But does everyone have a doppelganger? There's a fairly decent chance of it, actually, thanks to the limited number of genes that influence facial features.
"There is only so much genetic diversity to go around," said Michael Sheehan, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, who routinely studies appearance variations and genetics in species such as paper wasps and house mice. "If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice."
...
people of the same ethnicity typically have a larger set of genes in common than they do with those outside their group, which is why, for example, South Asians usually have dark hair and brownish skin and Scandinavians usually have blond hair and light skin.
...
The biggest ethnic groups are the Han Chinese (about 1.3 billion people) and the Hindustani (perhaps as high as 1.2 billion people, from South Asia). If you're in either of these groups, you theoretically have better odds of running into an almost-you, almost-him or almost-her.
I once came face-to-face with a blue-eyed Uighur in a Beijing hutong who was the spitting image of a white kid I went to grade school with in the Rockies. Do Soylentils have any doppelganger stories?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snow on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:08PM
People often mix us up. We are not twins.
I don't think that counts though...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:41PM
One of my friends once saw me in town, and rang me to ask why I'd ignored him. I told him I didn't go to town that day. A couple of weeks later, someone else told me the same thing.
Turns out that there's a guy running around my town who looks almost exactly like me. He even shares the same surname, but I've never seen him at any of the Cylon meetings so I have to wonder if we're related somewhere up the line.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mmcmonster on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:17PM
I was in a probability class and the teacher was doing a demonstration about how when you have a group of 30 students that there was about a 50 percent chance that two of them would have the same birthday.
So he asked the kids what their birthdays were. The first two he asked were fraternal twins (which he didn't know, as they have a fairly common last name) and he stopped the demonstration there, in triumph (and a little confused).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:42PM
I read somewhere that it's not impossible for two unrelated people to have the same DNA, AKA twins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @01:12AM
The chance that two unrelated people have an identical total DNA gene sequence is at least 1 in 6 million. http://www.genetics.edu.au/Publications-and-Resources/Genetics-Fact-Sheets/FactSheet22 [genetics.edu.au]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday September 11 2015, @02:41AM
According to Google [google.com] the total population of the earth in 2015 is around 7.2 billion.
Take your chance of 1 in 6 million and plug it into the statistical equations for the Birthday Problem [wikipedia.org] and it does indeed look likely we have quite a probability for a doppelganger.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:13PM
I once saw a woman who looked exactly like a previous coworker taking two Black cocks in a pornographic video -- and because she was one of the most unique-looking women I'd ever seen, I had a "hard" time believing that it was not she acting in that video. Further confounding my judgement was the fact that, when I had worked with that woman, she actually told me that she preferred Black men. This was in Los Angeles and she was a powder-skinned Armenian with those strangely masculine features that somehow make women more attractive (think Sarah Palin's chin) and with straight jet-black hair down to her butt. Come to think of it, I have no way to prove that they both weren't the same woman.
But we've all done that. At least twice I've seen people around in public and asked them in confusion something like, "Dave?" Only to get a reply like, "No, Mark, dude."
There are a few disorders that are actually kinda related -- Apophenia, [wikipedia.org] pattern-recognition gone awry, and the Capgras Delusion, [wikipedia.org] the belief that somebody known has been replaced with a doppleganger -- both of which can be read about regularly in pop culture and conspiracy theories alike.
(Score: 5, Informative) by davester666 on Friday September 11 2015, @04:17AM
No, we all haven't done that.
I can state, with near certainty, that I have never taken two Black cocks in a pornographic video.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday September 11 2015, @04:23AM
I saw what I was almost certain was an ex-girlfriend on a similar type of video online once. I actually showed it to a friend who met her a few times, and he was all like, "Nah, that can't be her. Tits are too large."
While that was a weird response to give, in retrospect, I'm pretty sure he was right. She did have significantly smaller tits. I... don't think they were fucking, on account of the fact that it would mean that there would have needed to be some time during the day she wasn't co-dependently haunting me, but I guess you never know. One of those things, I guess.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:13PM
Most drunk men totally believed that the lady they just groped "looked exactly like you".
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:23PM
I've never met my double, which is good, the world doesn't need that....
But I've met many people that looked almost identical to other people I've known, not just facially, but also in body type.
And oddly, I've often found they have similar personalities, likes and dislikes.
