Why your youngest are truly revolting

Born To Rebel

December 20, 1996

This study aims to put sibling rivalry in a quite new light. The central idea, stated again and again, is that children born later in a family are much more likely to be receptive to revolutionary ideas than first-borns. The main support for this thesis comes from a study of over 1,000 scientists with respect to their acceptance of new ideas. Most people, including scientists, resist radical innovations. So, why do some accept new ideas while others do not? Frank Sulloway's key case study is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

He asserts that what differentiates revolutionary thinkers from nonrevolutionary ones is almost never greater knowledge of the facts. Much more important is personality, and here birth order has a major influence. In the case of the theory of evolution later-borns were 9.7 times more likely than individual firstborns to endorse the theory. Moreover, he presents evidence that the same strong correlation is true of other scientific revolutions: the Copernican revolution, the circulation of the blood, and phrenology. By contrast, for what he somewhat arbitrarily classifies as conservative theories, like spiritualism and germ theories, the correlation is in the opposite direction - they received more support from first-borns.

From such studies he concludes that "most innovations in science, especially radical ones, have been initiated and championed by later-borns." But all the evidence in the book relates to reception and not to innovation of new ideas, a crucial distinction that is never discussed. One expects to find, for example, an analysis of the birth order of Nobel laureates, but such information is strikingly absent. One must suspect that it does not fit the thesis. My suspicions are compounded by the following list of first-borns: Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Freud, Davy, Kepler, Born, Pauling, Watson and Crick, Luther, and Lenin.

Sulloway offers an explanation of the effect of birth order on personality in terms of evolutionary theory. "Sibling rivalry is Darwinian common sense," he writes. Siblings wish, like all animals, maximal parental investment in their well-being. His analysis of personality persuades him that first-borns, because of their physical superiority, are more antagonistic, while laterborns are more altruistic and empathetic; first-borns are more conscientious and more strongly identified with the parents; first-borns are more jealous of their siblings and more anxious about their status; later-borns are more open to new experiences and are more risk-oriented. All these, he recognises, are controversial conclusions.

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The openness of later-borns is accounted for in terms of the value that divergent thinking and behaviour give them - it helps them compete for a scarce resource, parental interest. Since parents invest heavily in their firstborn the more talents later-borns show, the greater the chance that the parents will nurture them. Another factor is child-parent conflict, which Sulloway suggests causes any offspring to become more open to innovation.

But things are somewhat more complex as factors such as gender and the spacing of the children can apparently have significant influences. Women seem to be more given to conforming than men. And then there is temperament. Depending on differences in family riches, individual disparities in temperament have highly varied consequences for the rest of the personality. Sulloway focuses on the role of shyness and introversion. There is research which shows that shyness is one of the most heritable of personality traits; about 50 per cent of the variability is due to one's genes. But in large families later-borns are more likely to be shy. Curiously, shyness makes first-borns more open to experience whereas for laterborns such a temperament makes them less open. Not surprisingly openness to new ideas depends on a variety of influences, both genetic and environmental. Sulloway constructs an eight-variable model of family dynamics based on over 3,000 scientists who participated in 28 scientific debates and finds an excellent correlation with the probability of accepting radical ideas. But the model is seriously at fault with Galileo and Sulloway deals with this by explaining it in terms of Galileo's relation with his father. Galileo was a radical because his father was a radical.

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This is but one of many such examples where Sulloway explains away behaviour that does not fit with his theory. The result is that the book contains a great deal of very interesting information on the personalities and childhood of many scientists. But one cannot escape the feeling that this is gossip rather than science, however persuasive his arguments are. So that when we come to Watson and Crick, both first-borns, and their discovery of the structure of DNA, this is dismissed as creative puzzle-solving and not a radical innovation. However, even a cursory knowledge of the story of how they arrived at the structure of DNA would persuade anyone that they were revolutionaries and radical in every way.

No indication is given as to why the focus should be on the acceptance of scientific innovations. It could be argued that it is not an admirable quality but merely a desire to be fashionable or to like novelty. No artists are included in the analysis and it would be interesting to know the family dynamics of revolutionaries like Joyce, Beckett and Picasso.

However, there is a lengthy discussion of the origin of social attitudes and the implications for the Reformation and political history, the French revolution in particular. Firstborns are more socially conservative, middle children occupy the middle range, while lastborns are usually the most liberal. The claim is made that sibling strife, not class conflict lay at the heart of the Terror in France. And one of the most striking statistics in the whole book is that in the United States Supreme Court first-born justices are much more conservative than their later-born counterparts.

This book full of provocative ideas and interesting information, about one third of which is given to appendices and notes. But all the correlations suggest no more than increased probabilities for a particular type of behaviour. One is left with the suspicion that given a detailed account of family history and early experiences, then with Sulloway's type of analysis one could account for any later behaviour - but with position in the birth order being relevant, though less important than he would have us believe.

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Lewis Wolpert is professor of biology as applied to medicine, University College London.

Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives

Author - Frank J. Sulloway
ISBN - 0 316 88179 1
Publisher - Little, Brown
Price - £20.00
Pages - 653

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