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

FRANK Sulloway's 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 labored to uncover why it was Darwin who originated the theory of natural selection. He built a database of 6,566 scientists and other historical figures from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century. Through his study of this database, the answer became obvious to him: Darwin was the fourth child born in his family. To Mr. Sulloway, much of history is literally sibling rivalry writ large, an eternal struggle between conservative, authoritarian, and closed-minded "first-borns" and liberal, rebellious, altruistic, and open-minded "later-borns." (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 first-born = conservative = bad (one of his illustrations of a first-born 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 ground his logic plausibly in neo-Darwinian sociobiology rather than literary movements such as 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, appears to be too variable to generalize about.)

However, a careful reading shows that Mr. Sulloway does not actually explain the cause of Darwin's creativity. It turns out that later-born scientists are not significantly more innovative. (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were all first-borns. Genius remains largely inexplicable.) Instead, later-born scientists are merely more receptive to others' innovative theories, especially before there's much evidence. Once solid data become available, this gap rapidly closes. (First-borns, 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 later-borns were nine times more likely to favor.)

Birth order, it appears, primarily influences opinions, not talents. Keep in mind that those of us who publish our opinions tend to vastly overrate the historical importance of published opinions.

Despite heroic research efforts, a lucid prose style, and an 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 among 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 first-borns to account for why so many French scientists stubbornly resisted Darwin. Yet by this logic, France's surplus of first-borns in the twentieth century should have made French soldiers loyal conformists, while fast-growing Germany should have been saddled with an undisciplined army of "born to rebel" later-borns. 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 he will need a far more sophisticated understanding of politics than Mr. Sulloway brings to the job. His first weakness is that he assumes that "conservative," "liberal," and "radical" mean roughly the same thing in all places and at all times. For example, his description of Darwin's politics -- "Darwin was ahead of his time, and his world view 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 to Hillary Clinton. Darwin was linked to the rising tide of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism by blood and marriage (both his mother and his 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 the economist Thomas Malthus, who was in turn a follower of Adam Smith). Darwinism was Whig free-market economics applied to biology.

Further, Sulloway seems not to realize that it is much harder today to define what is the orthodoxy to rebel against than it was in, say, 1517 (the first year in his database), when the Catholic Church unquestionably defined the intellectual establishment. He tends to assume that scientific progress remains upsetting to conservatives. Yet beginning in the 1920s, with the discovery that subatomic reality is indeterminate (which flummoxed atheistic determinists), many recent scientific revolutions have proved deeply gratifying to the prejudices of 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 to St. Thomas Aquinas's Prime Mover proof for the existence of God.

Most notably, the sociobiologists' ongoing "rediscovery of human nature" confirms conservative distrust of the liberal dogma that all differences between human beings are the product of social injustice. Today, the Pope appears more enthusiastic about Darwinism than the self-proclaimed "cultural radicals" who control the granting of 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, Mr. Sulloway ends up offering additional reassurance to conservatives in their rebellion against liberal orthodoxy.