Customer Reviews

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

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A reader writes: "However, Mr. Sulloway's book is tightly reasoned and supported by a great deal of research."

You might want to look at the discussion of Sulloway's work in Judith Harris' recent _No Two Alike_, pp 92-112. According to that account, Sulloway's work was never published in a peer reviewed journal, the book in which it was published failed to provide the sort of information needed for other people to check the truth of his results, and Sulloway repeatedly refused requests for such data--for instance, the names of the Protestant and Catholic martyrs whose birth order rankings he offers as evidence, or cites to the studies whose results he claims to summarize.

When someone wrote a critical article pointing out evidence that his factual assertions about the data were false, he delayed the publication for several years by the threat of lawsuits.

Judging by her previous book, Harris is a careful writer, so absent some evidence to the contrary my current conclusion is that Sulloway is a fraud.

The role of siblings within the family and beyond has received attention for many years. Sulloway pulls together a mass of research, including his own to find patterns deriving from family structure. Using a strong evolutionary stance, he shows how "sibling rivalry" for resources extends into later life. This sweeping study keeps the reader's attention with clear, straightforward prose and a refreshingly direct approach. It will keep other students of human behaviour working for many years.

The general pattern, examined within larger social, political, religious and scientific arenas, shows how later-borns become the flexible, innovative thinkers. While, necessarily, only a few become actual creators of new ideas, they more readily accept fresh concepts. Later-borns learn to adapt in the family environment - it's a survival trait. First-borns, and Sulloway notes the difference between chronological and "functional" first-borns, cling to a conservative stance. Even if the parents are radical thinkers, their first-borns will adhere to their way of thinking. Later-borns in such a circumstance are more likely to depart from the family's stance, adhering to more conservative social or political ideas. The disparity in attitudes is the norm within the family, not necessarily across family boundaries.

Throughout the book, Sulloway frequently turns to Darwin as a case study in strengthening his thesis. It's a wise choice, since Darwin is emblematic of what Sulloway asserts. middle-class, middle sibling, middle-aged at the peak of his achievements, Darwin exemplifies most of Sulloway's criteria for distinguishing birth order as a personality driver. Sulloway concedes that the focus on Darwin is a logical result of the naturalist's showing the world how evolution works. The traits he describes have biological roots, intensified by the human condition. Human families have a long time to build the patterns he describes. Since Sulloway's thesis shows that cultural and socio-economic factors have little or no bearing on the evolutionary patterns established, previous dogmas will have to be revised or discarded. In more than one sense he's duplicating Darwin's own experience.

The book concludes with a series of Appendices explaining how Sulloway built his database of events and people. He uses 121 historical "revolutions" and nearly two dozen scientific ones, as well as the Reformation to support his thesis. The criteria for selection are given and explained. He's not averse to challenges by other scholars, but they'd best have their data firmly in hand. He's buttressed his case admirably. Only one serious challenge to Sulloway's effort has emerged since this book was published. Readers should be aware of Judith Rich Harris' critique of Sulloway's methods in the Appendix of her The Nurture Assumption. This is not the place to examine the debate, but both should be reviewed by readers. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

I was prepared to dismiss this book and its premise because of prior experience with birth order theories. However, Mr. Sulloway's book is tightly reasoned and supported by a great deal of research. In the end, Sulloway avoids the reductionist trap by showing how birth order interacts with a variety of other environmental factors to produce personality. Sulloway has put the issue of our biological nature squarely on the table by showing the relationship of human history to natural selection and the life forces that drive all living things. This book won't do much for our egos, but may well explain a great deal of human behavior. My only concern is the mischief that the inevitable misuse of his ideas is likely to produce

This book by Frank Sulloway places birth order, and the "Darwinian" struggle for parental attention, at the center of personality formation. Sulloway has taken 26 years to write his book - Born to Rebel, and it is worth it. He bases his theories on meticulous research into the biographies of over 3000 scientists, from the days of Copernicus to the present. His theories began with, and are founded on, the observation he made back in 1972 that there are dramatic differences between the groups of scientists who promote the periodic revolutions in science, and the groups who oppose and support orthodox science. His observation is that these differences are related to differences in family position, and Sulloway demonstrates a degree of statistical significance in these relationships that is almost unheard of in the social sciences. The book is remarkable on a number of levels. First of all, the theoretical observations have a power that may put Sulloway up on a level with Freud and Piaget in unveiling the mechanisms of human development. Secondly, the topic of the book is a fascinating read: first of all, on the personal level, and Sulloway is not so much of an academic that he shuns this. There are sideline remarks throughout the book that encourage the reader to apply the insights to him- or herself. Thirdly, the book is very interesting on the level of biography, and fourthly in its insights into the history of science. Also, it is beautifully written: it survives with flying colors the test that I apply - reading it aloud. Also, Sulloway is a master of statistical exegesis - in his command of statistical theory and technique (there is an appendix on the use of descriptive statistics that stands on its own as a beautiful piece of education), in the clarity of his explanation of the significance of statistical results, and in his use of just the right diagram. I have a particular fetish about the intelligent use of statistics and the representation of quantitative data. I have two favorite books on these subjects. There is Cathy Marsh's book on descriptive statistics called Exploring Data, and a book by Edward Tufte called The Visual Display of Quantitative Data. These two books, however, are textbooks. They explain in the abstract how to use statistics effectively and truthfully, though both books abound with fascinating examples. Sulloway, though, is manipulating his numbers for real, so his achievement is doubly impressive and doubly fascinating.

