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> How can it be that two cells that were separated just after conception can carry enough genetic information to predetermine where your blackheads will develop when you are fifty or sixty years old? It’s really very scary.”

The same way they can determine a myriad precisely placed, tiny structures in the body, like the ossicles of the ear.

Or the way a sixty-year-old individual's left foot looks a lot like a mirror image of the right foot, in spite of sixty years of separation.

The evo-devo folks are unravelling this as we speak. It's an amazing generative/feedback process!
This was a very long, very interesting article. I learned a bit from it.

Two of my uncles are fraternal twins involved in a long-term twin study. They just traveled to the east coast for their periodic study updates a month or two ago. I don't know what may have been learned from tracking them through the years but I know they have enjoyed the opportunity to participate.

Handedness mentioned in the article was also interesting since I have siblings who are left-handed and my son and I are ambidextrous in many things. I worked with a man who could close his eyes and write his name in cursive with each hand simultaneously with the left hand signature being a mirror image of the right hand signature. Pretty spectacular.

Other odd things mentioned included tendencies for moles or acne to appear in the same relative places on twins suggest to me that mole positions on singletons could also be passed from a parent such that a child having a mole in the same place as one of the parents could be an inherited trait - the "family" mole or birthmark.

Genetics is weird and fascinating and I haven't looked closely enough at it to understand it. I may have to read some more on the subject.

Thanks for this article.

With a little bit of practice, anyone can learn how to write with their non-dominate hand backwards. It comes out backwards naturally. Just practice for an hour and you'll amaze your friends with backwards writing at full speed that looks just like your ordinary handwriting in a mirror.
I had a benign cyst removed from my neck, about the size of a grape. I casually mentioned it to my dad some time later, and he said he had a golf ball sized cyst removed from the same location.

Weird. It's almost as if we were related.

There's a great documentary called Three Identical Strangers. It follows three sets of identical twins who were separated at birth, and later reunited in adulthood. Watching it gives you a real sense that nature is practically the only thing that defines us. Worth a watch for anyone who found this article interesting.
Article talks about paradox, where twins reared apart where more similar than twins reared together.

As a non identical twin, I remember we sometimes actively tried to become different with my twin. Growing up, we hated being treated as one unit instead of two individuals. Also we competed a lot in sports, school etc. Slowly I found areas where I was better and my brother where he was. I have talked to some other twins and they said the same thing, about hating as being treated as one unit and wanting to become at least little different.

identical twin here - I share your experience, but at the same time I recognize that the "big" differences I see and accentuate between me and my brother are in fact laughably trivial when compared the differences between non-twins. Despite any efforts to find our different paths, we are far, far more alike than different.
Scientists have no idea why 302 neuron nematodes go left or right, the idea that a social scientific study like this is coming to the conclusions they come to are absurd.

The original Pioneer Fund funded Minnesota studies very rarely studied twins separated at or near birth and raised in very different environments. For most of the twins, the separation happened much later, or happened early but was temporary and the family was reunited, or the parents died and two sisters each raised a twin, and the like. The notion is false that the Minnesota studies all this flowed from showed people mainly raised from birth in very different environments. It did not.

It's a religious belief - we are the Brahmin, we are the chosen people, dressed up in 21st century Calvinist/liberal clothes. We are born successful or not successful, due to nature, not nurture or environment. It's scientific Calvinism. Of course some people flock to defend it in a way they wouldn't for some aspect of quantum theory - as I said, it's a religion in pseudo-scientific form. It feeds people's egos, especially people born to some form of privilege who have not accomplished all that much, and some people race to swallow from that hose as fast as they can.

The history of the funding of all of this is the old Pioneer Fund which started out showing Nazi eugenic films. They funded the original Minnesota twin studies all this field flowed from.

I should note this appeared in The New Yorker three years into Tina Brown's editorship, this kind of low middlebrow garbage didn't show up in The New Yorker much before that, but it became commonplace after she came in.

I have to say I dislike the tone of your comment, it's unnecessarily argumentative, but the point about the Pioneer Fund is correct. I'm also concerned that there may be some selection bias in reports of separated twins with amazing similarities. Nobody is going to make a documentary about a whole set of separated twins that are completely different from each other, and we will naturally focus on similarities and ignore differences.

Personally on the nature Vs nurture debate I think it's probably both, at about 50/50. I don't see how either of them can't have a significant influence.