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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

But does everyone have a doppelganger [livescience.com]? 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 [wikipedia.org] in a Beijing hutong [wikipedia.org] who was the spitting image of a white kid I went to grade school with in the Rockies. Do Soylentils have any doppelganger stories?

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