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Authors: Lawrence Wright

Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Siblings, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Genetics & Genomics, #test

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BOOK: Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are
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Page 44
She recalled that when she said she had named her son James Edward, the court official exclaimed, "You can't do that. They named the other little boy James."
As the years passed, Lewis wondered about his brother, but he said he hesitated to try to find him because he was "afraid it might stir up some problems."
Eventually, however, curiosity overcame Lewis . . .
It was odd enough that both of the twins were named Jim, but it was utterly uncanny that each man had married and divorced a woman named Linda, then married a woman named Betty; the names of their firstborn children were James Alan Lewis and James Allen Springer; each had owned a dog named Toy. The article went on to say that both Lewis and Springer enjoyed carpentry and mechanical drawing and had spent family vacations on the same beach in Florida. Both had worked parttime in law enforcement. They were each six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. The only apparent difference between them was that Lewis wore his hair short and slicked it back, whereas Springer let his grow longer and combed it forward in bangs. Perhaps it was all a series of absurd coincidences amounting to very little; on the other hand, it might be the riddle of existence itself, the mystery of how we become the people we are, bound up in two soft-spoken, rather bemused, thirty-nine-year-old identical twins who 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
 
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 the other. Maybe we'd pass each other in the hallway, that was it." Bouchard had read carefully the criticism of pre-
 
Page 47
vious twin studies and knew the importance of testing the twins separately, using separate investigators, to keep from contaminating the results with the interviewer's expectations or gossip by the twins. The Jims had grown up less than a hundred miles from each other in western Ohio, so their values and many of their cultural references were similar, and of course any two people are bound to find that they have tastes, habits, experiences, and even friends in common if they live in the same society. In the case of the Jim twins, however, it was more difficult to find differences. According to their life histories and the inventories they filled out, each lived in the only house on his block, with a white bench around a tree in the backyard; each had elaborate workshops where they made miniature picnic tables (Lewis) or miniature rocking chairs (Springer); each followed stockcar racing and hated baseball. Their wives told the Minneapolis researchers that both Jims were romantics who left love notes around the house, but they were also anxious sleepers who ground their teeth at night and bit their nails to the quick during the day.
The Jims had extraordinarily parallel health histories as well: both had identically high blood pressure and had experienced what they thought were heart attacks, although no actual heart disease was diagnosed; both had had vasectomies; both had hemorrhoids; both had "lazy eye" in the same eye. The measurable features of their personalities, such as sociability, flexibility, tolerance, conformity, and self-control, were all so similar that they could have been the same person, as were their mental ability scores. "The only difference is that I would talk about my feelings where Jim felt more comfortable writing about them," says Springer. Bouchard was struck as well by the fact that their speech patterns, their body language, the way they sat in a
 
Page 48
chair or shook hands, were practically indistinguishable. Certain findings had immediate consequences. For instance, since their teenage years both Jims had suffered the same kinds of migraine headaches, which until then were not thought to have a genetic basis. Also, at one point in their adult lives both Jims put on ten pounds at the same time. Was there some kind of genetic programming at work? Such things had been suspected, but now there was a way of comparing major life changes. The possibilities for the study seemed to open endlessly. Bouchard stopped thinking about doing a little monograph.
"We got quite a bit of publicity," Bouchard recalls. "
People
magazine ran a story. They were on the
Johnny Carson Show
. They really fascinated everybody. And so I wrote a grant proposal. I had no idea it would become a life study." As a result of the publicity, however, other separated twins began to surface, creating a research bonanza. Within a year of the Jims' reunion, Bouchard had studied fifteen other sets of separated twins and put together a team of six psychologists, two psychiatrists, and nine other medical experts.
A routine developed. The twins usually arrive in Minnesota on a Saturday (international visitors arrive on Friday). They have been asked to bring whatever birth certificates, adoption papers, photographs, school and medical records, awards, and letters they can find. Bouchard usually greets them at the airport. Often the spouses or parents come as well, to be included in the family studies that have been added to the program. Sunday afternoon the twins go to Elliott Hall, where one twin begins writing out his life history, while the other twin, in a separate room, takes the first of many personality assessments, which include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Myers-Briggs Type
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