Do Twins Share a Soul?
An anthropologist — and identical twin — grapples with different cultural understandings of twinship.
By Stephen E. Nash
I have a clone.
He’s an identical twin brother, really. But as monozygotic twins derived from one fertilized egg, we share the exact same genome.
Since birth, we have been engaged in an inadvertent experiment to test whether nature (genetics) or nurture (culture) is more important in an individual’s development. As with any dichotomy, the reality lies not in the extremes but somewhere in the middle: Nature and nurture are important to an individual’s development.
That said, if nature were the more important force, we’d expect identical twins to be really similar people — physically, socially, psychologically, and otherwise. If nurture were more important, we would expect identical twins to end up as very different people.
Twins make for a fun existential thought experiment — one that philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, biologists, and parents have pondered deeply through the ages. In some parts of the world, such as in southwestern Nigeria, rich cultural traditions about twins have emerged over time.
