due to genetic differences between the populations, Sandra and her colleagues tested whether variability in intellectual performance in a sample of African-American children was related to their degree of Caucasian ancestry as indicated by a set of genetic markers that were informative regarding ethnic background (Scarr, Pakstis, Katz, & Barker, 1977). Sandra and her colleagues found no such relation, thus suggesting that a genetic basis for Black–White differences in IQ was untenable. It would have been considerably easier for Sandra to adopt the conventional wisdom that there were no such differences and that such topics of study were taboo. But it is only because Sandra had the courage to pursue such research that we have actual knowledge about such important topics, rather than merely opinions uninformed by data.
