6 thoughts on “How Identical Are Identical Twins?”

1. It’s been known for quite some time that there is cell-based information that is not directly in your DNA. For example, the way your mom set up your egg. One example — snail shells. Whether they spiral left or right depends on the mom’s DNA and how she set up her eggs.

   That’s why I wonder at people who think they are resurrecting extinct animals. Putting a mammoth embryo in an elephant just isn’t the same.

2. On the other hand in psycological adn personality studies,twins raised apart (not having any presure to be more individual),often walked nito thestudy rom meeting their twin for the first time –finding they had identical cloths, styles, careers,names they chose for kids, food and brand prefs, and IQs –even when raised in extreamly different cultural homes.

3. Twins are often closely studied to gain understanding of the philosophical question of The Self. In many studies where they located a pair of identical twins that had never met each other it was surprising to see the number of behavioral traits that they shared. However, uncanny similarity between estranged identical twins proved to good to be true. It was later determined that in several cases the twins had in fact met before hand and had actually made it point to deceive the behavioral studies.

   So, I guess one thing that twins hold in common — especially ones that didn’t know they had a twin. Is their desire to make themselves out to be more special then they really are.

4. I knew a lady years ago who had monozygotic twin girls. These girls were identical down to their moles, birthmarks and misaligned teeth. They were about 12 at the time I met them and they would have been impossible to tell apart except that one was blond and the other a brunette. No, they didn’t dye their hair. The blond was very introverted and quiet. The brunette was very much a wild-child. So the twinning didn’t carry over to personalities with those two.

   I have boy/girl twins. When they were infants they looked identical. I was often asked how do you tell them apart. I would answer – I measured them, the boy is an inch taller than the girl.

5. I have never understood why people think a clone would be the “exact same copy” of the person or animal the clone came from. The clone might be a physical copy, but it would have its own personality because it would be a separate being. Say someone in the future decided to clone a beloved lost wife or child from saved cells in a databank. Well, even if you imprinted the brain of the clone with the memories of the person it was made from, that clone would still grow up in a separate time period from the original person, and everything it would go through would be different simply because of that fact. As for cloning pets — that clone of beloved Fluffy, isn’t Fluffy. At best it’s Fluffy version 2.0. And of course even the physical characteristics of the clone won’t be quite the same as the original person, for the simple reason of being raised in a different time period from the original person.

   The scenario is being set up for a lot of unhappy people who, instead of getting the beloved lost person, get instead the bizarre experience of getting someone who looks like the beloved, maybe even sounds and acts a little like a beloved, but… just… isn’t the same person. And this will lead to a lot of unhappy, abandoned clones, who will eventually band together in angry gangs, who will then attack the homes and institutions of the Frankensteins who made then abandoned them. The First Clone Wars!

6. I agree with Andrea’s concept of what a clone is not. However, how far off would two “clones” be if they could fully develop in a labratory environment (rather than at some point finishing development inside a living host). Perhaps the epigenesis process could be controlled?

   Anyway, I have “monozygotic” twin daughters, and they are very different from one another to me.

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