They got the same DNA. Genes are the same. Same mother, same father, same older siblings, same younger siblings, same number of books in the house, same number of TVs in the house, same teachers, same everything. So they should be absolutely indistinguishable. They should be, you know, clones.... Well, if you know a pair of identical twins, you know they’re not indistinguishable. They have separate personalities. I know this intimately, having two identical twin uncles, Barry and Mark, who are more similar than people picked off the street at random, but no one in the family had any doubt which was which. They each had their own personality, and that’s true of all individuals. Well, that leads to a real puzzle that I think psychologists have not really thought through enough, which is: how can they be different? It’s not their genes. It’s not their environment—at least not anything stable about the environment, like who your mother is or what neighborhood you live in. Thinkableshow more

Steven Pinker

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