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Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway. New York: Pantheon, 1996. 653 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN 0-679-44232-4.
Although researchers have examined the effects of birth order on intelligence, achievement, and personality, many of these studies have insuperable flaws, and the best work has produced weak or inconsistent results. Consequently, interest in birth order has waned and seemed doomed to consideration only within pop psychology. With the publication of Born to Rebel, Frank Sulloway resurrects birth order as an explanatory variable in the social sciences, arguing that birth order is more important than race, class, or gender for understanding human history.
Drawing upon an astonishing quantitative data base he created from the biographies of thousands of scientists and others, Sulloway finds large systematic differences between firstborns and laterborns. Firstborns tend to be domineering, ambitious, "tough-minded," and conservative, while laterborns tend to be rebellious, sociable, "tender-minded," and liberal. Sulloway also finds that laterborns are more open to experience than firstborns, and therefore more likely to devise and embrace radical ideas. By documenting over a dozen scientific revolutions led by lastborns and...