I suppose its not unusual for people with similar athletic body types to like sports, and often the same sports. But often the personality traits, wise-guys, shy, flirts, studious, sticklers for details, and ne'er-do-wells, seems to reside in similar looking people.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:43PM
> I've never met my double, which is good, the world doesn't need that....
You need that even less. Meeting your doppleganger is an omen of your own death. [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:07PM
When I was younger a friend had what appeared to be my picture in her car. It kind of creeped me out until she turned it over and it was just some random model.
Later on, when I was in college the friend of one of my roommates acted, dressed and looked almost exactly like one of my friends from high school. But apparently that woman had actually gone to high school with my room mate, so it definitely wasn't her just pretending to be somebody else.
This sort of thing is pretty much inevitable. There's a relatively fixed range of variation in complexion, facial features and body types so there's almost certainly going to be people like that walking around. What's interesting about the question is how common is that really. I'm guessing it's going to be more common for good looking people than for ugly people as good looking people tend to be more average over all. Average eye size, average chin size and so forth. Whereas the people we usually deem to be ugly tend to be outliers. They don't look quite the same as the rest of us.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @12:10AM
A former house mate (from when we both lived in another city--so I had never met any of her family) invited me to meet her, at her sister's new house. When the sister let me in, there were other family members all in the living room. I had a really hard time determining who was my former house mate (~28 yrs old) and who was her mother, perhaps late 40s and very "well preserved". Mother and daughter were nearly identical, at least to my eyes.
Luckily I guessed right and hugged the correct person...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:00PM
When I was at Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1980 for my advanced training in the Army, I twice had to show my ID to convince people I wasn't "Brad" (I was in civilian clothes both those times, so I wasn't wearing a name tag like while in uniform). He was apparently another soldier in a different training school on the base.
While I was in uniform, I was told by several other people who had seen him, that except for the name tag on my uniform they would have thought I was him.
I assume Brad was also getting told he looked like me. Even though the schools we were in were within a couple of blocks of each other and we almost certainly marched past each other going to and from class, luck would have it that I never met up with him.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VortexCortex on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:43PM
Even though the schools we were in were within a couple of blocks of each other ... luck would have it that I never met up with him.
Happens more often than you think, esp. in the army. Poor guy. You've been MKULTRA'd.
"Brad" is the name your other split personality uses. My heart goes out to you. Watch out for "missing time". :p
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday September 11 2015, @04:55AM
In some ways, I'm just as happy I never met up with Brad. The reason so many people came up to me thinking I was Brad was he was dealing on the side. This was before the days of random drug tests in the Army, but I hardly needed that kind of trouble.
Besides, if he's my split personality, who's THAT guy over there? *points at empty space*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:20PM
Back in the 80s when I was an auto mechanic, a customer came in giving me a funny look, really checking me out. The tech working on his car found a porn mag sticking out from under the seat and took a look inside, then called me over. He asked "Is that you?" The guy doing a really hot blond looked exactly like me... Same age, haircut, mustache, and everything (!!!) else. I could not believe it, I was an instant celebrity. This isn't the first time I've been mistaken for someone else, or told that I look like a celebrity. I've been told I look like one of the Beatles, a porn star, the guy on a package of zig-zag papers, and even that I look like Demi Goddess Moore.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:39PM
I never met the kid, but I was accused several times of things that I just didn't do. Five, six times, I was stopped on the street by cops who wanted to see some kind of identification. And, it wasn't just the cops, either - when I graduated, and started looking for work, there were a handful of people who thought I was this other guy. Apparently, the guy I was being mistaken for was a petty criminal.
Of course, it wasn't anything that I took very seriously, or I'd have gone looking for the guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @03:09AM
> Of course, it wasn't anything that I took very seriously, or I'd have gone looking for the guy.
And discovered he was really just one of your alters.
Dut-dut-dummmmmm!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @12:18AM
I've been told multiple times in various parts of the US that someone knew someone that looked JUST like me. Never ran into one myself.
