Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are by Lawrence Wright Page A
Authors: Lawrence Wright
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shared a taste for Miller Lite beer and chain-smoked Salem cigarettes.
The subject of twins reared apart was familiar to Bouchard, who is a tall, shambling man, with an open, florid face and bright blue eyes under tangled white brows. Since he came to Minnesota in 1969, Bouchard had been teaching a course in individual personality, vocational interests, values, and mental abilities. Twin studies are the very foundation of this branch of
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psychology. Not every university offers such a course, in part because race, gender, and class differences are closely compared, which arouses passionate debate over whether such differences are genetic or environmental. Bouchard had been picketed by the Students for a Democratic Society, who demanded that he be fired for teaching the "Nazi theories" of Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein.
This was an unexpected twist for Bouchard, who was a charter member of the Free Speech Movement during his own student days at Berkeley and on one occasion had himself been arrested and had spent a day in jail. He never studied with Jensen there, having been trained as an environmentalist, but later, when Jensen's article appeared in the Harvard Educational Review , Bouchard became a convert. His own studies about intelligence had drawn him increasingly into the center of controversy, but it turned out that he had an appetite for intellectual combat.
As it happened, he had already been thinking about pursuing research on twins reared apart, but he had no idea how to go about finding them; there had been only nineteen such cases reported in the United States at the time, and seventy-eight in the world (the Neubauer study was still quite secret). Very few of those had been reared by nonbiological relatives after having been separated early in life, and that made Lewis and Springer all the more exceptional; almost perfect, from the point of view of a behavioral scientist who had spent his career trying to tease apart the influence of nature and nurture on the human personality. Bouchard realized the importance of getting to the twins before they had the chance to create a mythology about themselves, or to reinforce mutual habits and thought patterns, which is one of the most distinctive features of the twinning
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phenomenon. He immediately invited Jim Lewis and Jim Springer to come to the university for tests. Within an hour Bouchard excitedly persuaded university officials to provide some grant money to study the Jim twins, and he vowed to "beg, borrow, or steal, and even use some of my own money if I have to," for the rest of it. "It was just sheer scientific curiosity," Bouchard says now. "I thought we were going to do a single case study of a pair of twins reared apart. We might have a little monograph." Over the next several weeks he dragooned colleagues from various departments to administer a battery of hastily assembled tests. Finally, only a month after their initial meeting, the Jim twins arrived in the Twin Cities, as the MinneapolisSt. Paul metropolis is called.
On the morning they were to begin the tests, Bouchard took the Jim twins to breakfast. It was the first time he had ever really worked with twins. He intended to brief them on the study, but he found himself obsessing over little details about them: the way each twin picked up his knife, for instance, or the way they had bitten their nails. Each twin had a peculiar whorl in his eyebrow, and Bouchard absently started counting the number of hairs in their brows. "You're staring at us," they told him. Bouchard had to excuse himself. He had been staggered by the similarity of their gestures, their voices, and the morphology of their bodies. These men had lived entirely separate lives, and yet if Bouchard closed his eyes he couldn't tell which twin was talking.
"We'd start early in the morning and finish in the evening," Jim Springer recalls about his first trip to Minneapolis. "They'd take Jim [Lewis] one way and I'd go
The subject of twins reared apart was familiar to Bouchard, who is a tall, shambling man, with an open, florid face and bright blue eyes under tangled white brows. Since he came to Minnesota in 1969, Bouchard had been teaching a course in individual personality, vocational interests, values, and mental abilities. Twin studies are the very foundation of this branch of
Page 45
psychology. Not every university offers such a course, in part because race, gender, and class differences are closely compared, which arouses passionate debate over whether such differences are genetic or environmental. Bouchard had been picketed by the Students for a Democratic Society, who demanded that he be fired for teaching the "Nazi theories" of Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein.
This was an unexpected twist for Bouchard, who was a charter member of the Free Speech Movement during his own student days at Berkeley and on one occasion had himself been arrested and had spent a day in jail. He never studied with Jensen there, having been trained as an environmentalist, but later, when Jensen's article appeared in the Harvard Educational Review , Bouchard became a convert. His own studies about intelligence had drawn him increasingly into the center of controversy, but it turned out that he had an appetite for intellectual combat.
As it happened, he had already been thinking about pursuing research on twins reared apart, but he had no idea how to go about finding them; there had been only nineteen such cases reported in the United States at the time, and seventy-eight in the world (the Neubauer study was still quite secret). Very few of those had been reared by nonbiological relatives after having been separated early in life, and that made Lewis and Springer all the more exceptional; almost perfect, from the point of view of a behavioral scientist who had spent his career trying to tease apart the influence of nature and nurture on the human personality. Bouchard realized the importance of getting to the twins before they had the chance to create a mythology about themselves, or to reinforce mutual habits and thought patterns, which is one of the most distinctive features of the twinning
Page 46
phenomenon. He immediately invited Jim Lewis and Jim Springer to come to the university for tests. Within an hour Bouchard excitedly persuaded university officials to provide some grant money to study the Jim twins, and he vowed to "beg, borrow, or steal, and even use some of my own money if I have to," for the rest of it. "It was just sheer scientific curiosity," Bouchard says now. "I thought we were going to do a single case study of a pair of twins reared apart. We might have a little monograph." Over the next several weeks he dragooned colleagues from various departments to administer a battery of hastily assembled tests. Finally, only a month after their initial meeting, the Jim twins arrived in the Twin Cities, as the MinneapolisSt. Paul metropolis is called.
On the morning they were to begin the tests, Bouchard took the Jim twins to breakfast. It was the first time he had ever really worked with twins. He intended to brief them on the study, but he found himself obsessing over little details about them: the way each twin picked up his knife, for instance, or the way they had bitten their nails. Each twin had a peculiar whorl in his eyebrow, and Bouchard absently started counting the number of hairs in their brows. "You're staring at us," they told him. Bouchard had to excuse himself. He had been staggered by the similarity of their gestures, their voices, and the morphology of their bodies. These men had lived entirely separate lives, and yet if Bouchard closed his eyes he couldn't tell which twin was talking.
"We'd start early in the morning and finish in the evening," Jim Springer recalls about his first trip to Minneapolis. "They'd take Jim [Lewis] one way and I'd go
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