Double Mystery: the nature of twins (1995)

The same way they can determine a myriad precisely placed, tiny structures in the body, like the ossicles of the ear.

Or the way a sixty-year-old individual's left foot looks a lot like a mirror image of the right foot, in spite of sixty years of separation.

Two of my uncles are fraternal twins involved in a long-term twin study. They just traveled to the east coast for their periodic study updates a month or two ago. I don't know what may have been learned from tracking them through the years but I know they have enjoyed the opportunity to participate.

Handedness mentioned in the article was also interesting since I have siblings who are left-handed and my son and I are ambidextrous in many things. I worked with a man who could close his eyes and write his name in cursive with each hand simultaneously with the left hand signature being a mirror image of the right hand signature. Pretty spectacular.

Other odd things mentioned included tendencies for moles or acne to appear in the same relative places on twins suggest to me that mole positions on singletons could also be passed from a parent such that a child having a mole in the same place as one of the parents could be an inherited trait - the "family" mole or birthmark.

Genetics is weird and fascinating and I haven't looked closely enough at it to understand it. I may have to read some more on the subject.

Thanks for this article.

As a non identical twin, I remember we sometimes actively tried to become different with my twin. Growing up, we hated being treated as one unit instead of two individuals. Also we competed a lot in sports, school etc. Slowly I found areas where I was better and my brother where he was. I have talked to some other twins and they said the same thing, about hating as being treated as one unit and wanting to become at least little different.

The original Pioneer Fund funded Minnesota studies very rarely studied twins separated at or near birth and raised in very different environments. For most of the twins, the separation happened much later, or happened early but was temporary and the family was reunited, or the parents died and two sisters each raised a twin, and the like. The notion is false that the Minnesota studies all this flowed from showed people mainly raised from birth in very different environments. It did not.

It's a religious belief - we are the Brahmin, we are the chosen people, dressed up in 21st century Calvinist/liberal clothes. We are born successful or not successful, due to nature, not nurture or environment. It's scientific Calvinism. Of course some people flock to defend it in a way they wouldn't for some aspect of quantum theory - as I said, it's a religion in pseudo-scientific form. It feeds people's egos, especially people born to some form of privilege who have not accomplished all that much, and some people race to swallow from that hose as fast as they can.

The history of the funding of all of this is the old Pioneer Fund which started out showing Nazi eugenic films. They funded the original Minnesota twin studies all this field flowed from.

I should note this appeared in The New Yorker three years into Tina Brown's editorship, this kind of low middlebrow garbage didn't show up in The New Yorker much before that, but it became commonplace after she came in.