Experimental Blog #7

Comments on the book "One and the Same" - My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to Be Singular by Abigail Pogrebin

It is repetitive to say that being an identical twin is something everybody else can only try to imagine. The author is one of a pair of very intelligent and intellectually employed identical twin sisters.
This life experience is so incomprehensible and inaccessible to almost everybody else that it seems it has produced a very great deal of what is sometimes called proto-scientific thinking, description, and explanation. However, the author repeatedly remarks about this. This proto-science is what all people, but, it seems, especially men, do, because we all instinctively try to explain everything, whether we really understand anything or not.
She also spends at least one chapter on the revolutionary new science of "epigenetics". This science deals with all the biophysics and biochemistry that are the environment of our chromosomes. One of the author's scientific sources says that, "When we say, 'environment', we mean 'everything but genetics.' "
This means that as soon as our genome is enclosed in a cell, the zygote, it has an environment. The following environments might be the embryo, the fetus, the infant, the mother's womb, and all four of these things are organic and unique to each person, including identical twins. And after we are born our bodies continue to be environments for our genomes.

Actually, the author might say that she didn't quite say all of these things, but these things and the fact that identical twins have such extraordinary relationships with each other, themselves, and everybody else makes their life stories and experiences fascinating, and maybe sometimes unsettling, for everybody.