With a minimum of psychobabble, Frank Sulloway has cogently written about one of the great questions of child development. His historical analysis is simply superb as are his statistical explanations. (His appendix 1 on statistics explains the subject more clearly in four pages than my experience of four quarters at a major university. Thanks for the review, Frank, it's been 25 years.) Because he shoots down some of the sacred cows of the Marxists, Freudians, and others, I am certain Mr. Sulloway will endure a lot of stupid criticism for the conlusions he draws. Yet, I am willing to bet that in 20 years, his ideas will be part of the intellectual furniture. If one only reads one serious book per year, this is certainly the choice for 1997. My only criticism is that I could not find where Sulloway reveals HIS birth order.

As provacative and ground-breaking in its way as Alfred Russel Wallace's exposition of the theory of natural selection, Born to Rebel dares to suggest that our willingness to embrace controversial beliefs is a predictable consequence of our order of birth. The author's proof itself constitutes a facinating journey into the history of creative thought; the evocation of the childhoods of Darwin, Voltaire and Frederick the Great lend powerful support to the thesis. Sulloway's use of statistics is shockingly understandable even for someone who fled from Statistics 101. The prose flows like a wonderful after-dinner conversation; but after this feast the world is seen anew. If my allusion to Alfred Wallace escapes you, check this book out

Although the data supporting his hypothesis look very impressive and almost convincing, the problem I have with this book it that Mr Sulloway picks his Revolutionary Theories for reasons that are dubious. For example, excluding certain theories on the basis that "they would have been discovered by others around the same time" can hardly be called scientific. And then, after lots of very impressive statistics, he wanders off into the land of anecdotal evidence science that makes the reader wonder why he's working at MIT in the first place. Although there is probably a basis for some of his conclusions, and it is a great effort to bring science to this subject of popular prejudice, I can't support the raving reviews it received in the press.

This is a book that attracted a great deal of attention when it first came out. And, indeed, ironically, a couple colleagues and I had a related book, "Birth Order and Political Behavior," come out at about the same time. Needless to say, we didn't sell many copies compared to Frank Sulloway's book!

The work itself has generated much controversy. I am not so much interested in that as in the book itself. He states clearly his basic thesis (Page 53): "Most innovations in science, especially radical ones, have been initiated and championed by laterborns. Firstborns tend to reject new ideas, especially when the innovation appears to upset long-accepted principles." As a firstborn, I am, of course, instantly skeptical!

Sulloway brings a wide array of evidence to bear on his thesis. As noted elsewhere, there is some controversy there, but I am still impressed with the scope of his work.

My colleagues and I, in our book, asked a different question--not about innovation and revolution: Is birth order related at all to political eminence and leadership. We studied birth order in terms of its effects on (a) the odds of being president of the US, becoming a Supreme Court Justice, becoming a member of Congress, military achievement at West Point and (b) the chances of being a British Prime Minister, Soviet leadership, United Nations secretaries general, Pope, and great generals in history. It was often quite difficult to ascertain birth order. Bottom line, though? No real impact of birth order.

It is that set of findings more than any other that raises some questions in my mind. I simply find it hard to believe that birth order can be so powerful--whether in terms of leading to eminence or to being a rebel.

Nonetheless, Sulloway's book is provocative, raises many questions, and ends up being--at least in my opinion--worth taking a look at.

I think the book is misrepresented by it's own title. It's not really a collection of knowledge on birth order and the psychological ramifications of birth order. Instead, the book is about applying what is known about birth order to see if there is a correlation between historical figures' birth order and family variables, and their degree of revolutionary innovation, or acceptance of revolutionary innovation.

Most of the historically significant scientists are covered, such as Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin (especially Darwin, there's whole chapters on Darwin). There's a lot of biographical information in the book in general.

