Identical twin here. In high school, we had a brutal geometry problem set. The only people in the school who got it right were my twin brother and I. Pretty cool.
We were in separate sections; by then, we really didn't like being the same class. I was in the second section and was accused of cheating by the teacher with zero evidence; the correct answers, it was math, were going to be the same. My response was the fuck we did; we were competing against each other. The teacher knew he wasn't going to get past that and changed the subject. But going from only to cheater to next didn't sit well.
As for the article, what is the bitrate of odd movements?
BTW, we may have cheated at one point. 24 Hour Fitness had a less well known half-price for twins membership. Or at least, I think they did.
My favorite cheat was when my identical twin forgot his id and couldn't get in the bar. I had someone run out my driver's license to him and he got in.
> As for the article, what is the bitrate of odd movements?
This. The claim that they were seated close-by, made odd movements, and progressed at the same rate is very suspicion-inducing. If the test was multiple-choice it really wouldn't have been hard to have one sibling copy the other's answers. Having and resolving disagreements would have required much higher bandwidth, but just playing follow-the-leader would have required a bitrate of, what a few bits a minute?
The "brother and I" are a compound complement, not an object. Complements use the same form as the subject. Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I".
I will also add that myself is only for a few specific cases, primarily when the subject and object are the same:
I looked at myself in the mirror. She looked at me.
I have decided to just be myself. Kind of an odd case there.
I, myself, love to go to the movies. Here it is just used for emphasis, not as an actual reflexive pronoun.
Some people do use the reflexive pronoun as an object in certain cases, often with compound objects, but it is not proper under any prescriptive English grammar that I have studied.
> Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I".
I assure you, "it's me" is in far more general use than "it is I". The latter, and the purported rule that copular be takes two subjects, is at best exceptionally formal, and many English-speakers don't readily produce it in any context. Quick litmus test: check how acceptable the equivalent constructions are to you for "us" vs "we" or "them" vs "they": "The only ones who got it right were they."
And then conjunctive compound NPs are clear as mud; you routinely run into otherwise impeccable speech where the governing rule seems to be that local euphony trumps long-range syntactic agreement. There's no good prescription here; there's a pretty wide range of pronoun conjunction constructions where you're going to want to either rephrase or just suck it up and let it sound intuitively wrong to somebody.
I wouldn't correct someone for saying "It's me" in most contexts. But I will step right in and defend the person who says "It is I" and is told she is wrong.
Identical twin here. My brother and I are/were completely different academically. I excelled in math/school - he struggled. I graduated with an engineering degree, he didn't and struggled in high school and college. He ultimately did earn his bachelors degree - but not until his late 30's. There are some area's where we share similar thoughts, and some where we drastically diverge. To this day when I look at baby pics from ages 0 to around 3 I have no clue which one is me unless the pic has been labeled.
I'm now the father of twin girls (fraternal) and they are basically two completely different human beings who happened to share the same womb and birthday. They are NOTHING alike.
I also have 2 other siblings, and though I communicate the least with my twin these days - I still feel and share a bond with him that I'll never have with my other siblings and I can't quite explain it.
All that said I can't wrap my head around this idea that twins "think alike because they're twins." I think the simple answer to this case is that both of those women are smart and studied hard. And if you're really worried about it - put them in different classrooms and make them re-take the test. Sure would have saved a bunch of time and legal fee's!
> I still feel and share a bond with him that I'll never have with my other siblings and I can't quite explain it.
May I bother you with a request for perspective? A neighbour lost one of his identical twins at 6 months old. Both twins were born around 700 grams, and were under treatment (incubation possibly, but I'm not sure) in the house for many months. I do not know if they were together during treatment or not.
The twin who lived does not know that she had a twin sister - at around age two or maybe three the family took down the photographs of the deceased twin and stopped talking about her. Might that have some lingering effects on the living twin? Of course I'm asking about the general case, not this specific case, because obviously I cannot provide enough information over a short HN comment. But in your opinion, as someone with an unexplainable bond unlike that with other siblings, might such a bond persist even had you not known about the existence of your twin? How might that affect you if so?
To be clear, I have no intentions of revealing what I know and would never betray the parent's wishes.
I'm hard pressed to think I'd have the same bond if I had lost my twin at 6mo. I don't really have any memories pre age 3 so I'd assume I'd grow up just thinking I was an only child. This also assumes my parents removed all trace of my twin.
It's an interesting thought experiment.
