The idea that we all have a “double“Exactly walking down some street on another continent has fueled literature, cinema and urban legends for centuries. we call doppelganger and, although you may think that it is the result of science fiction, the reality is that there is a solid biological explanation for this idea.
It’s proven. Top-level Spanish researchers, such as geneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Manel Esteller, director of the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute, demonstrated that this phenomenon is not magic, but is pure genetic statistics.
In order to understand this phenomenon, the researchers analyzed 32 couples of “doubles” who were not related to each other and compared their DNA, epigenetics and also the microbiome.
What they saw. The team not only relied on the visual perception that two people looked too similar, but used facial recognition algorithms to measure the objectivity of the real resemblance. In this way, of the sixteen couples that the algorithms classified as ‘extremely similar’, nine of them shared multiple genetic variations that are known as ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms‘.
But these similarities were not distributed at random, but were concentrated in the genes responsible for sculpting the forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin. That is, these sixteen couples gave results comparable to those of real biological twins.
There is a nuance. If their DNA is so similar, why aren’t they identical in everything? The study resolved that the subtle differences between these doubles are due to epigenetics, which is basically how DNA is expressed depending on the lifestyle or environment in which we develop, and their microbiome, which are the bacteria that live in your body.
A genetic puzzle. This study is not an isolated case, but the scientific community has been mapping the architecture of the human face for years, discovering that the combination of genes that defines our face is finite. In this way, as the probability of the genetic dice landing in the same combination increases exponentially.
The experts. One of the authors of this study, Carles Lalueza-Fox, granted a recent interview with El País and pointed out that, after analyzing the 200 most important genes for facial structure and calculating the probabilities, they saw that “we probably have more than a double somewhere on the planet.”
Now this phenomenon is a little more popular basically because social networks are making it easier to find our doubles.
Image | Anton Malanin
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