Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
Put aside your morals and your judgement for a second. Or until you finish reading this. And then the book.Wright is a writer for The New York Times, but as any sensible person would he cashes is on the same writing twice, once as a columnist, then as a novelist. I already like him.A quick look at his Goodreads profile reveales that he is not only beyond prolific, but also stretches across various subject matters, from politics to genetics, just to name one.I though about writing down what I think on the subject of twins, nature vs. nurture, social experiments and so on, but the next countless quotes shed a light on that, also.''Twins have been used to prove a point, and the point is that we don't become. We are.''''Twins have been confounding humanity from the earliest times, almost as it they were a divine prank designed to undermine our sense of individuality and specialness in the world.''Chapter by chapter we learn about twins who got separated by accident, or by the hand of a doctor, who suffers from possible God-delusions, not to forget the Auschwitz episode, which offers an unsettling image of what could/did happen when/''if scientists were allowed to experiment freely on twins without the constrains of human decency.''''If people were merely creatures of their environment, and not of their genes, then society imposed these differences, rather than simply reflecting them.''''Separated twins are at once an experiment of nature and an experiment of society.''''God could appear to me in a dream and tell me the outcome of a perfect twin study, and my question to God would be, 'Okay, now that I know that the heritability is 0.469327, what do I do with it? Tell me what that tells me,'says Lewontin, one of Kamin's coauthors.''''In 1973 Jerry L. Hall, of the George Washington University Medical Center, reported that he had succeeded in cloning human embryos, using a method that had already been perfected with animals. Dr. Hall merely split the embryo, then at the stage of only a few cells, into two or three parts. Each lump of cells developed normally into twin or triplet embryos. The object of the experiment was to make more embryos available for women who were undergoing in vitro fertilization. Those embryos that were not implanted in the womb were discarded, but they could have easily been frozen and used later, perhaps in other women. Thus the study of twins gains a weird pertinence for the future, as we envision twins separated not only by distance but by time as well.''''How can it be that two cell clusters that were separated fifty years ago have enough information to determine where your blackheads would develop when you are fifty or sixty years old. It's really very scary.''''I can tell you with complete certainty that some of us are twins who are walking around in a single body. (...) The fact that this happens in humans was only discovered when donors in blood banks were found to be carrying two different blood types; it could mean that fraternal twins merged in the womb.''! ''What is fascinating about twins is that they are a condition of humanity which forces all rules to be qualified. Everybody is different - except identical twins.Everybody has got different blood groups - except identical twins. And they are so dramatically visible. They are known to everyone, every writer is aware of the dramatic potential of twins, every kid who ever met identical twins is instantly fascinated by them. They have been known since we have been able to know about anything. Yet we still don't know why they happen. We have all sorts of hypotheses that are given as fact. I now regard a fact as a hypothesis that people don't bother to argue about anymore.''Then there is the detailed life of John/Joan, the boy, who was the victim of a grand scheme. His doctor accidentally used an electrical cauterizing needle rather than a scalpel, which resulted in a completely removed penis. And that's when his doctor and parents decided to flip a coin and raise him a girl, just to prove that ''we are born sexually neutral, in other words, and are pushed by social forces into one camp or the other.'' Obviously, all they achieved was mental scaring. And lastly:''Twins threaten us because they undermine our notion of identity. We think we are who we are because of the life we have lived. We think we shape the character and values of our children by the way we raise them. We think that we are born with the potential to be many things, and to behave in an infinite variety of ways, and that we consciously navigate a path through the obstacles and opportunities that life presents us with, through a faculty we call free will. But when we read about twins who have been separated at birth and reunited in middle age only to discover that in many respects they have become the same person, it suggests that life is a charade, that the experiences that we presume have shaped us are little more than ornaments or curiosites we have picked up along the way, and that the injunctions of our parents or the traumas of our youth that we believed to have been the lodestones of our character may have had little more effect on us than a book we may have read or a show we may have seen on television. The science of behavioral genetics, largely through twin studies, has made a pervasive case that much of our identity is stamped on us from conception; to that extent our lives seem to be pre-chosen - all we have to do is live out the script that is written in our genes.But this view, for most people, seems stark and frightening and full of dire political and philosophical consequences. If we are only living out our lives like actors reading our lines, then the nobility of life is cheapened. Our accomplishments are not really earned, they are simply arrived at. Our failures are just as expectable. We are like genetic rockets, programmed to travel in a set direction with a given amount of fuel. Barring some accident of fate, our trajectory is predetermined - we're just along for the ride.''! ''It's also as if there is no self except for the shadow that is cast on the environment.''
