Poll: identicle multiples

[Tesla]

are your identicle multiples different or the same?

[WickidaWitch]

Dont have Identicle multiples but I am one.
My sister and I are like night and day. Always have been.
We do look alike though I try hard not to. She has very blond hair and mine is naturally brown(most of it).
The only people that cant tell us apart that I know of are her friends who have never met me before or didnt know i exsisted. One day I had a man put his arm around me and kiss me on the cheek in the supermarket. I looked at him and said " I'm not Trisha"
He almost died!
A funny~
I was watching a video last week from 1989 and yelled into my sisters boyfriend to come quick-see Trisha!
It was me in the video!

[breathingmom]

My identical daughters are alike in some ways and different in other ways. They have very different tastes in food. One will eat anything, the other has a very particular palate. They both love music, art, and dance.

People who don't know them well cannot tell them apart. One of them has a little rounder face but other than that they are exactly the same.

What about you Tesla? Do you have identical twins?

~Jill

[matches]

I have identicle boys that my wife and I can tell apart easily but family members have trouble some times. Strangers will sometimes say they see differences but most of the time say they look the same. When they are sleeping they look like carbon copies of eachother. When they are awake there personalities are so different you wonder if they are really identicle.

[Tesla]

Thank you for interesting replies! I love to read them
I have a 3 y o boy. There is no history of twins in my dh's or my own family.
What sparked my interest in this issue is my psychology class.
I am thinking about making a report on twins.

What puzzles me the most about twins is that identicle twins have identicle DNAs and therefore they produce the same brain waives - this is what explains the similarities in twins who were raised apart; however, there are several factors that may make identicle twins act different - family environment, outside environment, etc.
Example :
one couple dressed their identicle daughters differently from birth, encouraged them to like different things, go after different intersts as children. As grownups, these twins look different, they went to 2 different colleges in different parts of country and have totally different career fields.
Another example is if parents treat their identicles differently, they will most certainly be different. Like, if one of the twins was severly injured at birth, it is most likely that he or she will require more care than the healthy twin.

What do u guys think? Is it genes VS environment? a little of both?

I have a theory that some identicle twins are 99.9 % alike and other identicles can be as little as 70 % alike.

It's very interesting topic for me to explore.
Thanks for your info Natasha

[matches]

Tesla,

We have done some research on twins. When we found out we were having twins (third month) we also found out that babies had one placenta. At three months in the pregnancy this is a good indicator that you will have identical twins. Sometimes by the end of the pregnancy fraternal twins will end up in what looks like one placenta when the two placentas absorb each other.

Your theory on some twins being 99.9% to 70 % alike is very true. One of the contributing factors is when the egg splits. If it splits very early the twins will come out with a lot of physical differences along with other differences as well, the later they split the more similarities they will have. There are number of things that could happen when the egg splits. Sometime you will get mirror twins that are mirror images of each other ex. they look alike except all the features are opposite. This could even be as extreme as organs being switched around. Splitting very, very late is one of the reasons for Siamese twins.

As far as identical twins having very different personalities...like mine; now they are identical, they do have they same parents (obviously), they have done the same things and been to the same places since conception. My theory is, once the egg splits you have two clusters of cells that are identical in their DNA however, at this point they are separated and to some extent from this day forward will be more and more on there own, so to speak. At this point their outside environment will have an impact on there development even if the environment is the womb. For instance my boys were born full term for twins (38 weeks) Elijah (baby A) was 5lb11oz and Roman (baby B) was 4lb7oz. Roman had a four inch cord so he did not get the nourishment that Elijah received, subsequently Elijah also ended up getting a lot more of my wifes hormones. For the first two months Elijah was very grumpy and Roman was a lot more subdued. You can imagine that these extra hormones must have had a pretty significant impact on the Elijahs newly developing brain and personality. So in my opinion the outside environment is going to have some affect on their developing chemistry very early in the pregnancy and could reasonably affect them differently.

I love this topic , take care

[Tesla]

Very cool, matches!
I think u are right !

I went and checked out your website. Your little guys are so precious!
I love the pout face babies make.

[laralou]

Mine are almost 6 mos. They have always looked very similar but slightly different. Everyone claims they can tell them apart, but when looking at just one of them, no one ever knows who they have.

I see different developmental differences but not really different personalities yet.

A good resource if you decide to write a paper on this is Twins magazine which has a zygosity column each month to discuss issues with identicals or fraternals. It has good scientific info. In fact, a month ago the doc claimed we shouldn't call them identical at all, since they aren't "identical", but rather should call them monozygotic.

You might want to put this question in the Parenting Multiples subforum (at the top of Parenting Issues) to reach more moms of identical twins.

[1Plus2]

My monozygotic (identical) girls are alike in many ways yet you can still see a definite personality difference. My egg split very eary on...before day 3 after conception. The reason we know this is because my girls each had their own chorion, amnion and placenta. That happens in identical twins when the egg splits early. They were born at 38w3d and weighed 6lbs.11oz. and 7lbs.1oz.

Monozygotic twins may have the same DNA but they are never truly identical. Once the egg splits genes can mutate in different ways in each baby. In fact, they can even (although very rarely) be a boy/girl pair. There's an article about this in Twins magazine in the same section laralou talks about in her post. It's very fascinating.

I am very excited to watch my girls grow and to observe first hand the unique relationship between monozygotic twins.