Twins: A window into human nature | Nancy Segal | TEDxManhattanBeach
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- čas přidán 7. 12. 2017
- Twins tell us about our humanity - who we are and where we came from, says Nancy Segal. In her fascinating and entertaining talk, we learn that genes play a much bigger role in our decisions and behaviour than scientists previously believed. Dr. Nancy L. Segal has been seeing double since 1982. As a post-doctoral fellow and research associate at the University of Minnesota, she worked on the well-known Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. A fraternal twin herself, Dr. Segal founded the Twin Studies Center at CSU Fullerton, where she is also a Professor of Psychology. Nancy’s current interests include the behavioral and physical development of twins, the nature of twins’ social relationships, Korean twins separated at birth, the behavioral development of Chinese twins adopted internationally, the behavioral consequences of twin loss, and the personality similarity of unrelated look-alikes. Her work illustrates that by using twins as “living laboratories” we can sort out which aspects of twins’ lives are influenced by genetic inheritance, and in turn begin to “lay bare the basis of human behavior.”
Dr. Segal is an award-winning author and recipient of several international honors. Her hobbies include swing dancing, watching old movies and traveling to exotic locations. Her three proudest moments were having one of her books become an answer on Jeopardy, being pictured on a Pepsi can at a Madrid Congress and riding in an elevator with Eleanor Roosevelt. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx
her dress and the background did an optical illusion for my eyes haha great video though
Exactly
It's called "wasp waist"! ;-)
I have always been interested in identical twins. I have studied on this for years and am fascinated with identical twins raised separate and sharing so many samenesses. Very interesting. Thanks for uploading this talk.
Dr. Segal!! So great to see you taking the TED stage with your research.
P.s. For a minute there, the egotist in me thought I was that undergrad student haha
I literally click on this video because of the thumbnail I told myself there's no way she has a perfect hourglass shaped like that but now I know clearly it's the background I just had to see for myself
Lol same
It is evident that we have a strong genetic influence on our behavior, I have investigated on the subject and have been surprised with the findings. We cannot deny the genetic influence on behavior, the problem and rejection of many people arises that when researchers talk about twins (raised together or apart) they only focus on the similarities and brag about them a lot but don't talk about the differences of them and the causes of that. With what they talk in the media they make it seem that the twins are 100% same, that everything is genetic and it is not, they should do a more ethical research and scientific dissemination showing the influence and importance of both sides, the message that generally arrives to general public is that the environment does not matter or matters little when in reality it does and much in the emotional aspect of the person, all studies in psychology and even daily experience, including twins cases, give to see the importance of an emotionally healthy environment (and the implications of this in the course of people's lives, no matter how many similarities or differences they have). Even with genetic programming, human beings need a good environment (responsible parents or authority figures, good nutrition, affection, etc.) to function well and even to break negative generational genetic patterns.
PS: sorry for the bad translation, I don't speak much English.
@Ismael Barrera Nothing is really random. In Utero is an environment. A pregnant woman with a poor diet will give inadequate prenatal nutrition to her unborn child therefore cause defects, mutations, delayed/improper development. Also depending how stressful her environment, produce more cortisol which also will affect the fetus. No such thing as random, only explanations yet to be discovered.
Eduardo and Pablo. Thanks for your comments too.
play brought a diagnosed and un interacting child 'back' to people and life...
and it took longer than neccessary... or longer that things could've improved in... but the loving parents... that made a safe workd... now all live again.
But the environment did need something else... and still wondering exactly what it was... but it had to do with PLAY and more Exposure to life and nature of every day...
going emotionally where for a while the parents... didn't.
Play saved the child.
*changes something in the child's world.
Edwardo Abad • I thought you did a great job, with the translation. WTG
I have absolutely no connection to twins. This speech by Nancy Segal is captivating! She is a renowned college professor and expert of twins and yet she is fun and easy to understand! I could have listened to her for much longer!
I have twins and she is so right! Love the comparisons! Twins ARE amazing creatures!
Awesome!
I’m an identical twin, you would not believe the absurd assumptions people have and the truly stupefying questions they ask.
