Not that it’s obviously terribly important to the historical chaos discussion, but I think siblings aren’t a great natural model. Siblings differ by at least (usually more than) nine months, which you can imagine affecting them biologically, via the physiology of the mother during pregnancy, or via the medical /​ material conditions of their early life. They also differ in social context—after all, one of them has one more older sibling, while the other has one more younger one. Two agents interacting may exaggerate their differences over time, or perhaps they sequentially fill particular roles in the eyes of the parents, which leads to differences in treatment. So I think there are lots of sources of sibling difference that aren’t present in hypothetical genetic reshuffles.
(That said, the coinflip on sex seems pretty compelling.)
Not that it’s obviously terribly important to the historical chaos discussion, but I think siblings aren’t a great natural model. Siblings differ by at least (usually more than) nine months, which you can imagine affecting them biologically, via the physiology of the mother during pregnancy, or via the medical /​ material conditions of their early life. They also differ in social context—after all, one of them has one more older sibling, while the other has one more younger one. Two agents interacting may exaggerate their differences over time, or perhaps they sequentially fill particular roles in the eyes of the parents, which leads to differences in treatment. So I think there are lots of sources of sibling difference that aren’t present in hypothetical genetic reshuffles.
(That said, the coinflip on sex seems pretty compelling.)