READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

TWIN STUDY: TWO OF A KIND

A. The scientific study of twins goes back to the late 19th century, when Francis Galton, an early geneticist, realised that they came in two varieties: identical twins born from one egg and non-identical twins that had come from two. That insight turned out to be key, although it was not until 1924 that it was used to formulate what is known as the twin rule of pathology, and twin studies really got going.

B. The twin rule of pathology states that any heritable disease will be more concordant (that is, more likely to be jointly present or absent) in identical twins than in non-identical twins – and, in turn, will be more concordant in non-identical twins than in non-siblings. Early work, for example, showed that the statistical correlation of skin-mole counts between identical twins was 0.4, while non-identical twins had a correlation of only 0.2 (a score of 1.0 implies a perfect correlation, while a score of zero implies no correlation.) This result suggests that moles are heritable, but it also implies that there is an environmental component to the development of moles, otherwise, the correlation in identical twins would be close to 1.0.

C. Twin research has shown that whether or not someone takes up smoking is determined mainly by environmental factors, but once he does so, how much he smokes is largely down to his genes. And while a person’s religion is clearly a cultural attribute, there is a strong genetic component to religious fundamentalism. Twin studies are also unraveling the heritability of various aspects of human personality. Traits from neuroticism and anxiety to thrill – and novelty-seeking all have large genetic components. Parenting matters, but it does not determine personality in the way that some had thought.

D. More importantly, perhaps, twin studies are helping the understanding of diseases such as cancer, asthma, osteoporosis, arthritis and immune disorders. And twins can be used, within ethical, for medical experiments. A study that administered vitamin C to one twin and a placebo to the other found that it had no effect on the common cold. The lesson from all of today’s twin studies is that most human traits are at least partially influenced by genes. However, for the most part, the age-old dichotomy between nature and nurture is not very useful. Many genetic programs are open to input from the environment, and genes are frequently switched on or off by environmental signals. It is also possible that genes themselves influence their environment. Some humans have an innate preference for participation in sports. Others are drawn to novelty. Might people also be drawn to certain kinds of friends and types of experience? In this way, a person’s genes might shape the environment they act in as much as the environment shapes the actions of the genes.

E. In the past, such research has been controversial. Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor working at the Auschwitz extermination camp during the second world war, was fascinated by twins. He sought them out among arrivals at the camp and preserved them from the gas-chambers for a series of brutal experiments. After the war, Cyril Burt, a British psychologist who worked on the heredity of intelligence, tainted twin research with results that appear, in retrospect, to have been rather too good. Some of his data on identical twins who had been reared apart were probably faked. In any case, the prevailing ideology in the social sciences after the war was Marxist and disliked suggestions that differences in human potential might have underlying genetic causes. Twin studies were thus viewed with suspicion.

F. The ideological pendulum has swung back; however, as the human genome project and its aftermath have turned genes for abstract concepts to real pieces of DNA. The role of genes in sensitive areas such as intelligence is acknowledged by all but a few die-hards. The interesting questions now concern how nature and nurture interact to produce particular bits of biology, rather than which of the two is more important. Twin studies, which are a good way to ask these questions, are back in fashion, and many twins are enthusiastic participants in this research.

G. Research at the Twinsburg festival began in a small way, with a single stand in 1979. Gradually, news spread and more scientists began turning up. This year, half a dozen groups of researchers were lodged in a specially pitched research tent. In one corner of this tent, Paul Breslin, who works at the Monell Institute in Philadelphia, watched over several tables where twins sat sipping clear liquids from cups and making notes. It was the team’s third year at Twinsburg. Dr Breslin and his colleagues want to find out how genes influence human perception, particularly the senses of smell and taste and those (warmth, cold, pain, tingle, itch and so on) that result from stimulation of the skin. Perception is an example of something that is probably influenced by both genes and experience. Even before birth, people are exposed to flavours such as chocolate, garlic, mint and vanilla that pass intact into the bloodstream, and thus to the fetus. Though it is not yet clear whether such pre-natal exposure shapes taste-perception, there is evidence that it shapes preferences for foods encountered later in life.

H. However, there are clearly genetic influences at work, as well – for example in the ability to taste quinine. Some people experience this as intensely bitter, even when it is present at very low levels. Others, whose genetic endowment is different, are less bothered by it. Twin studies make this extremely clear. Within a pair of identical twins, either both, or neither, will find quinine hard to swallow. Non-identical twins will agree less frequently.

I. On the other side of the tent, Dennis Drayna, from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, in Maryland, was studying hearing. He wants to know what happens to sounds after they reach the ear. It is not clear, he says, whether the sound is processed into sensation mostly in the ear or in the brain. Dr Drayna has already been involved in a twin study which revealed that the perception of musical pitch is highly heritable. At Twinsburg, he is playing different words, or parts of words, into the left and right ears of his twinned volunteers. The composite of the two sounds that an individual reports hearing depends on how he processes this diverse information and that, Dr Drayna believes, may well be influenced by genetics.

