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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."
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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.
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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: 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.