Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kaye.

One of the central questions of human development is the relative roles of nature and

nurture, our genes and our environment. But it's hard to isolate these two broad

variables since all of us are a unique blend of both. The only exceptions would be identical

twins, or triplets or quadruplets and so on, but even here there is a problem since most twins like most twins like most

other siblings are raised in the same home thus offering no systematic way to

isolate nature from nurture.

That is, unless the twins are separated at a very young age,

preferably each being raised in a very different environment.

Then you get some interesting data. So interesting in fact that some

researchers have been enticed to go to unethical lengths to produce it. In a new book,

deliberately divided inside the controversial study of twins and triplets adopted a part,

world-renowned twins studies expert Nancy Siegel describes an infamous experimental program

originating at the Louise Wise Services Child Development Center in New York City,

in which psychiatrists directed twins to different homes without telling the adopted parents what they had done.

...