Archive for the 'Twins' Category

Double Trouble

February 22nd, 2008

A few months ago I wrote about being an identical twin. Back then I’d done some research on twins, but I really didn’t find out that much. That was before I read “Entwined Lives”, a fantastic book that covers just about everything twin-related under the sun. It was even written by a twin, Nancy Segal. (She’s fraternal.)

Nancy (with a Ph.D. in twin research) writes about all kinds of twins: fraternal, identical, conjoined, and even triplets and other “multiples”. Considering that she’s a fraternal twin herself, I think it’s funny that she talks about the “lesser” …

A Twins’ Tale

September 6th, 2007

As regular readers of my blog already know, I’m an identical twin. It’s a source of constant curiosity to others, probably because there aren’t that many of us - The best estimate I found seems to put identical twins at about .4 percent of the population, or around 1 in every 250 births. Fraternal twins, by contrast, are much more common, at around 2.7 percent of births (around 1 in 37 births). So that means that there are almost 7 times more fraternal twins than identical twins out there. No doubt this is mostly due to fertility drugs …