Free Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are by Lawrence Wright

strikingly similar, however, despite the fact that they had been raised in such opposing cultures. Bouchard observed that their tempos, their temperaments, their characteristic mannerismstheir style of being in the worldwere far more alike than different, similarities that were all the more surprising because Oskar was raised entirely by women and Jack had grown up with his father.
One night in Minneapolis, the two men went to see a hypnotist in a cabaret. As the hypnotist was attempting to put a volunteer into a trance, and was dramatically counting backward, Oskar abruptly sneezedloudly, so that everyone in the club was startled. "He does that all the time," Oskar's wife whispered to Jack, who was astonished. One of his favorite pranks was to step into a crowded elevator and let out a loud fake sneeze just to watch everybody jump.
The team studying these twin pairs was at a loss to explain how these uncanny coincidences might have happened. Was it possible that people could be wired in such a way that they were programmed to marry people named Betty and Linda, or squidge their noses, or sneeze on elevators? Did these events have meaning or were they just random, freak happenstances? Clairvoyance is

 

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a part of twin lore; twins frequently report that they experience sharp pain when one is injured, or that they know when the other is about to call; some have even reported being able to see out of the other twin's eyes when they are experiencing some dramatic event. These suggestive psychic connections between identical twins could explain some of the mysterious synchronicities, but they have been rarely tested and never confirmed. Moreover, many of the twins had not been aware that they had a genetic companion in the world.
Bouchard throws up his hands when he talks about the coincidences. "We had a lot of discussions about how you could do anything with that information, and it turns out it would be a massive, massive job. It's a big world with lots of possibilities. For example, take the names of the kids." He was referring to the fact that several twins who had been raised apart gave their children identical or highly similar names. "We know names are not randomly distributed. They come in waves. They reflect popular taste. When Jack Kennedy was president, there were a lot of kids named Jack. We know that these are nonrandom events. And so the probability that two people have the same name can't be validated against some random action. What you need is a population of couples the same age as the twin couples with their kids, and then you'd need to know the frequencies of all these names. Think about how much work you'd have to do to gather that kind of informationbut then you'd have to do it for everything! About the car they owned! About the beach they went to! What they named their dog! You'd have to collect that data from every pair. And then, what would it tell you?"
Those early sets of twinsthe Jims, the Giggle Sisters, the Nazi and the Jewcreated a sensation not only in the popular press but in scientific journals as well.

 

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Money, which had been so hard to capture in the early years of the Minnesota study, soon came along in the form of government funds and grants from private foundations that had an interest in twin research. Foremost among the foundations backing Bouchard's research is the Pioneer Fund, a New York foundation that has roots in the eugenics movement of the thirties and that has had a history of backing projects that advocate racial separatism. The Pioneer Fund has given the Minnesota project over $1.3 million, more than any other project in the fund's history. In the sixteen years since Bouchard met the Jim twins, his study of reared-apart twins has included 132 individuals who are identical twins; two sets of identical triplets; another two sets of mixed triplets (a pair of identical twins plus a fraternal third member); seventy-six individuals who are same-sex fraternal twins