Last year someone finally had a photo handy of one of my doppelgangers. I took a look at the photo and sure enough, the hair, the face, the expression, and body type were all spot on. If the photo hadn't been taken at a place I've never been to, I would have thought it was me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @01:35AM
I've been told Peter North is my doppelganger.....at least from the waist down.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday September 11 2015, @03:57AM
On several occasions in my life people have confused me with someone else, although I've never learned who this person was except that he lived nearby. But there was once an occasion where I made the acquaintance of a fellow of European ancestry, quite white and shaved his head to hide his premature baldness. Not long afterward I made the acquaintance of another fellow of African-American ancestry who was the spitting image of the white guy, except he was black, complete with shaved head. You'd think they were long-lost identical twins except one had just fallen into a vat of shoe polish. One wonders what the white guy's ancestors were doing with the black guy's ancestors.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Friday September 11 2015, @05:26AM
Around the Fin de siècle prior, der doppelganger was a big thing. Post-colonial guilt, invention of photography, sudden increase of "hey, you look just like" statements, who knows why. But if the want the truth, the real Fin de siècle angst in the pants version of the Doppelganger, I suggest you read "The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/220 [gutenberg.org] You know, the guy who wrote "The Heart of Darkness" which was the inspiration for "Apocalypse Now" and George W. Bush's foreign policy. Does Bush have a doppelganger? If so, would it be from Texas, or California, or Florida? Is John Elias just his brother in another body? Are the Bushes just Lizar#$^%*----carrier lost::: end transmission.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday September 11 2015, @07:40AM
I had a teacher in 8th grade that always called me Justin. She did it every day and apologized because she said I looked exactly like this Justin guy. Who knows, maybe she was just senile.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @12:34PM
Hey Bieber! I didn't know you liked Soylentnews, let alone knowing how to read.
(Score: 1) by rob_on_earth on Friday September 11 2015, @09:17AM
The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards in the same way twice in the history of the world are infinitesimally small, statistically speaking. The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is ‘52 factorial’ otherwise known as 52! or 52 shriek. This is 52 times 51 times 50 . . . all the way down to one. Here's what that looks like:
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,
975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
taken from
http://qi.com/infocloud/playing-cards [qi.com]
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLIvwtIuC3Y
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @09:58AM
Of course this makes the unfounded assumptions that all people always shuffle a pack of cards perfectly. I strongly doubt that most non-professional people shuffling decks do so, not by decision, but simply because you need quite a few shuffles to really randomize your cards, and most non-professional people won't do that many. Which usually is completely justified because the randomization achieved is still good enough for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @12:36PM
Statistically it's not impossible then.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday September 11 2015, @02:54PM
That said, often times when I meet new people they'll ask me if we've met before. Then they'll prompt me with some detail about the other person: "Did you go to school X?" or "Did you ever work at Y?" and it turns out I'm not the person they thought I was. I'm not sure why it seems like such a common occurrence. I've never met anyone who looked particularly like me in my opinion.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Friday September 11 2015, @04:47PM
I sort of had the same thought, however I think the card metaphor holds. After playing several hands over several hours it is possible that you will have the same sequence of cards dealt to you, perhaps in just a different order, or with different suits. We might perceive this as the same hand, especially if you consider the observation bias of a player. That down-on-his-luck player only sees that the dealer gave him another 2-7 combo in the hole for the third hand tonight, when those hands were really dealt as 7♠-2♣, 2♠-7♣, and 2♣-7♥. I think we do the same for faces, subjectively zooming in on the features we want to see, while ignoring a lot of other subtle details.
(Score: 2) by SecurityGuy on Friday September 11 2015, @01:34PM
The premise doesn't take into account that it's more than just genes that control how you look. Genes are present, but are they expressed? Turned on/off/up/down by environmental factors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics [wikipedia.org]
I had identical twins in my kindergarten class who looked similar, but not identical. You'd never mistake one for the other even though they presumably have identical genes.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 11 2015, @06:31PM
A few decades ago I had a friend who many other people though looked just like me, to the point of being confused as to which was which. Neither of us thought that we looked like the other, and none of our close friends were ever confused. (And close doesn't mean *that* close. There were fairly conspicuous differences.)
So what's generally going on is the people are focusing on a few features and using those to identify who someone is. Which features differs from person to person, largely depending on who they've known in the past, giving more weight to characteristics that have been more useful. This saves on memory, processing, etc. And when they see someone they match what they see against their chosen "search image" and fill in their memory using what they see in front of them. (Remember someone you know really well, but who isn't present, and try to remember the details of their features. Perhaps you can, but *I* can't, and never have been able to.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.