Nature vs nurture?. ..how odd is it that some twins who are raised together can be so different yet somehow when separated at birth they mirror each other’s tastes and lives...
Fascinating😍👏
I am a proponent of what Dr. Segal has found.
Nancy Segal is a great researcher.
Fascinating talk that tells us so much about who we are and how big a part genes play in that -- more than most of us think.
it makes me less and less convinced by systemic racism discussions, what if its just average genetic difference in intelligence and ability that explains wealth gaps?
@@ooDirtyMickoo Because it doesn't and a completely irrational argument when given a more accurate comparison with twins that are reared in dramatically different environments like the case with the Bogota twins: "Before starting her research, Segal would not have been surprised if each young man tested similarly to his identical twin, despite their different environments. But her preliminary results, she said, show that on a number of traits, the identical twins were less alike than she initially anticipated. ‘‘I came away with a real respect for the effect of an extremely different environment,’’ Segal said.
Perhaps the results merely indicate that people raised in deeply rural environments, with little education, take tests in a wholly different manner from those who attended a university. William, who managed a small business with competence, at times seemed overwhelmed by the test. But Segal considered the young men’s story a case history that might provoke further research, inspiring others to seek out more examples of twins reared apart with significantly different upbringings, whatever they were."
@@ooDirtyMickoo for some reason, I am unable to directly see your reply so I will continue the thread. Nowhere in my argument do I state any claims of uniform intelligence. I posted a link to one of the sets of twins mentioned in the list on this video and quoted the woman speaking as she was quoted in the New York times. Both sets of identical twins tested so differently from each other that she concluded that people raised in rural areas with little education take tests differently than those who are raised in the city. If intelligence is genetic then how do you explain 2 sets of twins testing different than their identical pair on an IQ test? One explanation could be that they were raised in an environment where the closest school was 5hrs away so they hardly attended and could only attend until age 12. Genes play a partial role in intelligence and environment explains the rest. Before your mother even gets pregnant with you, her environment allows her or prevents her from expressing certain genes, (diet, toxins) which then become what is to be passed down when she becomes pregnant with you.
I was directing my initial comment on your assumption in explaining the wealth gap. Out of the twins raised in the city of Bogota one became an engineer and the other became an accountant and then a lawyer. Out of the twins raised in the country with no running water and no electricity and no school, their only option was the military and one tried to get an education paid through the military but got discharged because he contracted a rare disease while serving. These veterans became butchers after moving to the city. One of the twins retained his stutter while his swapped identical raised in the city overcame it at an early age because his mother put him in speech therapy classes. I doubt you read my comments in their entirety and read the story of these twins which Nancy Segal studied and wrote a book about. There is a free lecture series on Behavioral Biology from Stanford University where Robert Sapolsky explains how the environment drives gene expression and even outcomes in test scores. Start there.
@@mystermont2019 I explain that by saying environment accounts for success to a degree. I also highly suspect genetics do too. Is the study using quadruplets or a set of twins?
@@ooDirtyMickoo Sorry I have to end this discussion here. You did not read the links I sent nor did you fully understand my reply. What you are asking is in both my previous replies as well as the link. If you are not familiarized with behavioral biology I can't continue this discussion with you. For people to become knowledgeable on this topic a lot of subjects have to be covered but the best I can do for you at the moment is point you to Robert Sapolsky.
I find it strange Jerry and Mark's 'quirk' of holding Budweiser, having heavy keychains and big belt buckles is used as evidence of genetic determination, and yet the fact that one is about 50% heavier than the other (which you'd expect to be much more genetically influenced) is not used as counter-evidence...
I'm sure the underlying studies are more substantial, but this talk came across as pseudo-science / pop-science to me - just a lot of quirky anecdotes
Same.
Although the talk used anecdotes but the concept is 100% true. Atleast in the case I’ve ovserved.
I agree. There is a fascinating discussion about epigenetics to be had here, but this talk seems to gloss over it completely. I would have preferred if she took a more nuanced approach where she discussed differences between monozygotic twins as well. (Seems like the goal here is to highlight the most similar findings).
