It starts gently enough: the kind of titillating, feel-good human-interest story we’re bound to love. Are we unique snowflakes, visited upon the Earth by the angels of nature, or are we lumps of undifferentiated Play-Doh, nurtured into being over time by our environment?
One day in 1980, adopted 19-year-old Jewish kid Bobby Shafran hops into his burgundy-green Volvo, in gung-ho teensterism named the “Old Bitch”, and arrives for his first day at community college in upstate New York – and discovers through the shocked reactions of his classmates that there is not just one of him. He has an identical twin brother, Eddy Galland, whose existence he never knew of.
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A minor tabloid sensation becomes wall-to-wall national news as it turns out the twins aren’t two, but three, as a third boy, David Kellman, emerges from the woodwork. And boy, are they similar, despite growing up as strangers. They look the same, they speak the same, they have the same mannerisms, they smoke the same brand of cigarette, they have the same taste in girls! Proof positive, surely, of the power of nature in determining our destiny?
The triplets become the talk of New York, hitting the nightspots of New York, going into business together with a celebrity restaurant called – you’ve guessed it – “Triplets”, and even garnering a cameo role ogling Madonna in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan.
Alongside archive and recreated footage and testimony from friends and family, Bobby and David communicate the joy of a brotherhood discovered just as they are boys becoming men. But the sense that there is no happy end to this story starts early, if subtly, as it slowly dawns that Eddy’s wife is talking about him in the past tense.
Film-maker Tim Wardle investigates why the triplets were ever separated in the first place — and, come to that, placed in three very different families spanning the socio-economic spectrum. At the centre of an emerging web of unlikely coincidences and ever more apparent manipulation and deceit sits distinguished psychologist Peter B Neubauer, an Austrian-born refugee and American child psychiatrist who had devoted himself to one of the hoariest and dumbest questions in biology: are our behaviours and our likelihood of a happy, healthy life the product of nature, of those identical genes that identical twins share? Or are do they develop later, a product of our upbringing, of nurture?
Released earlier this year in the US and now on limited release in the UK, Three Identical Strangers is both a compelling piece of story-telling and a sobering meditation on the hubris of science that becomes divorced from the people it’s supposed to serve. Because the fact is that the “debate” Bobby, Eddy and David’s lives were manipulated to settle had long before ceased to be a debate.
We learned from the 19th-century inventor of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, that human behaviour is shaped by culture to the point where personality tests (including his own) are the very devil to do. We have known since the 1910s, and the birth of modern genetics in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “fly room” at Columbia University, that genes mean nothing unless they are expressed in an environment. The world went to war to defeat an ideology, Nazism, powered (among other things) by a model of genetics as the be-all and end-all that even at the time researchers knew to be patently absurd.
And yet still the nurture versus nature debate refuses to die. For every James Flynn — a New Zealand intelligence researcher who demolished the idea of “innate” intelligence in the 1980s — we have behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin, who only this year couched his own account of behavioural development in stark terms as more nature than nurture. We know genetic and environmental factors are just two points on a much more complex multidimensional map. And yet we seem to be absolutely trapped in a circular argument that leads again and again to cod science, inflammatory rhetoric, and – in the case of the three identical strangers – tragedy. Wardle’s visceral, moving and at times sheer grab-the-side-of-your-chair anger-making film is a necessary reminder of what the study of human behaviour should always have at its core – human welfare.