by Steve Sailer (http://members.aol.com/steveslr) -- Published in National Review, 12/9/96, 1,050 words -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Born to Rebel arrives on a crest of imposing hype, with serious scholars comparing its importance to that of the works of Charles Darwin. For 26 years, this statistically inclined MIT historian has labored to uncover why it was Darwin who originated the theory of natural selection. After building a database of 6,566 scientists and other historic figures from the 16th through the early 20th Centuries, the answer's now obvious to him: Darwin was the 4th child born in his family. To Dr. Sulloway, much of history is literally sibling rivalry writ large, an eternal struggle between conservative, authoritarian, and closed-minded "firstborns" and liberal, rebellious, altruistic, and open-minded "laterborns." (Pop quiz: Name Sulloway's birth rank and politics.) Despite the author's tendency to torture his examples to fit his comically obvious prejudice that firstborn = conservative = bad (one of his illustrations of a firstborn with a "conservative ideology" is the Unabomber), there is almost certainly some truth in his general idea. Sulloway's findings agree fairly well with popular stereotypes, the urban folk wisdom of our time. One of his accomplishments is to solidly ground his logic in Neo-Darwinian sociobiology rather than literary movements like Freudianism: sibling rivalry is genetically motivated competition for scarce parental resources. Older, bigger children defend their privileges, while younger kids try to subvert the status quo. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. (The "only child," by the way, appear to be too variable to generalize about.) A careful reading reveals, however, that Dr. Sulloway does not actually explain the cause of Darwin's creativity. It turns out that laterborn scientists are not significantly more innovative. (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were all firstborns. Genius remains largely inexplicable.) Instead, laterborn scientists are merely more receptive to other's innovatory theories, especially when there isn't much evidence one way or another. Once solid data becomes available, this gap rapidly closes. (Firstborns, in turn, seem to deserve some credit for resisting new but bad ideas like phrenology, the once-popular pseudo-science of predicting personality from skull bumps, which laterborns were nine times more likely to favor.) Birth order, it appears, primarily influences opinions, not accomplishments. Keep in mind that those of us who get our opinions published tend to vastly overrate the historic importance of published opinions. Despite heroic research efforts, lucid prose style, and admirable zeal for statistically testing hypotheses, at times Sulloway can sound like Matt Groening's Seventh Type of College Professor: The-Single-Theory-to-Explain-Everything-Maniac. ("The nation that controls magnesium controls the universe!!!") Yet, family dynamics are a curiously impotent Single Theory. No nation can use birth order to control the universe because no nation can control birth order. The great engines of history remain cultural differences propagated through families, not differences between individuals spontaneously generated over and over again within families. For example, in one of his few attempts to explain distinctions between countries, Sulloway cites France's low birth rate and consequent high proportion of firstborns to explain why so many French scientists stubbornly resisted Darwin. Yet, since France's low birthrate continued into the 20th Century, by this logic France's surplus of firstborns should also have made French soldiers loyal conformists, while fast-growing Germany would be saddled with an undisciplined army of too many "born to rebel" laterborns. The events of May, 1940, however, would seem to cast doubt on this reasoning. When Sulloway leaves the relatively firm ground of scientific history for the swamp of politics, his analysis becomes a bit of a mess, partly because politics itself is messy. Unlike scientific revolutions, most political revolutions -- whether the American revolution, England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, Japan's Meiji Restoration, the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Mussolini's putsch or Hitler's takeover -- contain both radical and conservative elements. Eventually, somebody may make sense of the relations between birth order and politics, but they'll need a far more sophisticated understanding of politics than Sulloway brings to the job. His first weakness is that he assumes that "conservative," "liberal," and "radical" means roughly the same thing in all places and all times. For example, his description of Darwin's politics -- "Darwin was ahead of his time, and his worldview was that of a twentieth-century liberal" -- is a much more accurate portrayal of Sulloway's own ideology. True, Darwin was a "liberal", but a nineteenth-century free market liberal, infinitely closer in outlook to Milton Friedman than Hillary Clinton. Darwin was linked to the rising tide of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism by blood and marriage (both his mother and wife were Wedgwoods, members of the factory-owning family that developed the first brand name in history); by heavy stock market investments; and by intellectual heritage (the single most important influence on Darwin was economist Thomas Malthus, a follower of Adam Smith). In spirit, Darwinism was Whig free market economics applied to biology. Further, Sulloway seems not to realize that it's much harder to define what's the orthodoxy to rebel against today than in, say, 1517 (the first year in his database), when the Catholic Church unquestionably defined the intellectual Establishment. He tends to assume scientific progress remains upsetting to conservatives. Yet, beginning in the 1920's with the discovery that subatomic reality is indeterminate (which flummoxed atheistic determinists), many recent scientific revolutions have proved deeply gratifying to the prejudices of sophisticated conservatives. For example, the now-validated Big Bang theory was long pooh-poohed by the scientific establishment out of anti-religious bias: the Big Bang is disturbingly close to Genesis ("Let there be light") and Thomas Aquinas' Prime Mover proof for the existence of God. Most notably, the sociobiologists' ongoing "rediscovery of human nature" validates conservative distrust of the dominant liberal dogma that all differences between humans are the product of social conditioning. Today, the Pope appears more enthusiastic about Darwinism than the self-proclaimed "cultural radicals" who control who gets tenure in university humanities departments. Paradoxically, by offering even more evidence that human nature is fixed and that the power of state-mandated social reform to advance harmony and happiness is highly limited, Sulloway ends up offering additional reassurance to conservatives in their rebellion against liberal othodoxy. # # # Steve Sailer (steveslr@aol.com) is a businessman, writer, and only child.