>>10768560as someone who works with adopted children, there are a lot of reasons why this might be a misleading study
- when were the kids adopted? usually, 12 is the cutoff (here in cali anyway, sometimes older kids get adopted but usually not older than 12) but that's still a lot of time for some other factors to come into play. if a kid is raised by a neglectful parent until they are 6, and then adopted, that is way different than being raised from birth
- why were they adopted? adoptions at birth because someone gives up their child are relatively rare. more often adoptions happen when a kid is a few years old. often times they are adopted because birth parents are unfit/abusive/neglectful. children placed at birth are also detained from parents in a hospital due to drug exposure, so that could also play a major role
- adoptions don't just happen instantly. the child welfare system (again, in cali, not sure about minnesota) is based primarily around reunification, which causes great tension in children. imagine visiting with your black birth parents while staying with prospectively adoptive white parents, and having to go to court hearings where a judge tells your bio parents they are unfit.
- many adoptions happen after multiple placements. that is to say, a kid will be with one family, then moved to another family to adopt them. for children in certain age ranges (2-5) this can cause delays that last for many years, and is also associated with longer-term social issues.
finally, just a quick read of the wiki on this study indicates your chart is biased for many of the reasons I have pointed out, and from the followup study's author -"results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement," and "We think that it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based"