I noticed the very same thing; it's no small problem. It's possible that the real research goes deeper, but this video presents no control whatsoever for the random quirky traits that any two humans will share. If you dig around for a while with basically anyone you meet, you'll come across some weird similarities you have. Take all the famous uncanny comparisons between Lincoln and Kennedy that people like to talk about. Do any of these twin pairs exceed the normal distribution of these kinds of weird quirky coincidences? Maybe they do, but that would have to be studied very carefully, and to be honest my gut says that even these pairs presented here with *only* evidence for similarity given to us probably aren't much more similar than any two people if you were to go and look for every weird coincidence between any two lives. Keep in mind that in a room of 75 people there is a virtually 100% chance that two of them will share a birthday--a quirky coincidence that utterly defies our instinctive understanding of statistics! Or consider how often you've run into the awkward situation of two people wearing the same outfit to a party. I myself drink my beer with my pinky under the can--does it wow me any time I meet someone else who does (no...I don't even notice because I'm not looking for it). These things happen all the time.
What are the numbers for giving your kid the same two common names, or happening to marry two women with the same sequence of names, or happening to wear the same number of rings and bracelets on a given day? The odds of those things are probably not nearly as low as we might assume, especially for the twin pairs that grew up in the same region.
Presented without any control I can't see any scientific value in these goofy stories (again the real research may be much more valuable). As presented this appears to be just one big example of massive confirmation bias.
@@pocklecod Agreed
The Jim twins also had a dog growing up, both of which name their dog, Toy.
I saw this TV program called Xporation Station Life 2.0. The program was on cloning. They cloned a deceased dog. The resulting offspring displayed the same unlearned behaviors as the deceased parent. Is this inherited behaviour also true in human beings? If yes then the next question is is intelligence also inherited? If intellectual ability is inherited how do we deal with this inequity?
The deep learning AI came up with some invalid stats meta scrutinies of other studies based upon statistical methods that conclude completely the opposite of what has been found.
Can't get over the fact that the twins read books back to front, whyyyyyy??? Makes no sense
People believed their child was genetically ill.
And they prevented anyone from interacting or having expectations or trying correction or teaching situations....
because he is ...(diagnosis)... he does not and will not understand.
? We have been given a burden? we will carry it... why has this happened to us? It is a matter of numbers... genetic... fault/mistakes... it happens. And it happens with others too... 1 in a 100(1in 80?/1 in 45)
Anyway... I went to play, they needed a carer for two weeks... there after the kid made eye-contact.
Would I come back? I did.
And took the child to nature and we did free play and challendges and exposures and dealt with the emotions(not protect from it)...
and all the time somehow the child found a different and new health trajectory...
Did the Genes change?
How were they changed?
Can others in similar belief change...?
I found kids willing to play.
But all belief was... it is Genetic. nothingbwe can do...
have you tried play?
Hmpf... how will that work. We try medicine...
Have you watched for example Dr. Mate videos? Heard of Biology of loss?
I believe: PLAY SAVED THE CHILD.
Where firts there was no hope.
The child now studies at University.
While i still struggle to tell others...
try it... PLAY SAVED THE CHILD...
(for us)... but donyou think they listen??
*thanks for this entertaining talk.
lovely dress.
Two minutes in and I can't keep going because of the mouth sounds.
aghhh.... great ,now you made me notice it too. damn 😒😒
It's your misophonia DNA.
30 seconds in and I'm struggling to focus on the message.
That mouth sound is disturbing
OMG -- seriously. And such a shame because I was interested.
❤❤
Prof. Segal is pretty impressive in her talk about identical twins. However, she has talked about similarities only. Does she want to ignore dissimilarities and say it is all due to genes and there is no role of environment in learning or behavior?
No, she never said that
I knew it Manny I knew it I got twinned🕵️🕵️
Interesting but not that scientific.
For crying out loud!!! I couldn’t bear to even get close to finishing the video because of her constant lip smacking between every single pause in her speech.
3 identical strangers brought me here
Omg I've just watched that! then as I was doing some more digging i found myself here. I only clicked on it because her body didn't match her face. Then I realized her dress and the back ground were performing tricks of the eye!