J. Elsewhere in the marquee, Peter Miraldi, of Kent State University in Ohio, was trying to find out whether genes affect an individual’s motivation to communicate with others. A number of twin studies have shown that personality and sociability are heritable, so he thinks this is fertile ground. And next to Mr Miraldi was a team of dermatologists from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. They are looking at the development of skin disease and male-pattern baldness. The goal of the latter piece of research is to find the genes responsible for making men’s hair fall out.

K. The busiest part of the tent, however, was the queue for forensic-science research into fingerprints. The origins of this study are shrouded in mystery. For many months, the festival’s organisers have been convinced that the Secret Service – the American government agency responsible for, among other things, the safety of the president – is behind it. When The Economist contacted the Secret Service for more information, we were referred to Steve Nash, who is chairman of the International Association for Identification (IAI) and is also a detective in the scientific investigations section of the Marin Country Sheriff’s Office in California. The IAI, based in Minnesota, is an organisation of forensic scientists from around the world. Among other things, it publishes the Journal of Forensic Identification.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

THE ORIGIN OF ANCIENT WRITING

A. The Sumerians, an ancient people of the Middle East, had a story explaining the invention of writing more than 5,000 years ago. It seems a messenger of the King of Uruk arrived at the court of a distant ruler so exhausted that he was unable to deliver the oracle message. So the king set down the words of his next messages on a clay tablet. A charming story, whose retelling at a recent symposium at the University of Pennsylvania amused scholars. They smiled at the absurdity of a letter which the recipient would not have been able to read.

B. They also doubted that the earliest writing was a direct, rendering of speech. Writing more likely began as a separate, symbolic system of communication and only later merged with spoken language.

C. Yet in the story the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, seemed to understand writing’s transforming functions Dr Holly Pittman, director of the University’s Center for Ancient Studies, observed, writing ‘arose out of the need to store and transmit information…over time and space.’

D. In exchanging interpretations and information, the scholars acknowledged that they still had no fully satisfying answers to the questions of how and why writing developed. Many favoured an explanation of writing’s origins in the visual arts, pictures becoming increasingly abstract and eventually representing spoken words. Their views clashed with a widely held theory among archaeologists that writing developed from the pieces of clay that Sumerian accountants used as tokens to keep track of goods.

E. Archaeologists generally concede that they have no definitive answer to the question of whether writing was invented only once, or arose independently in several places, such as Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mexico and Central America. The preponderance of archaeological data shows that the urbanizing Sumerians were the first to develop writing, in 3,200 or 3,300 BC. These are the dates for many clay tablets in an early form of cuneiform, a script written by pressing the end of a sharpened stick into wet clay, found at the site of the ancient city of Uruk. The baked clay tablets bore such images as pictorial symbols of the names of people, places and things connected with government and commerce. The Sumerian script gradually evolved from the pictorial to the abstract, but did not at first represent recorded spoken language.

F. Dr Peter Damerow, a specialist in Sumerian cuneiform at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, said, ‘It is likely that there were mutual influences of writing systems around the world. However, their great variety now shows that the development of writing, once initiated, attains a considerable degree of independence and flexibility to adapt to specific characteristics of the sounds of the language to be represented.’ Not that he accepts the conventional view that writing started as a representation of words by pictures. New studies of early Sumerian writing, he said, challenge this interpretation. The structures of this earliest writing did not, for example, match the structure of spoken language, dealing mainly in lists and categories rather than in sentences and narrative.

G. For at least two decades, Dr Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a University of Texas archaeologist, has argued that the first writing grew directly out of a system practised by Sumerian accountants. They used clay tokens, each one shaped to represent a jar of oil, a container of grain or a particular kind of livestock. These tokens were sealed inside clay spheres, and then the number and type of tokens inside was recorded on the outside using impressions resembling the tokens. Eventually, the token impressions were replaced with inscribed signs, and writing had been invented.

H. Though Dr Schmandt-Besserat has won much support, some linguists question her thesis, and others, like Dr Pittman, think it too narrow. They emphasis that pictorial representation and writing evolved together. ‘There’s no question that the token system is a forerunner of writing,’ Dr Pittman said, 'but I have an argument with her evidence for a link between tokens and signs, and she doesn’t open up the process to include picture making.'

I. Dr Schmandt-Besserat vigorously defended her ideas. ‘My colleagues say that pictures were the beginning of writing,’ she said, ‘but show me a single picture that becomes a sign in writing. They say that designs on pottery were the beginning of writing, but show me a single sign of writing you can trace back to a pot — it doesn’t exist.’ In its first 500 years, she asserted, cuneiform writing was used almost solely for recording economic information, and after that its uses multiplied and broadened.

J. Yet other scholars have advanced different ideas. Dr. Piotr Michalowski, Professor of Near East Civilizations at the University of Michigan, said that the proto-writing of Sumerian Uruk was ‘so radically different as to be a complete break with the past.’ It no doubt served, he said, to store and communicate information, but also became a new instrument of power. Some scholars noted that the origins of writing may not always have been in economics. In Egypt, most early writing is high on monuments or deep in tombs. In this case, said Dr Pascal Vernus from a university in Paris, early writing was less administrative than sacred. It seems that the only certainty in this field is that many questions remain to be answered.