Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are

Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are Read Online Free PDF
Author: Lawrence Wright
Tags: Family & Relationships, science, Siblings, Life Sciences, test, Genetics & Genomics
realize that his research opportunity was a limited one, and this knowledge spurred him into feverish, sleepless activity.
Of the approximately 3,000 twins in Auschwitz only 157 survived Mengele's curiosity. We know very little about what he learned or even what he was looking for. Mengele worried that his records would fall into the hands of the Soviet army, and in fact that may have happened. Verschuer, who was in contact with Mengele throughout the war, destroyed all their correspondence. As a party zealot, Mengele probably was seeking to validate the Nazi dogma of the inherited superiority of the

 

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Aryan race; however, his attempts to change the hair and eye color of the Jews and Gypsies at his disposal suggest that he was also trying to engineer genetic mutations that were scientifically absurd (perhaps his own dark coloring was a spur in this pursuit). One of the prison doctors, Miklos Nyiszli, wrote in his account of Auschwitz that Mengele hoped to discover the secret of multiple births in order to repopulate his depleted nation. There was (and still is) an ongoing debate about the causes of twinning, which were of enormous interest to Verschuer and presumably to his protégé. And yet Mengele never systematically examined the parents of twins, nor did he have the time or the focus to conduct breeding experiments, which in any case would have required several generations of healthy twins who were not submitted to the extraordinary biological stresses of the camp. Despite the testimony of Mengele's colleagues, as well as some of the prisoners, that Mengele was a highly competent researcher, one cannot help but be struck by his scientific naïveté, by the sadism of his experiments, and the wantonness and waste of his precious resourcesthe twins themselves. One can only suppose that the madness of the entire Nazi enterprise was so total that it overwhelmed scientific discipline and crushed ordinary human reason. If his records ever were to be found, they would be unlikely to be of much interest to twin researchers, except as a cautionary example of the perversion of the scientific impulse by political fanaticism.
It is an interesting question to pose, given the Nazi attachment to genetic predeterminism, whether Mengele could have been a good scientist and a decent human being in another political environment. Was he born to be a monster? Or did he simply adapt to a monstrous situation?

 

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One consequence of Nazism was to discredit genetic theories, and twin studies in particular, for a generation. And in proportion to the fall of genetics was the rise of behaviorism. The behavioristic movement began in the lectures of John B. Watson at Columbia University in 1912, and it quickly produced its own tempestuous controversies. "We have been accused of being propagandists, of heralding our conclusions in the public press rather than in the more dignified scientific journals, of writing as though no one else had ever contributed to the field of psychology, of being bolshevists," Watson recalled in 1930. Watson was doing his work in an age that was convinced of the inheritance of talent, ability, and temperament, that believed in families of genius and families of criminality, that accepted racial differences without question. Watson agreed that physical traits, such as hair color or the length of one's fingers, passed through bloodlines, but the hereditary structure was only waiting to be shaped by the environment; and it might be shaped in a million different ways, depending on the training the child experienced. "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might selectdoctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Watson wrote, in one of
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