Born That Way

by William Wright

  His areas of specialization were problem-solving and I.Q., but for a number of years Bouchard had fantasized about the scientific possibilities of studying identical twins who had been raised separately. To have in his laboratory two individuals with identical genetic makeup yet nurtured in different environments—or better, to have a number of such twin sets—would provide a unique opportunity to establish what effects, if any, genes had on personality and behavior.

  He knew the idea for twin-based experiments had been around for a long time. A variation on Bouchard’s idea was suggested a hundred years earlier by a British scientist Bouchard admired, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, a brilliant dilettante, and founder of the eugenics movement. As Bouchard pursued the idea, he learned that separated-twin studies had been tried a few times, in both Europe and America, but the studies had only been able to turn up a few pairs, the twins varied in degree of separation (different families but with contact, for example), and the studies were unevenly executed. So the results, which all indicated a genetic role in behavior, were easy to dismiss by the prevailing majority of psychologists who were hostile to data suggesting genes had anything to do with behavior. Still, Bouchard was certain the conclusions were accurate, in spite of their flaws, and knew that one day a twin study would be done that was unassailable.

  Over the years, a number of psychologists had been aware of the scientific appeal of such a study. Identical twins result when one egg, impregnated by one sperm cell, splits into two fetuses, hence the term monozygotic twins (MZAs for identical twins raised apart, MZTs for those reared together). This would be in contrast to dizygotic, or fraternal, twins (DZs), who result from two eggs that have been impregnated by two sperm cells. Monozygotic twins have not just similar but identical DNA, while dizygotic twins share roughly 50 percent of their genes, as do siblings born at different times.

  There had been a number of large twin studies of a different sort: comparisons of monozygotic twins with dizygotic twins, all pairs raised in the same household. The assumption was that if in measuring various personality traits, a greater similarity was found in identical twins than fraternal, the difference could be attributed to their genetic uniformity, since the rearing environment was the same for each set. In all of these studies, the identical twins proved to be more similar than the fraternal.

  Bouchard found these studies persuasive but knew others didn’t. The results had been attacked by mainstream psychologists who were wedded to the theory that experience and training were the sole molders of personality. These men and women, called “environmentalists” in the profession before that term came to have a totally different meaning, were assiduous in their efforts to discredit any data that granted a role to genes in the formation of personality. Their principal charge was that identical twins were more similar because of social (that is, environmental) pressures on them to be more similar (a complaint later refuted by more than one study designed to detect this effect).

  Also, the studies were unwieldy, requiring large numbers of twins for statistical reliability. There were other weaknesses to this method, all of which would be eliminated, Bouchard believed, in a study of separately raised twins. He grew more and more convinced that if done correctly and with enough twin sets, the evidence of gene influence would be irrefutable. Increasingly he considered undertaking such a study himself and examined the earlier studies carefully to see why they had failed to convince the scientific community. Behind Bouchard’s conviction of the accuracy of the twin studies’ conclusions was a personal belief in a genes-behavior link. It was the sort of gut feeling that balks at prevailing theory and that time and again has launched breakthrough research.

  He carefully studied the only American separated-twin experiment, a 1937 study by H. H. Newman, F. N. Freeman, and K. J. Holzinger that was based on nineteen sets of twins. He also examined a 1965 study of twelve sets of reared-apart twins conducted in Denmark by Lars Juel-Nielsen. One in England, involving thirty-seven sets, was conducted by the British psychologist James Shields in 1962. With each of these studies, the environmentalists expended considerable energy in debunking their findings.

  These efforts culminated in a 1981 book, Identical Twins Reared Apart, by Susan Farber, a psychologist at Columbia University, that painstakingly critiqued each of the twin studies. Spotlighting their flaws, Farber concluded that none of the results could be trusted. The most devastating criticism was that of all the sets of twins examined in the different studies, only three pairs could legitimately be considered reared-apart; the other pairs had contact of one sort or another that, according to Farber, disqualified them as reared-apart. Also troublesome to Farber, some twins had not been separated immediately after birth but had spent many months together as infants. She saw this as another possible corruption of the experiment. Citing other flaws and methodological vulnerability, Farber concluded that all of the studies should be dismissed.

