My doppelgänger: Has he/she my DNA and my genes too?

Last Updated on September 16, 2022 by Joseph Gut – thasso

September 03, 2022 – Sometimes, in sleepless nights, as an ever and never stopping inquiring mind, you may stumble over just flabbergastingly mind-boggling stuff like this. The issue is “doppelgänger” and the possible genetic similarities behind it.

Doppelgänger means people that appear so similar to yourself that even facial recognition software would have a hard time telling you apart. Now scientists think they can explain what it is that makes them look so similar and possibly could explain why each of us may have doppelgänger(s). Doppelgängers are certainly and definitively not the result of some deep dark family secret. Simply, they look strikingly similar to you just with their brown hair, the structure of their nose, their cheekbones, and the shape of their lips, their hairdo, and many ma also have similar weights, similar lifestyle factors, and similar behavioral traits like smoking and education levels. That could mean that genetic variation is related to physical appearance and potentially may influence some habits and individual behavior.

Scientists have long wondered what it is that creates a person’s doppelgänger. Is it nature or nurture? A team of researchers in Spain tried to find out. Their results were just very recently published in the  Journal Cell Reports . In fact, Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, revealed  that he worked on research involving twins in the past, but for this project, he was interested in people who look alike but have no actual family connection going back almost 100 years.

For this project, he actually turned to a very uncommon, but for the purpose of his research phantasmic resource. The resource is called “I’m not a look-alike!” which is an in itself very unique art project in photography by the Canadian artist François Brunelle.

Despite it’s slightly misleading title, the “I’m not a look-alike!” project is dedicated to do exactly this; to photograph “look-alikes” around the world, with an overwhelming wealth of hidden information behind each simple picture taken. In the approach of “Art leads to Science”, the research team in Barcelona asked selected pairs presented in the work of Francois Brunelle to do a DNA test. The pairs filled out questionnaires about their lives. The scientists also put their images through three different facial recognition programs. Of the people they recruited, 16 pairs had similar scores to identical twins identified using the same software. The other 16 pairs may have looked the same to the human eye, but the algorithm didn’t think so in one of the facial recognition programs.

 

Researchers then took a closer look at the participants’ DNA. The pairs the facial recognition software said were similar had many more genes in common than the other 16 pairs of individuals.  The  according to the face recognition programs “look alike” pairs of human individuals shared in fact several genetic variants. And these are very common among them, the researches noted. Thus, these individuals share those genetic variants that are related in a way that they have the shape of the nose, the eye, the mouth, the lips, and even the bone structure, i.e., their physical appearance.

Some confounding aspects