Doppelganger Genetics

And other news.  In all cases, emphasis added.

From a Gab correspondent – it’s all in the genes. The paper.

Of interest to me, these doppelgangers are not particularly similar in their overall ancestral genome (related to EGI), compared to random co-ethnics.:

Related to population stratification, among the 16 look-alike pairs, 13 were of European ancestry, 1 Hispanic, 1 East Asian, and 1 Central-South Asian. Although background genetic ancestry is a principal determinant for genetic variance between human populations, we observed that of the 13 White look-alike pairs, 7 (54%) did not cluster genetically, suggesting alternative purposes for shared genetic variation between look-alike pairs. To further determine ancestry, genotyping of the 16 look-alike cases was performed using GenomeStudio v.2.0.5 to create PACKPED Plink files (STAR Methods). Their genomic data were merged with 1,980 West Eurasian, Asian, and Native American individuals genotyped in the Affymetrix Human Origins (HO) array (Lazaridis et al., 2014), where the remaining dataset held 175,469 common SNPs. PCA was generated with the HO individuals (Figure S3) and look-alike individuals (Figure S3B for West Eurasia and Figure S3C for West Eurasia, Asia, and America) (Price et al., 2006; Patterson et al., 2006) (STAR Methods). We observed that almost all the look-alike pairs cluster close to each other according to their countries of origin (or self-attributed ethnic background) (Figure S3). However, they are not more closely related than other pairs of individuals from the same populations taken at random.

So the look-alikes do not seem to have more genetic kinship with each other than are random co-ethnics to each other; the similarities seem to be derived from a specific sub-set of genes. From the standpoint of EGI, this is interesting.  Overall EGI may not be affected by this phenomenon, but inclusive fitness defined as the ability to influence pursuit of genetic interests may be affected, if the traits influence genetic continuity.  Thus:

Examples of independent questionnaire variables (such as height, weight, smoking habit, or level of education) further demonstrate that look-alike pairs are closer than non look-alike pairs (Figure 4C). Thus, humans with a similar face might also share a more comprehensive physical, and probably behavioral, phenotype that relates to their shared genetic variants. Our study supports the concept of heritability estimation that individuals correlated at the phenotype level share a significant number of genotypic correlations.

On the other hand, this all underscores the problem with phenotypism – should one favor one’s unrelated lookalike (and the data show that these people are not cryptic relatives) over one’s more closely related familial kin?  The fetishist types believe that it seems, despite its maladaptive aspects.

With this doppelganger situation, one wonders if there are certain gene complexes extant in different populations, and when these (by random chance? some other reason?) happen to get combined in individuals in similar patterns, create (familial-unrelated) people with similar physical appearances and similarities in other attributes. A deeper dive into this phenomenon would likely be a fruitful area for further genetics research.

Other news:

Reading more about Late Antiquity I’m continually struck by a problem in Der Movement’s narrative of “racial decline” being the cause of the Fall of Rome. If this is the case, why did the Eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, last for about 1,000 years past the Western Roman Empire when, by Der Movement’s standards, the East’s population was far more inferior and degenerate that that of the West?  Indeed, archaeogenetics show that Rome was becoming genetically more “northern and western” during Late Antiquity and of course the West included Gaul and had by that time various Goths and Franks in imperial service, while the East was composed of those “southern and eastern” populations that were relatively more prominent in Rome during the peak of imperial power and which Der Movement blames for Rome’s collapse.  Then to make matters even worse, during the reign of Justinian, the East conquered Italy, North Africa, and a slice of Spain, defeating the heroically superior Goths and Vandals.  That is all backwards if we take “movement” dogma to be truth.