"First Born, Later Born: Does It Matter?"

KJ college English essay 10/27/09

In the article, "First Born, Later Born" by Geoffrey Cowley, it is introduced by a story about a young Charles Darwin, and how he challenged conventional wisdom. This enraged Louis Agassiz, who at the time was the world's leading naturalist. The author interviewed Frank Sulloway, who said that it is no coincidence that Darwin was the fifth child of his family, and that Agassiz the first child of his family. Sulloway has done twenty years of research, and found that no matter what their gender, ethnicity, culture, or background that the first born are more likely to defend the status quo, and that later born are more likely to try to topple this logic. Sulloway goes so far as to say that people with the same birth rank have more in common than their own siblings.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding birth order research, and the study has a reputation of flakiness. Sulloway also explained that older siblings have different pressures than younger siblings. which may be a cause of the differences in personality. Studies performed also state that firstborns were more neurotic than younger siblings. In turn, the later born siblings were consistently deemed more agreeable than their first born siblings. Families that have only one child, then that child scored between both categories on personality majors, but were more open to experience than first born children.

Sulloway also said that first born and later born children are likely to have different styles of thought in their core beliefs. His studies also stated that last born children are more likely to support left-wing than to support conservative views. To support the theory that first born children have more conservative political views, Rush Limbaugh, George Wallace, and Newt Gingrich are all first born children. On the opposite side of the political ideology spectrum, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi were both later born children. In addition to the contrast in behavior from first born children and last born children were five times more likely to support Copernican and Darwinian revolutions than first born children. Although there are many exceptions to this rule, and two big ones are that Isaac Newton was a first born, but Hitler was not. The article also said that first born girls are more vocal, assertive, and confident than younger siblings. Even after all of the research done by Sulloway, there are still many people who do not support this theory.