Identical Personalities?

As a student in elementary school, I was actually taught that identical twins only look the same, but deep down, they really aren’t all that similar. And then David Myers came around and proved my schoolteachers wrong! You see, identical twins are very much alike. You could say that it’s because they grew up in the same environment, but think about what would happen if identical twins were separated at birth. Along with the example covered in Benjamin Kampf’s blog post, where the identical twins separated at birth were so alike that the only noticeable difference was how each spelled his son’s middle name (although it was the same name), an example that blew my mind was the one of Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe, a Nazi Catholic and a Caribbean Jew, respectively. They were separated at birth, and despite their completely different environment, they both shared identical traits, from the foods they liked to the particular tics they shared. So how can you tell identical twins apart? The main difference is that one will be healthier than the other, usually because no two people can ever share the exact same source of nourishment and number of copies of genes in the same womb. I don’t have an identical twin brother as far as I know of, so I can’t really apply this stuff to myself. However, my mom is a triplet and is almost physically identical to her sister (scientifically speaking, two of the triplets have to be identical). So I tried thinking, is my mom healthier than my aunt, or vice versa. The answer is possibly, since my aunt and my mom have gotten sick in different ways as they get older. Upon further thinking of my mom and her sister, I realized that they really aren’t alike at all, thus proving Mr. Myers wrong and proving my schoolteachers right. For example, my aunt is generally worried about everything, but my mom is a total chiller. Looking to the childhood stories my mom has told me, I have come to believe that my mom and aunt’s differences developed due to nurture, or how the environment affected them. Despite everything I said in the first two paragraphs of this blog post, it seems that the environment CAN make identical twins different.