  Bouchard felt her verdict was unjust. She saw no significance that the studies, for all their imperfections, arrived at the same conclusion: a degree of genetic influence over behavior. Bouchard also felt Farber demanded an impossible-to-obtain standard of “separateness.” Above all, he felt that her book, if fair and accurate, proved only that the earlier studies were not airtight. But he knew she intended more than this. The strong implication of the Farber book was that reared-apart twin studies had their chance and they had told us nothing; the environment still reigned supreme.

  For Bouchard, her conclusion’s illogic only strengthened his dream of a thorough, flaw-free reared-apart twins study. He was certain that if a sufficient number of pairs could be found, if separation occurred very early in life, if care was taken to include only twins who had had no connection after separation, if they could be studied immediately after reunion, and if their personalities could be assessed by widely accepted personality measures, the results would go far to convince the scientific community of genes’ relevance to personality.

  One earlier study presented a particularly thorny problem to Bouchard’s vision. It had been done by the eminent British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, who claimed to have studied fifty-three sets of separated twins in the 1930s and 1940s. The results, according to Burt, showed a high degree of heritability to intelligence. At first Burt’s findings came under the same sort of attack as the other twin studies; but after Burt’s death, the attacks switched to Burt himself. Methodological irregularities and statistical oddities were magnified into accusations of falsified data. To expunge Burt’s conclusions of genetic influence, the environmentalists were succeeding in expunging the reputation of Britain’s most eminent psychologist.

  These charges against Burt, which were later found to be unfounded (and will be examined more fully in chapter 14), offer a chilling illustration of the lengths to which the antigenes forces were willing to go to quash evidence of a genes-behavior connection. What struck Bouchard most forcefully in reviewing this history was that Burt’s I.Q. findings had been replicated by three other separated-twin studies: one in America, one in England, and one in Denmark. But this replication did little to save Burt once the environmental forces had him targeted. The Burt drama was the largest scandal to ever rock the psychological profession and was well known to Bouchard, as it was to every psychologist. Whether one gave credence or not to the fraud charges, many recognized the ideological motivations behind them.

  Bouchard knew well that he was itching to enter perilous scientific terrain. But his apprehensions were subsumed by his conviction that the psychology profession, his chosen field, was ignoring a major component of human personality and behavior. He also believed that a separated-identical-twin study, for all the imperfections of the earlier studies, was still the most potent method for revealing gene influence. With an assiduous effort to avoid the flaws of the earlier twin projects, he was certain such a study was capable of unlocking fundamental secrets about human nature. It would also force those who insisted the environment determin
ed everything to rethink this bedrock assumption.

  Although Bouchard had been trained as an environmentalist, he had long had misgivings and watched with satisfaction as the evidence of genetic influence on behavior accumulated in the late sixties and early seventies. In spite of the opponents’ speedy refutations of most of this evidence, he knew that others shared his misgivings and that the orthodoxy of strict environmentalism was weakening its hold on many of his colleagues. Bouchard saw twins separated at birth as the ultimate and much needed nature-nurture experiment.

  As his thoughts centered increasingly on setting up such a study, he invariably stumbled on one problem: finding a large enough number of raised-apart twins. Were there many? How would he find them? Persuade them to cooperate? Impossible as it seemed, he clung to the idea. Somewhere there were humans walking the earth at that moment who held the answer to a question that had plagued psychologists and thinkers for centuries. They would be worth finding.

  Bouchard discussed strategies for locating reared-apart twins with a colleague in the Minnesota psychology department, Professor Auke Tellegen. They both admitted they had never heard of such twins or even read about them in the press. They believed, however, that reared-apart twins must exist and they pondered ways to find them. They considered placing ads in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times but dismissed the scheme as too costly and reaching too narrow a population sample. (Even if the ad turned up enough twins for a study, the opponents had a built-in tool for dismissal: all of the twins were New York Times readers and therefore an atypical sample.)