I thought she was very thin at the waste lol
OMG her dress is so tricky !!! Im thought she was very skinny
Naturally conceived Triplets, a pair and a spare. Blessings
Hmmm
Her dress made it seem like she had a super tiny waist haha
because the number of identical siblings studied was not in the hundreds of thousands nor hundreds of millions that would allow the "data scientists" using 'big data' statistical methods with degrees of freedom applied to allow the small sample sizes to mean anything.
I have seen this trickery applied in other situations.
2 studies found excellent results, but the statistical examination of the studies somehow turned these results into saying the complete opposite of what was reported in the only studies ever conducted on the question under study.
This trickery when applied quashed an innovative healing method that worked on otherwise incurable illnesses.
Now such illness sufferers shall die due to infections caused by their illness not being treated by the innovative methods that were studied all because of the lies done by statistical methods.
When I confronted the chatbot with these reasonings, it still could not see any fault with Cochrane's appeal to authority logical fallacies and insisted that studies finding that genetically identical people were extremely similar to one another to be a completely invalid finding which on the face of it was ridiculous to extremes.
9:40
Is she Steve Vai’s mother?
im more interested in the dress, what a beautiful optical illusion
What?? Holding Budweiser becomes important as a research trait?? Just plainly look at the difference in body weight and body posture. Working at a Mac becomes a trait? Literally half of the teenagers might have worked at Mac or sth simikar at some point in life
These twin researchers are useless at the best, and misuse of tax dollars.
Nah dude, marrying someone named Linda is totally a genetic trait.
she is a psychologist not a DNA expert let's keep that always in mind James Watson a nobel price winner in DNA research has some doubts on the outcome of the research in twins due to epigenetic influences that are not taken into account in the outcome of the research
Actually epigenetics is taken into account in behavioral genetics. This is what they also say. That MZ twins are always quite a bit different as well and they account this to environmental differences which influence gene expression through the process of epigenetics. So this claim is not up to date I think.
But what is correct is that the MISTRA study does not take this into account. That is true. This is because in the 1970s genetics in psychology was a ideological taboo and was turned away from because of the eugenics movement that led in part to world war II. This even now is still controversial. Ideology is really detrimental to behavioral sciences, because they censor themselves and other and therefore don't research everything that they could be doing.
Also epigenetics in no way is an argument against genetic influences in behavior. It only explains that all a lot of cellular processes, therefore also processes in tissues and organs always interact with DNA. Everything in the body that involves proteins involves genes. Meaning that neurotransmission always involves genes and certain mutations in genes influence the speed or expression of genes and much more therefore it also influences processes in neurotransmission. The environment interacts with DNA through epigenetics which influences gene expression, but they also equally influence mutated genes or chromosomal events. Thus epigenetics is just another layer in the biological interaction of genes with the environment.
@@emiel89 I can't understand your statement that "twins are a little quite different", the fact that they do not talk about the differences in the media does not mean that there are no differences. Each trait has a different estimate of heritability, some higher, others lower, and even so this is not an absolute measure since it speaks of a average of population. In Dr. Bouchard tell us that, also, in Robert Ploming's book "Blueprint", he talks about the fact that in general twins, raised apart or not, tend to be 50% alike. Maybe there are little bit quite diferentes in appearance but searching deep in many traits they have a lot of diferentes.
Unfortunately, there are progressive political people (Marxism devotees) who very strongly oppose on political grounds all of her findings.
Who else clicked because her waist looked abnormally small?
Thought about this illusion of her dress like 60% of the video.
O.T. Is Dr. Segal trans ?
This unscientific politics has been incorporated into deep learning AI such as Bing ChatGPT4.
It's mind blowing how someone can do the research, observe extremely weird results, and the only conclusion word is "genetics". Urrh duhrr. Either you need to redefine what you mean by that, or you need to look for other hypotheses. Because there is no way that genes, that are protein-coding devices and "junk-dna" (lol) according to the outdated view of mainstream biology, can account for these crazy similarities. Anyone with half a brain working understands something else is at play here. Whether it's morphic resonance, predestination, some kind of unconscious remote communication, or something else, it's a shame to stop where it gets really interesting. But of course, it's forbidden territory.