The big take away from this book is that there have been many studies and mounds of data but not much has been resolved on the mysteries of twins. What correlates winds up challenged by the next study and politics hangs over this particular nature vs. nurture debate.Wright presents many anecdotes (alludes to data that is not shown) of the twins raised apart. These point to genes as a determining factor in many things about their lives. Does this mean that all the efforts of parents, teachers and communities mean nothing? Is a life determined by genes?Since this book is from 1998, I read it along with a well linked Wikipedia article. While there are now more tools for twin researchers, it's hard for the layman to spot what progress has been made. For instance, Wright states that it was not known when twinning actually occurs; the Wikipedia article, to a lay person, seems to give the how and when.The most interesting part was the new to me concept of the vanishing twin. In 1998, the estimate was that 1 in 13 single births began as twins. The remains of the second embryo might be found in the placenta or as an implant in the surviving embryo or just disappear. According to Wikipedia, the number is now estimated as 1 in 8.I would like to see an up to date edition of this book, with the actual data of the most significant studies.
What do You think about Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (1999)?
This is an older book, early 90s I believe, but presents some thought provoking studies that examine the nature/nuture boundaries.Tho current theories present the balance as 50-50, the information makes a strong case for nature's dominance over folks. As a therapist I found myself in a bit of an existential quandry! If behaviors as innocuous-seeming as the habit of pushing up one's nose, or, as life-defining as marrying a woman named Sue are pre-determined, what's left for influence? Professionally I console myself with the thought that in my field there is room to support a person living up to their inherent potential-which may vary greatly.On another, metaphysical plane I enjoyed considering how the near identical life courses of these separated twins may be the result of a shared meaning/spiritual journey that supercedes biology or psychology. Or perhaps an intangible connection between the twins exists, allowing parallels to take place.It's a fun, quick read.
—jenna
I found this book fascinating. I was particularly interested in Wright's take on how the results of twin studies have contributed over the last century to trends in politics, psychology, education etc. He presents this history as a sort of tug of war between behavioural geneticists and environmentalists, with both sides trying to prove stats of more than 50% influence. This book offers a very thought-provoking (albeit somewhat dated) examination of the Nature versus Nurture debate. Reading it caused me to re-assess many of my assumptions about inheritance.
—Becky
I tore through this book in a few hours. Partly – unfortunately – because it’s rather a slight book, but also because it’s fascinating as hell. Lawrence Wright, a journalist, not only synthesises the current thinking about twins, but also uses them as a method to discuss the ever-contentious issue of nature vs. nurture.Wright uncovers the fact that (compared to other areas of biology) not all that much is known about why twins are born, and most of what is known remains in dispute. This is partly because the tendency, over the last century, has been to use twins to study how genetics and environment affect people in general (i.e. “if one twin is raised by a low-income family and one twin is raised by a rich family, is the rich twin’s IQ higher?”). Widespread, in-depth studies that use twins to study twins have only emerged more recently.Because this is a work of journalism, it’s a fairly easy read, with scientific jargon minimized. Unfortunately, the journalistic slant means that many twin studies are mentioned, but not much detail is included. The lack of footnotes also makes my academic soul weep, because following up some of the more interesting studies is made that much harder.Twins is a really, really interesting read – I only wish it were longer, with more detail.
—Nicola