  Reluctantly, Bouchard put the idea from his mind and pursued other projects. Several years later, two of his friends, on seeing the news story about the separated Ohio twins, remembered his interest.

  STANDING IN FRONT of his mailbox reading about the remarkable similarities of the twins, both of whom were named Jim, Bouchard’s hopes for a separated-twin study returned in force, although he knew that one set of twins would have no scientific significance regardless of their similarities. Still, he found the pair too intriguing to pass over and resolved to lure them to Minneapolis with the idea of examining them, as clinical case histories, if nothing more. He contacted the woman who had written the newspaper article, explained his mission, and obtained their phone numbers. The Ohio twins, still in the euphoria of their reunion, quickly agreed to come to Minneapolis to be prodded, examined, and questioned for a week. On March 11, 1979, a month after reuniting, the two Jims reported to Bouchard’s office in the University of Minnesota’s Elliott Hall.

  Of the more than seventy sets Bouchard would eventually examine, many had a sizable number of astounding similarities, but none as many as the Jim twins. In fact, several sets of twins had only a short list of noteworthy similarities. While such lackluster sets were few, had Bouchard stumbled on such a pair at the outset, it might have dampened his interest in the potential of reared-apart twins to reveal secrets of personality formation. The Jim twins, on the other hand, with their boggling list of similarities, would probably have ignited a genetic fire in the most dogged environmentalist.

  Enthusiasm, however, was never a big problem with Bouchard. An even more important benefit of the Jim twins’ amazing list of parallels was that they drew considerable press attention. This exposure, in turn, brought forward other sets of separated twins. So Bouchard’s good fortune was finding at the outset a set of twins who illustrated beyond his wildest imaginings that his genetic hunch might be correct. At the same time, they were instrumental in making feasible a broad study, one that would eventually grow to the most exhaustive and comprehensive examination of reared-apart identical twins ever done.

  APPROXIMATELY THIRTY-SEVEN DAYS after their birth, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis had been adopted into blue-collar families and had grown up eighty miles apart in Ohio. As adults, both had worked hard to maintain modest middle-class lives; each of them, in fact, at various periods in their lives, had held down two jobs. At the time of their reunion Jim Lewis was a steelworker, his brother a records keeper for an electrical company.

  When Jim Lewis was six, his adoptive mother told him he had an identical twin brother. He was intrigued but made no effort to find his sibling. Springer also had been told he had a twin. Although he had an urge to take some action, he had no idea what action to take. A friend once told Springer of having spotted him in a bowling alley in a nearby town. Knowing he had not been near the town at the time, Springer had an eerie sensation. He got in his car and drove to the town with the vague hope that fate would bring him to his twin. On a similar impulse, Jim Lewis once traveled to the town of Bradford, Ohio, where he knew he had been born, with the confused hope of running into his twin.

  When he was thirty-seven, Jim Lewis, after a talk with his mother about the circumstances of his adoption, resolved to find his twin. He went to the Bradford courthouse and explained to the records keeper that he wanted to get in touch with his brother, from whom he had been adopted apart. The clerk found the information, then phoned Jim Springer’s real mother for her permission to release it. Getting her consent, she gave Lewis his brother’s number. He was stunned that it had been so easy.

  When the brothers finally spoke on the phone, both were full of emotions, but, more than anything, they were wary and apprehensive. They chatted for a while and concluded their conversation by making a date to meet at Springer’s house on the outskirts of Dayton. “By the way,” Springer asked, “What do you drink?”

  “Miller Lite,” Lewis replied.

  “So do I.”

  As the agreed-on time approached, both Jims grew increasingly nervous. They later admitted to each other their fears: What if the other twin was a bad guy? A jerk? A wife-beater? Needed money? Lewis’s anxiety fired his imagination: What if his brother needed an organ transplant? Like sleeping dogs, unknown twins might be better left alone.

