You could be genetically related to your doppelganger

You may share more with your doppelganger than you think: A recent Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest saw chaos in the streets of New York City as multiple of the actor’s doppelgangers came together to duke it out over who most resembled the French-American heartthrob. Given the striking resemblances on offer, it may not be surprising to learn that lookalikes have similar genetic profiles despite being biologically unrelated, National Geographic reports.

There are only so many ways to arrange a human face, it turns out: Molecular geneticist Manel Esteller found in a recent study that ‘ultra lookalikes’ — strangers that three separate facial algorithms found to be indistinguishable — share distinct parts of their genetic sequences, including those that control features like bone structure, skin pigmentation, and water retention, despite being unrelated. “There are so many people in the world right now,” Esteller explained, “that eventually, people that share a higher number of [genetic] variants are expected.”

Sharing a face does not equal sharing a personality: Despite sharing significant portions of their genomes, the lookalikes studied by Esteller had vastly different personalities. A study conducted by University of California Fullerton psychology professor Nancy Segal showed that doppelgangers from the same sample used by Esteller had no odds of sharing personality traits — a confirmation that nurture is just as important as nature in shaping our identities.

Identical strangers do have some things in common, though: While our character traits are clearly linked to our upbringing, genetic similarities do often coincide with certain shared physical or behavioral traits, Esteller noted, pointing to the similar gaits and shared propensity toward addictive behaviors like smoking of his study’s subjects. It all goes to show that while Chalamet’s doppelgangers may be able to walk the actor’s walk, his charismatic talk is all his.

Want to find your doppleganger? A number of sites help people locate their dopplegangers, including twinstrangers.net and Reddit’s /r/Doppelgangers. Proceed with caution, however — as Esteller notes, you may be disappointed by how unalike you and your twin actually are.

WHERE’S THE X ELON MUSK ONCE PROMISED US?

Musk is making empty promises: Nearly a year ago, Elon Musk said in an internal X meeting that in a year the platform would be handling “someone’s entire financial life.” Fast forward to today, and Musk’s promise to turn the platform into a “digital town square” and an “everything app” has been a total failure, The Verge writes.

A laundry list of unmet goals: Musk’s list of promised additions to the social media site once including a money transfer feature, a dating app, LinkedIn-like recruitment features, and a platform for long-form videos like Youtube — none of which have yet materialized.

The platform’s stalled development may not matter to the billionaire, though, with the Verge writing that “after only two years, it increasingly looks like Musk thinks of X not as a town square or an everything app but as his personal Fox News and source of training data” for AI.

Musk is clearly preoccupied with the AI rat race, with the billionaire seemingly intent on seeing his AI model Grok compete with ChatGPT. Musk has been focusing all of his energy on raising money to fuel his AI start-up xAI, which at its current valuation of USD 40 bn is worth significantly more on paper than X.