Frank Sulloway says your birth order determines your
personality — and he's got the numbers to prove it

Born to Rebel: Birth Order,
Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives
By Frank Sulloway, Pantheon, 653 pp.

By SCOTT ROSENBERG

when social scientists try to apply the rigid yardstick of statistics to taffylike questions of historical causality, there's always a hint of farce. If you can explain the past through a statistical model, you inevitably suggest that you can also predict the future — and we know how impossible that is. So we see the figure of the statistical historian — hunched over his data, muttering, "According to my calculations, the stock market should have crashed ... yesterday!" — as a distant cousin of the numerologist, the astrologer, or the reader of chicken entrails. Frank Sulloway, an M.I.T. scholar with a radical and at first glance pretty wacky theory about birth order and history, seems well aware of this image problem. In his new book "Born to Rebel," he focuses on scientific and political revolutionaries, but he might almost be writing about himself: "Individuals who launch radical revolutions typically require strong determination, courage, and independence of mind. Unfortunately, their divergent ways of thinking have tended to condemn these bold thinkers to rejection, ridicule and torment." Sulloway, by any measure, has got the right stuff to be an intellectual revolutionary. He's obsessive and single-minded; as he surveys revolutions — from Copernicus to Darwin, and from the Protestant Reformation to the French Revolution — his theory becomes a one-size-fits-all idee fixe. Birth order, Sulloway believes, is a statistically valid predicter of individual character and human history. Give him your family lineup, Sulloway promises, and he'll tell you the likelihood of your becoming a rebel or a dictator, a pacifist or a terrorist. Next: Sibling rivalry makes the world go round