...in the whole "Nature vs. Nurture" question, you really should read a
piece in yesterday's New York Times Magazine,
"The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá: After a hospital
error, two pairs of Colombian identical twins were raised as two pairs
of fraternal twins. This is the story of how they found one another —
and of what happened next."
So which is the greater influence on a person, nature or nurture? From the article (my emphasis):
Despite periods of controversy, twins studies proliferated. Over the
last 50 years, some 17,000 traits have been studied, according to a
meta-analysis led by Tinca Polderman, a Dutch researcher, and Beben
Benyamin, an Australian, and published this year in the journal Nature
Genetics. Researchers have claimed to divine a genetic influence in such
varied traits as gun ownership, voting preferences, homosexuality, job
satisfaction, coffee consumption, rule enforcement and insomnia.
Virtually wherever researchers have looked, they have found that
identical twins’ test results are more similar than those of fraternal
twins. The studies point to the influence of genes on almost every
aspect of our being (a conclusion so sweeping that it indicates, to some
scientists, only that the methodology must be fatally flawed).
‘‘Everything is heritable,’’ says Eric Turkheimer, a behavioral
geneticist at the University of Virginia. ‘‘The more genetically related
a pair of people are, the more similar they are on any other outcome of
interest’’ — whether it be personality, TV watching or political
leaning. ‘‘But this can be true without there being some kind of
specific mechanism that is driving it, some version of a
Huntington’s-disease gene. It is based on the complex combined effects
of an unaccountable number of genes.’’
Arguably the most intriguing branch of twins research involves a small
and unusual class of research subjects: identical twins who were reared
apart. Thomas Bouchard Jr., a psychologist at the University of
Minnesota, began studying them in 1979, when he first learned of Jim and
Jim, two Ohio men reunited that year at age 39. They not only looked
remarkably similar, but had also vacationed on the same Florida beach,
married women with the same first name, divorced those women and married
second wives who also shared the same name, smoked the same brand of
cigarette and built miniature furniture for fun. Similar in personality
as well as in vocal intonation, they seemed to have been wholly formed
from conception, impervious to the effects of parenting, siblings or
geography. Bouchard went on to research more than 80 identical-twin
pairs reared apart, comparing them with identical twins reared together,
fraternal twins reared together and fraternal twins reared apart. He
found that in almost every instance, the identical twins, whether reared
together or reared apart, were more similar to each other than their
fraternal counterparts were for traits like personality and, more
controversial, intelligence. One unexpected finding in his research
suggested that the effect of a pair’s shared environment — say, their
parents — had little bearing on personality. Genes and unique
experiences — a semester abroad, an important friend — were more
influential.
So that's it then; it's all settled. Just as I suspected: nature trumps nurture. Right? Not so fast.
As
pure science, the study of twins reared apart has troubled some
researchers. Those twins either self-select and step forward or become
known to researchers through media reports — which are less inclined to
cover identical twins who do not look remarkably alike, who did not
marry and divorce women of the same name or choose the same obscure
hobby. Identical twins who do not look remarkably alike, of course, are
also less likely to be spotted and reunited in the first place. And few
studies of twins, whether reared apart or reared together, have included
twins from extremely different backgrounds.
‘‘Every
study will have its critics,’’ says Nancy Segal, a professor at
California State University, Fullerton, who worked with Bouchard from
1982 to 1991. ‘‘But studying twins reared apart separates genetic and
environmental effects on behavior better than any research design I
know.’’
Segal
has been studying Chinese twins (fraternal and identical pairs reared
together and reared apart) since 2003. In several books about twins,
Segal has merged science with human-interest tales, walking readers
through statistical evidence but also highlighting anecdotal details:
the identical twins reared apart who each showed up for research wearing
seven rings, or the reared-apart sisters who rubbed their noses the
same way and called it ‘‘squidging.’’
___
At
the moment that a sperm penetrates an egg, that single-cell zygote is
what is known as totipotent: It is pure potential. It has in it the
makings of an eyebrow’s curve, a heart’s thick muscle, a neuron’s
electrochemical power; it has in it the finicky instructional manual
that will direct the building of the body’s every fiber and the
regulation of those fibers. But that one cell splits into two, and
instantly, lights begin to go out, potential dims. In order for that one
cell to become a tiny bit of flesh in a heart, and not the hair of an
eyebrow, one or more of its genetic signaling pathways must shut down.
The result is differentiation, a steady process of elimination that
allows complex biological universes to be built. Every time a group of
cells divides, each one becomes more like one thing, less like another.
By
the time that embryo is five or six days old, which is when a majority
of fateful twin splits occur, some of those cells, by chance, go to one
twin and some to the other. This means that the expression of some genes
in one of those future twins is already, in subtle ways, likely to be
different from the expression of genes in the other future twin,
theorizes Harvey Kliman, the director of the reproductive and placental
research unit at the Yale School of Medicine. From the moment that most
identical twins separate, they may well have different epigenetics, a
term that refers to the way genes are read and expressed, depending on
environment. They are already different products of their environment,
the environment being whatever uterine conditions rendered them separate
beings in the first place.
The
casual observer is fascinated by how similar identical twins are, but
some geneticists are more interested in identifying all the reasons they
might differ, sometimes in significant ways. Why might one identical
twin be gay or transgender and not the other? Why do identical twins,
born with the same DNA, sometimes die of different diseases at different
times in their lives? Their environments must be different, but which
aspect of their environment is the one that took their biology in a
different direction? Smoking, stress, obesity — those are some of the
factors that researchers have been able to link to specific changes in
the expression of specific genes. They expect, in time, to find
hundreds, possibly thousands, of others.
The
meta-analysis published this spring in Nature Genetics, which examined
50 years of studies of twins, arrived at a conclusion about the impact
of heredity and environment on human beings’ lives. On average, the
researchers found, any particular trait or disease in an individual is
about 50 percent influenced by environment and 50 percent influenced by
genes. But that simple ratio does not capture our complicated systems of
genetic circuitry, the way our genes steadily interact with the
environment, switching on, switching off, depending on the stimulus,
sometimes with lasting results that will continue on in our genome,
passed to the next generation. How an individual’s genes respond to that
environment — how they are expressed — creates what scientists call an
epigenetic profile.
So, getting back to those two sets of twins in Colombia:
Before starting her research, Segal would not have been surprised if
each young man tested similarly to his identical twin, despite their
different environments. But her preliminary results, she said, show that
on a number of traits, the identical twins were less alike than she
initially anticipated. ‘‘I came away with a real respect for the effect
of an extremely different environment,’’ Segal said.
The debate continues.
“That was just a simulation. Nothing can prepare you for the kind of monkey bars you’ll find in an actual war zone.”
