Выделить основную идею ! margaret richardson and terry connelly have almost identical taste in clothes, both have four children of more or less the same age, and both were married on exactly the same day. not surprising, perhaps, margaret and terry are identical twins. what is surprising is that they didn't even meet until they were in their midthirties - after their children were born. it is well known that twins are closer than most brothers and sisters - after all, they spend more time in each other's company. occasionally, this closeness becomes extreme: for example, grace and virginia kennedy who as children invented their own language; or greta and freda chapman who can speak the same words at the same time in the same voice, as if linked by telepathy. but what happens if, like terry and margaret, identical twins are separated at birth and brought up in different families? will their backgrounds make them completely different, or will their shared genes still mean that they have a lot in common? professor tom bouchard from the university of minnesota, set out to find the answer to this question. he traced more than a hundred pairs of twins who were adopted by different parents at birth, sixty-four of whom were identical twins. each twin was then tested and interviewed about every detail of their life and personality. it turned out that margaret and terry were not unusual. as well as looking very similar, many twins had the same iq, the same health problems, the same hobbies and interests, the same attitudes and even the same tastes. several pairs of twins arrived at their first meeting in the same clothes, and one pair of middle-aged women were wearing identical jewellery. others had made the same career choices: jerry and mark levy first met in their thirties to discover that they were both firefighters, who drank the same kind of beer and weighed exactly the same. however, the most incredible story is that of jim springer and jim lewis from ohio in the usa - in fact, the 'jim twins' made headline news across the usa when they finally met up at the age of thirty- nine. born to a poor immigrant woman in 1939, they were adopted by different families when they were a few days old, and both were named jim by their new families. this was just the first in an almost unbelievable number of similarities in their lives, (see below). of course, some of this must be coincidence. but professor bouchard has come to a remarkable conclusion. identical twins brought up separately are more similar than non-identical twins brought up together. ' i am not saying that upbringing doesn’t matter - it’s very important of course - but this research shows that our genes influence almost every part of our lives: they influence our iq, our hobbies; our personalities, our political attitudes, our health, even the clothes and food we like.’
