![]() They belonged to each other.” The first part of Three Identical Strangers zooms forward with the same carousing, puppyish energy. ![]() “The three of them ended up like puppies wrestling on the floor,” Kellman’s aunt recalls of the boy’s first meeting. ![]() Nature, in other words, makes a pretty strong case for itself. If identical people are raised in different environments by different parents, what can that tell us about the degree to which our behaviors, personalities, health, and intelligence are innate or acquired? Among the conclusions of one of the best-known studies of separated twins, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart: Identical siblings reared independently are roughly as similar as those reared together. Reunited twins, especially identical ones, are compelling to scientists for essentially the same reasons: They offer a unique opportunity to glean insight into the age-old question of nature versus nurture, genes versus environment, and with our growing understanding of the importance of epigenetics, the question of how these two factors act upon each other. An identical twin could experience the world and come back to report about choices we might have made.” It is not just the sense of identity that excites us but the difference the fantasy of an identical twin is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other spouses. ![]() “It feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is me, almost me. “Perhaps what is so compelling about the story of reunited twins is the implicit suggestion that it could happen to anyone,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lawrence Wright observed in his 1997 book, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are. ![]()
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