Seeing someone who looks just like you every day for 18 years (and being constantly called by two different names) I think does something to you. It's an experience most people don't have.
Intereting question... my younger brother was a twin as well, born prematurely and incubated for months. His twin didn't make it and to this day he claims his twin took part of his brain or will (not sure exactly what he means)
I've always dismissed it as an excuse for not doing well in school & life... but I sometimes wonder if it's a legit phychological "hold" of some sort.
The more interesting part for me would be if they explored more about how it was determined they were cheating and what the punishment was - ie the entire basis for the case. Imagine all the money wasted on this case when a simple solution existed.
Think they cheated? Create a different test of the material and administer it separately.
I'm an identical twin. I remember twice in high school we were accused of cheating because we wrote extremely similar essays, but in fact we both randomly came up with the same very specific idea at the same time.
identical twin too - my brother and I were accused of cheating on standardized test once in elementary school because our answers were so similar. Got called into the Principal's office. Fortunately, we were sitting far enough apart that there was no way we could have cheated.
Certainly with my brother and me, our answers to any kind of test at that age were highly correlated, just from having had similar (or the same) teachers and having similar aptitude.
You can't disentangle nature from nurture with some sets of twins as they are both in play. That's part of why it's fascinating to see both with strong simultaneous reinforcement, and similarly when the "nurture" part is removed and the chances of similarities is higher than normal.
Some studies look at identical twins vs fraternal twins, seeing if identical twins are more similar than fraternal. It's an excellent way to control for almost everything except the genetics.
The gold standard is "separated twins" studies, looking at identical twins who are adopted away to different families at birth.
Sadly for science but happily for the families involved, these are getting harder to do; the primary source of such twins used to be unmarried women who became pregnant, but between the availability of birth control and a dramatic reduction in the social stigma, far fewer children are being "hidden" by being adopted away.
The statistics presented in the case were probably pretty flawed. The telepathy stuff also seems rediculous.
The part I don't understand is: if the proctor sees identical twins sitting near eachother, and suspects them of communicating, why not just separate them instead of waiting until the test is over and then accusing them of cheating? Why not just remove the possibility for them to cheat?
> The part I don't understand is: if the proctor sees identical twins sitting near eachother, and suspects them of communicating, why not just separate them instead of waiting until the test is over and then accusing them of cheating?
Because by the time you notice that they're cheating, it's too late to retroactively prevent them from starting?
Much harder to move students now that tests are computerized. The software might not even support that functionality.
Also, we have no idea what their suspected cheating procedures are. Maybe they deliberately avoid acting early on a hunch so they get a full test worth of data to run an statistical analysis on.
I had a classmate in secondary school with whom we seem to have shared a very similar brain wiring to the point where we wrote identical tests in physics. I believe for maybe two years. As soon as he got his result, I knew mine & vica versa. Was a strange experience, we did develop a special bond.
We were never accused of cheating, it was a tiny group though (20).
Edit: By identical, I do mean _literally_ the same mistakes, same points. Not 99% similar. 100%.
One step is to stop caring so much about DNA, glorified run-of-the-mill recipe for proteins and alike (is it really important with what soldering iron was the RAM soldered on your computer?), and start looking at bioelectrical patterns. If all a "person" is is some kind of dynamical pattern, a state machine, if you will, drawn by voltage-gated ion channels [1] and mechanisms alike, then there is nothing mysterious when similar state machines are in the same state: nothing out of the ordinary if I boot up two different but same specification devices with the same operating system and I land, even with different RAM mappings, on the "same" desktop.
[1] Michael Levin: "Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition" https://youtu.be/3Cu-g4LgnWs
I have twin girls and they’re not similar at all. I don’t believe the hive-mind hypothesis.
TBH they do a lot of shenanigans to screw with people who aren’t familiar with them, like going by the opposite name. An elaborate cheating scheme seems like something they’d enjoy.
Identical twin here. I know me and my brother were very similar academically despite being in different classes and never studying together.
I imagine if these twins happened to study together, it seems plausible they scored similarly, and if you factor in pace, they probably think and work at a similar energy level. They dont get into how they got to the 10^38 figure, but to me that seems like the most fishy part. To prove cheating you need more than odd movements and similar scores in my opinion.
