Mom Always Liked You BestBorn to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Frank J. Sulloway

Abstract

Frank Sulloway's Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives ought to be familiar to most readers of Isis. Published in 1996 by Random House (Pantheon) in an initial run of fifty thousand copies, it has been widely reviewed in periodicals inside and outside academy and via broadcast media as well. Its author has been interviewed repeatedly for print, radio, and television on subject of intellectual and psychological consequences of birth order. Born to Rebel has garnered a good deal of popular attention and has stirred debate among sociologists and psychologists, especially those already concerned with links between innovation and personality. Historians and philosophers of science, on other hand, have studiously ignored book. There have been no symposia, no panel discussions, no public evaluations, no rebuttals. Except for a few book reviews it has remained completely off radar screen of profession. This silence is remarkable given collective anguish (in History of Science Society plenary sessions) about inability to reach a broad audience; it is all more so given that author is an active and respected member of HSS who is at once a noted Darwin scholar and a Pfizer Award winner (for Freud, Biologist of Mind [1979]). source of this disregard cannot be Sulloway's subject matter, for at core of book are two questions that every historian of science ponders: why do some people reject conventional wisdom and propose novel ideas that end up transforming our view of world, and why, during radical revolutions, do some people rapidly discard their old ways of thinking and embrace new ones while others cling tenaciously to prevailing mode of thought and zealously defend status quo? answers offered in literature are legion: education, religion, age, generational loyalty, oedipal rivalry, wealth, status, caste, class, political allegiance, nationality, and a host of other influential factors. Working scientists tend to treat most of these as irrelevant and argue that support and opposition are conditioned by strength of hypothesis, skill of proposer, quality of data, rhetorical skill of combatants, and eventually truth of in physical reality. last of these I add as an afterthought, because most students of science would agree that the truth of matter begs every significant question. Nevertheless, it has to be recorded as one of alternatives. Sulloway's thesis is that birth order and family dynamics hold real answer to these questions. The question of why some people rebel, including why a few particularly farsighted individuals initiate radical revolutions, is synonymous with question of why