Yeah no. You really need to reread your knowledge on genes and the effects they can have. Because molecular biology can full well explain a lot of things. You are making a leap which has no logic behind it. You go from, because there is a lot science does not know about the development of the brain therefore it must be paranormal. It is not forbidden. Those things have been studied as far is it can, and never has there been conclusive evidence to even remotely conclude there are phenomenon like that which you recount. I am not saying it is completely impossible because that is a claim that is hard to make but it is extremely unlikely and not probable.
Probably her research is much more extensive, but this is a TED Talk, she doesn't have 2 hours. Anyway genes and brain development have a great importance on personality traits and most of the things she showed are either defined by personality and habits or physiology. I just don't know how "predestination" or "unconscious remote communication" seems more coherent to you than genetics
"unconscious remote communication"
kogazor what?
Just because science doesnt have all the answers, doesnt mean that the supernatural is the placeholder. That's ridiculous, and has no evidence to support it. Besides, those weird coincidences are perfectly explained by just the word "genetics." It's sometimes in our genes that help determine what happens in our lives. For example, twins sometimes share interests and traits because of their genes. Sometimes, it is just huge coincidences. Just because it may be unlikely doesnt mean it's impossible. Just because it's unlikely, doesn't mean the supernatural is responsible. That's illogical.
this doesn't sound very scientific. I can find similarities in behaviour with random people, that doesn't mean there are common genes, it just means that we have similar behaviour. You just can't have controls in any of these studies, and there are innumerable factors to account for.
Well you don't sound scientific, rather philosophical. She has a wikipedia page talking about her accomplishments surrounding twin studies.
nature/nurture debate, twin studies are very important
Dude, this is a 12 minute presentation for some people in the audience who’s only “scientific” qualifications are paying 35 bucks for a general admission ticket.
If you want to get more “scientific”, you can start by reading the white papers on the Minnesota Twin Studies by Thomas Bouchard.
I am actually doing a course in behavioral genetics that does pick apart a lot of the twin studies. Actually many studies done with twins(often a bit more small scale) tend to support the conclusions in the MISTRA study. I even read a study from a few weeks ago that came once again to the same conclusions when talking about schizophrenia. So there definitely is consilience of evidence to support genetic influences of behavior.
Also most behavioral geneticists don't talk about genes or environment. But a combination of the two, called the genes-environment interaction. And this idea also is in concordance with molecular biology. Equally this is what most neuroscientists would also say.
Studies show twins raised apart in different environments, even different countries speaking different languages have many traits in common. It's not an anecdotal thing, these studies have taken place over decades.
is that jimmy fallon with a wig and a dress on? actually I think it's fred armisen
Absolutely pathetic and poor talk!
As a researcher myself, I believe the hypothesis of your research was not that genes make us attracted to certain names. May be characters of a person, but of course never a name of a lady or a son. That cannot possibly be a genetic trait. And as a researcher yourself how could you make an argument using such petty coincidences?
Genetic research is in its very infancy. Its till not as repeatable and predictable as other research fields. Even the most researched areas like cancer biology is very very difficult to predict. It would be awesome if one day we could predict cancer, just by seeing the genetic sequence.
In such field of infancy, how could you possibly make these bold and big claims about human psyche??
As a researcher, you should find this unethical as it could have huge consequences in the way people view their lives.
One of the worst Ted talks I've ever heard
She has a very masculine face.
so
@@jonmo111 just my opinion. If u dont like it then dont comment on my post 🤷♀️🤷♂️
Dr. Segal, please drink a glass of water or something. Christ.
This is how she talks, and she's most likely not sorry that it doesn't fit your narrow, cutesy idea of what women should sound like. Perhaps you should click back to your reality television.
why does her mouth sound so dry
I am sorry, but her dress doesn’t fit. And they make this weird illusion of her waist. Aghhh...idk why does this irritate me so much! :)))