The myth of mirrored twins

Fernando Kaskais

Jul 5

Twin sisters, Miami, 1984. Photo by Abbas/Magnum

What do the lives of twins tell us about heritability, selfhood and the age-old debate between nature and nurture?

Gavin Evans is a writer whose work has been published in The Guardian, Die Zeit, The Conversation and The New Internationalist, among others. His books include Mapreaders and Multitaskers: Men, Women, Nature, Nurture (2016), The Story of Colour (2017) and Skin Deep: Journeys in the Divisive Science of Race (2019). He lives in London.

Thirteen days before the start of the Second World War, a 35-year-old unmarried immigrant woman gave birth slightly prematurely to identical twins at the Memorial Hospital in Piqua, Ohio and immediately put them up for adoption. The boys spent their first month together in a children's home before Ernest and Sarah Springer adopted one – and would have adopted both had they not been told, incorrectly, that the other twin had died. Two weeks later, Jess and Lucille Lewis adopted the other baby and, when they signed the papers at the local courthouse, calling their boy James, the clerk remarked: 'That's what [the Springers] named their son.' Until then they hadn't known he was a twin.

The boys grew up 40 miles apart in middle-class Ohioan families. Although James Lewis was six when he learnt he'd been adopted, it was only in his late 30s that he began searching for his birth family at the Ohio courthouse. In 1979, the adoption agency wrote to James Springer, who was astonished by the news, because as a teenager he'd been told his twin had died at birth. He phoned Lewis and four days later they met – a nervous handshake and then beaming smiles. Reports on their case prompted a Minneapolis-based psychologist, Thomas Bouchard, to contact them, and a series of interviews and tests began. The Jim Twins, as they were known, became Bouchard's star turn.

Thomas Bouchard conducting personality tests on James Lewis and James Springer, identical twins adopted by separate families, Minnesota, USA, 1979. Photo by Thomas S England/Science Photo Library

Both Jims, it transpired, had worked as deputy sheriffs, and had done stints at McDonald's and at petrol stations; they'd both taken holidays at Pass-a-Grille beach in Florida, driving there in their light-blue Chevrolets. Each had dogs called Toy and brothers called Larry, and they'd married and divorced women called Linda, then married Bettys. They'd called their first sons James Alan/Allan. Both were good at maths and bad at spelling, loved carpentry, chewed their nails, chain-smoked Salem and drank Miller Lite beer. Both had haemorrhoids, started experiencing migraines at 18, gained 10 lb in their early 30s, and had similar heart problems and sleep patterns.

Of the 1,894 twins raised apart who had been tested by psychologists internationally between 1922 and 2018, the 'Jim Twins' story was, by far, the example cited most often, mainly because it seemed so strongly to suggest that nature trumped nurture, aptly illustrating Bouchard's prior perceptions. Their tale spread around the globe, finding its way from national newspapers to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, to school and university textbooks. Later, it was all over the web; 44 years on, it pops up whenever twins are discussed in the media, with the significant differences between these two men invariably ignored.

Some reports feature the story with two sidebar cases, also drawn from Bouchard's twins' larder. Oskar Stöhr and Jack Yufe were identical twins born in Trinidad in 1933, to a German mother and a Jewish-Romanian father, but they were separated six months later when their parents' relationship broke down. Oskar was raised Catholic by his mother in Germany and joined the Hitler Youth. Jack was raised as a Jew in Trinidad by his father. They met briefly at 21 and were reunited at 47. Although they had very different world views, their speech patterns and food tastes were similar, and they shared idiosyncrasies, such as flushing the toilet before using it, and sneezing loudly to gain attention. The other sidebar is devoted to the 'Giggle twins', Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert, identical twins adopted into separate British families after their Finnish mother reportedly killed herself. They reunited, aged 40, in 1979. Unlike their adoptive families, they were both incessant gigglers, had a fear of heights, dyed their hair auburn, and met their husbands at town hall Christmas dances.

Cases such as these have been used to revive the notion that distinct upbringings make no difference in how we turn out: it's all down to biology, specifically the clockwork mechanisms of Mendelian genetics – an idea with a long historical tail. But much has changed in our understanding of genetics since the human genome was sequenced in 2003. It was discovered that we have far fewer genes than anticipated (around 20,000, rather than the anticipated 100,000), and that there are very few genes 'for' anything. A complex property such as intelligence, for example, involves a network of more than 1,000 genes, interacting with the environment. Other discoveries that chipped away at genetic determinism noted that environmental pressures prompt changes in cell function and gene expression that don't involve changes in DNA (sometimes lingering over several generations) known as epigenetics; while advances in neuroscience have revealed how our plastic human brains are moulded by experience...

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https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-twin-studies-really-say-about-identity-and-genetics