If you were harbouring any illusions that you are unique, it may be time to put them to rest. A recent study indicates that there may be a person out there who looks like you and even shares some of your DNA sequence, even if you are not related to them. Perhaps this has always been the case but the internet has made finding your doppelgänger much easier.
This week in The Global Tiller, we dig deeper into the concept of doppelgängers. What makes one person resemble another unrelated person? How is technology impacting our ability to find lookalikes and how does this finding impact our reliance on facial recognition softwares?
The doppelgänger study was published last month based on the research of Dr Manel Esteller and his team at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. They looked into people who look alike but have seemingly no family connections going back to almost 100 years.
For this study, the team recruited 32 people from a lookalike photo project done by a Canadian artist and asked them to take a DNA test, fill out some questionnaires and put their images through different facial recognition softwares. What they found was surprising. Sixteen pairs of lookalikes had the same scores on these tests as an identical pair of twins, even though these lookalikes were born to completely different mothers. Even their DNAs showed they shared more genes in common, which explains the similarity of their facial features.
How is it possible for people who are unrelated to share so many genetic variants? According to Dr Esteller, it’s just by random chance. In fact, he thinks that there are so many people in the world that the system is producing humans with similar DNA sequences.
Another study by researcher Teghan Lucas conducted a few years earlier, but one that didn’t use DNA sequences of the participants, calculated that the likelihood of two people having the exact same features is very low. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, there’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of exact doppelgängers. However, the likelihood increases when we make the parameters more flexible.
It is important to mention here that both of these studies relied on a very specific dataset to arrive at these conclusions. All the 32 participants from Dr Esteller’s study were of European origins while the 4,000 photos that Lucas analysed belonged to US military personnel. Hence, it may be premature to claim these findings apply to the entire world population but, with internet proliferation, a global photographic database is only a matter of time. How else would we have discovered Chinese Elon Musk?
But what makes these studies of lookalikes interesting isn’t just the likelihood of finding someone who looks like you but how technology plays a role. In Dr Esteller’s study, they found that the pairs of lookalikes who looked similar to the human eye were not detected as lookalikes by the facial recognition softwares. Even Lucas’ findings can change if we bring in AI. It seems that humans and AI are not always on the same page when it comes to seeing doubles.
Why does it matter? Because the use of facial recognition softwares is becoming more commonplace, especially in a post-pandemic, germophobe world. We know already that there is a coded bias in machine learning, that AI struggles to identify black and brown faces. We know that the process through which a human brain recognises someone isn’t the same as a facial recognition software. So if we are outsourcing identification to a robot, can we trust it to spot the right person?
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
The discourse around where we come from isn’t just innocent curiosity about our origins but humans have long used genealogy to serve our own purposes.
Diana Körner on sustainable tourism and island collaboration
Pacific Toks Season 2 continues with a special series of speakers from the Virtual Island Summit 2022, which aims to encourage islanders to share knowledge and solutions for resilient, sustainable and prosperous islands worldwide. Along the Summit, we will sit with some of the speakers to dig deeper into their projects, ideas and their insights for our Pacific Islands. You’ll be able to hear from people from the Pacific but also from other islands of the globe that share similar challenges and concerns as our Pacific community.
For this second episode, Philippe sits down with Diana Körner, a sustainable tourism consultant and co-founder of the Seychelles Sustainable Tourism Foundation.
…and now what?
What makes me me? What is the ultimate definer of my identity? I grew up hearing that every human being is unique. It doesn’t seem to be the case. The more we learn about us through the ultimate coding bricks of our biology, the more we realise how much we all share together.
And for sure, this is a good thing even more so now than ever. At a time when populists are surfing on divisions and rejecting 'the other', we need again and again to be reminded that our passports, our flags or our borders are neither the core element of who we are nor the baseline of our differences. These may be important markers for some to define their identity but deep down inside we are closer to each other than we think.
So, why have I been told so often that we are all unique? Because our mainstream culture places individualism at the core value of our identity. We define the 'I' as the smallest common denominator, the ultimate element to understand humanity. Humanity, which for many people, exists as the sum of all those singular individuals who somehow manage to live together.
Our philosophies, technologies and social movements, despite promoting collaboration and co-development, are still rooted in individualism. We are pushed to showoff our uniqueness: our life accomplishments, our degrees, career achievements and even the unrealistic idea of a 'self-made' person. We are incentivised to share our unique insights by being told to share every single one of our thoughts to the rest of the world, believing that whatever comes up in our brain should be heard by everyone.
Some of it can actually be grounded in the fact that numbers advocate for our uniqueness. As scientist Richard Dawkins said, “The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. (…) We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.” Or this fascinating graph from Tim Urban which puts things in perspective:
But numbers are not infinite neither are the statistical combinations of our DNA. At one point we may end up with enough commonalities, among the hardly fathomable number of possibilities, to eventually be more alike than we think. And that’s great news. Because as we will eventually learn about how much common and as similarly unique as we are with all the others, we may eventually end up realising that the individual may not be the most important unit of understanding our humanity. It is not the 'I' that matters as much as the 'we', as many cultures around the world have shown us since generations.
The same way a single cell of a body is nothing without all the others, an individual may not be as important as the community in which they live. In a time when we’re facing challenges that go beyond the lifetime of a person, the scale of a single life, where our decisions will impact generations to come, it may be time to focus and foster our commonalities, our shared nature, our limited probabilities of uniqueness. It may be time to find confidence, solace and hope in our strength as similar multitudes, like a flock of birds or a school of fish that resembles a coherent being when joining forces to face a bigger enemy.
As science journeys through understanding the code of our nature and machines help us deal with data so big that we can eventually see global and shared patterns in our behaviours and identities, let’s use this as an opportunity to revise our perception of our selves and our collectives.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury