There is a deeper assumption underlying adoption studies that is often not acknowledged by either adoption study researchers or their critics, and it is an assumptions that is at least as important as the two considered by Richardson and Norgate: the assumption that the heritability statistics generated by adoption studies are informative about something of consequence. Although Richardson and Norgate’s paper presents several valid criticisms of adoption studies of IQ that lead them to suggest a ‘radical reappraisal’ of such studies, a reappraisal even more radical than the one they suggest might, in fact, be warranted