> They dont get into how they got to the 10^38 figure, but to me that seems like the most fishy part
If the test was multiple choice with 5 options for each question, and you assume that if they got the question wrong, they randomly guessed the answer, and their answers to all incorrect questions were independent of each other, and forget to account for the fact that one of those 5 options is correct (or there were 6 options, which is less common for exams in my experience), then you get approximately 1 in 10^38 for the probability their wrong answers were all the same.
But those are bad assumptions. People don't randomly guess the answer every time they answer incorrectly, and people who have shared experiences (like say taking the same classes) are more likely to answer the same way. And answers to different questions are probably correlated, especially in such a long test, where there are likely multiple questions covering similar material.
Now, it is possible that computed the probability a different way, and it is just a coincidence they came to the same number. After all, the above method doesn't account for how likely it is that they answered correctly on the 242 other questions they answered the same, which would probably require some analysis of other students who took the same exam and maybe how similar the twins were on previous exams. But it does seem suspicious that it is easy to get the same number with a very naive estimation.
You dont need more than odd movements for the invigilator to suspect them of something weird going on and remove them from the test. They could have just retested them later.
The calculation was done only after the invigilator noticed strange movements and noted them so that the tests were looked into more.
We have identical boys, James and Charlie, about to turn 5. Got a DNA test for a holiday present that confirmed it. They're very healthy and happy kids, and are each other's best friend.
When they were about 3, James asked to wear a dress. Now James wears a dress every day, and is -- for lack of a better word -- extremely flamboyant. At first Charlie wanted to wear a dress too, but that seems to have just been FOMO because now he never wears them. Charlie is maybe more cerebral and cautious than your average boy, but still very clearly feels like a boy.
This has all been really interesting and mystifying to us. My wife and I and most of the people we interact with are pretty ordinary cisgendered, heterosexual people. We've never consciously pushed the boys toward any particular social norm. And we both figured one's sexuality and gender identity was hardcoded in one's DNA. Now we have living proof that doesn't seem to be the case. Our best uneducated guess is that something in utero caused the boys to develop with different levels of hormones, and that caused their "wiring" to diverge.
Yes, we're careful to not put any labels on him. In his words, he doesn't like it when people call him a girl, and wants people to know he's a boy, but he does like to do things that girls do.
> And we both figured one's sexuality and gender identity was hardcoded in one's DNA.
There are some good reasons not to believe this. From a Darwinian perspective, we can easily observe that homosexuality is one of the worst possible phenotypes an organism can have, so we'd expect genes to be adamantly opposed to it. Or in other words, heterosexuality definitely should be hardcoded in, in several different ways, but homosexuality should not.
And the evidence, such as it is, tends to bear that out: concordance of homosexuality in identical twins is, if I remember correctly, about 40%. That sounds high, but it isn't -- concordance for randomly chosen traits in identical twins is much, much higher than 40%.
Would we still expect such adamant evolutionary opposition to homosexuality if we took into account kin selection or that sexuality is a complex thing whose genetic component is likely to be influenced by many different genes and it is possible that the set of genes that in some particular combinations give homosexuality give in other combinations heterosexuality plus some additional survival benefits that make it overall worthwhile to preserve those genes that can give homosexuality?
> Would we still expect such adamant evolutionary opposition to homosexuality if we took into account kin selection or that sexuality is a complex thing whose genetic component is likely to be influenced by many different genes
Yes. For example, a kin selection argument would need to assume that the number of additional surviving children produced by the homosexual's siblings was at least double the number of children forgone by the homosexual. This does not come anywhere close to being plausible. Things only get worse as the relationship becomes more distant.
> and it is possible that the set of genes that in some particular combinations give homosexuality give in other combinations heterosexuality plus some additional survival benefits that make it overall worthwhile to preserve those genes that can give homosexuality?
Is it possible? Sure; that's the sickle-cell anemia model. But as previously noted, what evidence we have tells us that homosexuality is already one of the least genetically-determined traits we're aware of.† And this theory shares the same problem as your first idea: the cost of homosexuality is so staggeringly high that we would never expect an offsetting benefit to be able to make up for it.
Suppose there is a genetic complex that arranges for various effects, and if everything goes wrong it causes homosexuality. Assume this failure occurs 5% of the time.
Our homosexual produces zero children. But a decline in relationship coeffiecients, which trashes the kin selection idea, is not a problem here: we're worried about comparisons of self-to-self, so as long as the expected number of children produced by this genetic complex is greater than otherwise, the complex can persist despite the occasional catastrophic failure.