  Once together, the tension disappeared quickly. While there was a clear resemblance—both were nice-looking, dark-haired men with sensitive eyes and medium builds—the physical resemblance was less striking than in most identical twins, more like the similarity of fraternal twins. The initial impact of their obvious twinness came more from the way they moved, held themselves, spoke, and gestured. As often happens with reunited twins, both felt an immediate bond that went beyond mere rapport and affection but was more like the restoration of a long-missing piece of their lives. In the instantly relaxed and happy atmosphere, they began discussing themselves and the astounding list of similarities began to unfold.

  The parallels in the lives of the Jim twins has been told many times—in magazine articles, on television, in lecture halls, in scientific papers. They have been discussed with amazement in laboratories at M.I.T., in faculty lounges at Oxford, and in the Tonight Show production offices in Burbank. The catalog of their similarities has become a litany of the behavioral genetics faith. Their dramatic story would bring broad attention to Bouchard and the study he hoped to launch, but their similarities would also come back to haunt him because of the many hard-to-swallow oddities and the resistance of these oddities to scientific explanation. Because of the Jim twins’ importance to the Minnesota study, and to behavioral genetics in general, their parallel quirks and traits bear repeating yet once more.

  IN SCHOOL BOTH JIMS had been poor students. One had dropped out in the tenth grade, the other just squeaked through high school. Both had worked as sheriff’s deputies, both drove Chevrolets, both chainsmoked Salems, and both like sports, especially stock-car racing. But both disliked baseball. They were amazed to discover that they had each taken an impromptu vacation to Florida during a particularly cold winter, had driven their families south, and had selected the same three-mile stretch of Gulf Coast beach as a place to spend their holiday. Coincidence was piling on to coincidence and threatened to collapse into something else.

  Some of the oddest similarities involved proper names, as they would with many of the separated twins Bouchard would later examine. Both Ji
ms had married women named Linda, divorced them, and married women named Betty. They were romantic and affectionate, and each had a habit of leaving love notes to his wife around the house. Springer had three daughters and a son named James Allan. Lewis had three sons, one of whom was named James Alan. There was no family precedent in either case, both simply liked the names. Both had owned dogs that they had named Toy.

  The two Jims were devotees of the same hobby, woodworking, for which they each had created nearly identical basement workshops, with the same corner placement of the work bench. A highly similar array of tools hung on the walls. Both men passed good portions of their spare time in their shops, each building furniture and picture frames. One of the most striking similarities in the entire Jim-twins catalog was that each had built a circular white bench around a tree in his front yard—although one was made of wood, the other of metal, the benches were unlike anything in their respective neighborhoods.

  Perhaps less surprisingly, there were remarkable physiological similarities as well. Both had undergone vasectomies, and both had slightly high blood pressure. Each had become overweight at roughly the same time and had leveled off at the same time. Both suffered severe migraine headaches that lasted approximately half a day and that did not respond to any medication. When they were later interviewed by a psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota, both used exactly the same words to describe the headaches: “Like somebody’s hitting you with a two-by-four in the back of the neck.”

  Understandably, Bouchard was amazed by the number of similarities and their degree of specificity, but he saw no way to establish scientific significance to the phenomena. For all their remarkable parallels, the Jim twins would be seen as nothing more than a bizarre artifact, genetic flukes. At the same time, Bouchard knew the similarities had to mean something.

  While Bouchard was pondering his frustration, he happened to speak with the journalist who had helped him find the Jim twins. She was curious. What had his interest been? What had he planned to do with them? What had he learned so far? Still excited over his exotic specimens, Bouchard said that while Springer and Lewis were only one set, they were extremely interesting to him as case histories and had rekindled his hope of doing a large-scale study if a sufficient number of separated twins could be found. He discussed the difficulty of finding such twins. The reporter asked how he would finance such a study. Bouchard replied that money would be no problem, he would “beg, borrow, or steal” if he had to.