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Separated Twins/Parallel Lives: What's Your Theory?

gattino

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
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We all know the stories...twins separated at birth, united in adulthood, find their lives have been remarkably similar, from their hobbies and occupations to their tastes and life experiences. (Accepting of course that this doesn't happen with every pair of separated twins, and that even the most similar will have many differences)

And most people who use these boards will be familiar with the most quoted extreme example of this phenomenon: the Jim twins. Two boys adopted by different families, each "coincidentally"named Jim and each not only sharing extremely matching life choices but also, more remarkably their wives (each married twice), children and even pet dog all had the same names too.

What I'm interested to know is what is the theory about what'd going on in these cases?
The standard "scientific" assumption, I take it, is that it suggests things like taste and personality is hereditary or genetic and will provoke similar decision making in each twin.
The parapsychological explanation, I'd assume, is to imagine its evidence of the popular idea of twin telepathy: what forms in the mind of one emerges, unwittingly, in the thoughts of the other over a great distance, so they end up making the same choices even without being aware of each other.

But what's always stymied me when I read about these cases is the bit that can't be explained by either of those scenarios: how do the shared tastes and/or telepathic thoughts of the twins account for those coincidences which aren't actually directly in their sole control? Someone else had to give them the jobs they had in common, for example. Which of the two above scenarios compelled those employers to do so?! If the two jims gave their kids and dogs the same names you might assume the presumed lack of choice on the part of their spouses in the decision to choose those names could be down to the jims being very dominant personalities perhaps.....but how in the name of Castor and Pollux did they both marry a Linda, divorce and both later remarry a Betty? All 4 women have to have had a say in who they married, so how does the twinship of the Jims in any way bring the women's decisions and attractions about?

Has this issue ever been addressed as far as anyone knows?

Or do you have a theory that would explain it? Could it be perhaps evidence not that the twins shared genes shaped their fate, but that their shared moment and place of birth did so? One up for astrology?!

I'd be interested in any thoughts or insights about these kind of cases and especially that aspect of it.
 
The official scientific explanation would have it that the Jim twins were genetically predisposed to being called Jim, rather than that their lives were entangled in some deeper way. Or, that the similarities and synchronicities were all mere coincidence, of course.

:lol:
 
kind of a side note here but, who the blithering frig would feel that separating twins for adoption would be a good idea?
 
I've wondered that.

I put it down to scarcity of supply, forcing adoption agencies to share out babies fairly, and perhaps a sense that adoptive parents might not cope with more than one child.

Of course, twins' natural parents are expected to just get on with it. ;)
 
Nuns did because they are evil. Babies they couldn't sell they ate.
 
Actually the answer, in the US at least, is that it was done deliberately by psychologists hoping to settle the Nature vs Nurture debate.

"In the 1960s, child psychologists Peter Neubauer and his colleague Viola Bernard, also a child psychologist and consultant to the Louise Wise adoption agency in New York, sought to find an answer to the impasse of the nature-vs.-nurture theory. Both doctors strongly believed that twins should be raised separately and used the adoption agency to conduct long-term studies of twins and triplets in order to see how each individual would develop without the interference of being treated exactly the same, by the same guardians.

“Neubauer believed at the time that twins posed such a burden to parents—and to themselves in the form of certain developmental hazards—that adopted twins were better off being raised separately, with no knowledge of their twinship,” writes Lawrence Wright, author of Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (John Wiley & Sons, 1999). “Here was an opportunity to look at twins from the moment they were separated, and to trace them through childhood, observing at each stage of development the parallel or diverging courses of their lives.”
 
'Well it's time you knew that you are adopted... and a twin... oh and part of an ongoing experiment based on your seperation'
 
gattino said:
Actually the answer, in the US at least, is that it was done deliberately by psychologists hoping to settle the Nature vs Nurture debate.
...
Click to expand...

So far as has been demonstrated to date, such deliberate adoptive separation for the sake of research has occurred in only one case.

Two psychiatrists - Viola Bernard and Peter Neubauer - persuaded a single New York adoption agency to cooperate in separating twins back in the 1960's. Bernard and Neubauer subsequently studied the separated children. A total of 13 children - 5 pairs of twins and one set of triplets - were separated under the aegis of this study. Accounts differ on the extent to which the study was completed; all agree that no results were published on account of ethical concerns. The active study supposedly ended circa 1979. New York ceased separating twins at birth in 1980. All the research records are archived and sealed until 2066.

Most of what little is known of this study derives from the book _Identical Strangers_, written by two of the twins involved (Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein). For example, see:

http://origin1.montereyherald.com/healt ... ck_check=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_Strangers
 
I think it is easily answered when you consider the thousands of twins separated at birth whose lives are totally different but never get reported as, well it isn't that interesting is it :D
 
You make a large assumption there. If you have evidence of these thousands of separated twins, produce it.

Although the demand in the adoption market for single, white, healthy newborns is large, it takes a nosedive after that. Prospective parents who will accept a non-white and/or older child are common, if the child presents no serious issues - one at a time. Dedicated prospective parents who go for kids who strain their resources, including those who come in sibling sets, exist; but the backlog of kids with physical, emotional, and developmental problems is large, so these families are unlikely to get newborn twins.

Breaking up existing poor families used to be a deliberate component of American social "welfare" policy (the degree to which welfare agencies are and always have been undermined by classist assumptions about "the poor" is appalling). This is no longer true, but the legacy lives on, and in the modern adoption market, breaking up existing families is still common enough that separating newborns who haven't had time to make an emotional attachment to each other isn't going to make anybody blink.
 
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