In other words, we need 19 out of every 20 people expressing this genetic complex to have as many children as 20 baseline people would, an increase of 5.2%.
> Might adaptive selection pressures have reshaped the genomes of the Malagasy, altering the proportion of African and Asian ancestry and leaving a signature in their very DNA?
> A research group tested this hypothesis by sampling the genomes of 700 Malagasy from 257 villages across the island. What they immediately remarked on was a sharp drop in Asian ancestry across much of chromosome 1:
> The target of selection on chromosome 1 in this case is the Duffy locus; and specifically, the null allele that fails to produce the Duffy antigen is under selection. This gene is well known in population genetics because of a marked contrast in variants between African and non-African populations; most Africans are Duffy-negative while most non-Africans are Duffy-positive. Duffy-negative individuals lack the receptor used by the Plasmodium vivax malarial parasite to invade red blood cells, a deficit that confers malaria resistance on its bearer. In Malagasy populations today, the region of Chromosome 1 around Duffy spikes to over 90% African in local ancestry whereas across the rest of the genome, the African ancestry proportion hovers around only 60%. Researchers calculate that this change was driven by a selection coefficient on the order of 0.20.
> We can translate this into plain English as an individual carrying the Duffy-negative allele has 20% more surviving offspring than one who does not.
> This is a staggeringly powerful selection coefficient; very few genes have been subject to such drive in humans; indeed a coefficient of 0.01 or above is by convention usually considered strong selection.
So the effect on non-homosexual bearers of this gene complex would need to be very powerful indeed, far more powerful than almost any selective effect we know of in humans, just for the complex as a whole to break even on reproduction.
It would also have to be quite recent; over time the disastrous side effect would be separated from the beneficial primary effects. The primary effects would persist and the side effect would vanish.
† It's worth being careful here. Heterosexuality is strongly genetically determined. Homosexuality is not strongly genetically determined. As a result, it doesn't really mean anything to say that "sexual orientation is [or isn't] genetically determined" - different orientations are not the same by this metric, and so referring to an umbrella group doesn't make much sense.
By analogy, it should be easy to understand that people who have two arms are mostly that way for genetic reasons, while people with one arm are mostly that way for non-genetic reasons. Is "number of arms" genetically determined? Well, yes, but only when the number is two (or in fantastically exotic scenarios).
Yes, that certainly all makes sense. If I recall correctly, growing up in the 90s we were sort-of put under the impression that DNA determines almost everything about a person. It's only more recently that science and society have discovered how much is actually determined by things like gut bacteria.
The rule of thumb for what determined any given trait, from summaries of the relevant science in the early 2000s, was "genetics 50%, unique environment 40-50%, shared environment 0-10% [heavily weighted toward the 0% end of things]".
Of course that division of influence (1) varies by the particular trait; and (2) is itself dependent on environmental conditions; when the general background is extremely impoverished, shared environmental influences may matter in a way that they don't when the background is lush.
Steven Pinker writing in The Blank Slate pounded on the message that it is essentially impossible for parents to have any predictable non-genetic influence on their children, but that there was still plenty left to be determined after the genes had their say. He recommended greater acceptance of the concept of fate.
Very interesting! I went to high school with identical twins, and even though they were quite hard to tell apart in terms of looks, they were wildly different in terms of intelligence - one was in the class for the gifted and the other was in the class for the struggling, they had quite different personalities too. Really fascinating.
They probably calculated the original chances assuming independent random variables for answers, and the truth is that those variables are dependent and highly correlated because they are twins.
Both the articles and the original out of thin air calculations are completely made up, but it's pretty conceivable that the cheating program had a mistaken assumption of variable independence, which is clearly false in this case.
At least they would be different on their birth certificate. I know that California certificates have fields for number of births and birth number (eg: twins, 1/2).
I don't like the term identical twins, it confuses some people and invites the kind of anecdotes described in the article. People are different individuals even when they have the same DNA. I prefer the term monozygotic twins.
We were in separate sections; by then, we really didn't like being the same class. I was in the second section and was accused of cheating by the teacher with zero evidence; the correct answers, it was math, were going to be the same. My response was the fuck we did; we were competing against each other. The teacher knew he wasn't going to get past that and changed the subject. But going from only to cheater to next didn't sit well.
As for the article, what is the bitrate of odd movements?
BTW, we may have cheated at one point. 24 Hour Fitness had a less well known half-price for twins membership. Or at least, I think they did.