If you were to encounter your lookalike on the street, would you recognize them, or would you pass them by without realizing it? This is a question that Montreal-based photographer François Brunelle has spent the last few decades asking himself. In his “I’m Not a Look-Alike” series of black-and-white photographs, he features people who look like each other but often don’t see it for themselves. Now his lookalikes portrait project has unearthed very interesting information on the DNA of these unrelated doppelgängers. Researchers from the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, asked if they could study the genetic make-up of some of the participants. The project’s manager, Dr. Manel Esteller, found that of the 32 pairs, 16 received the same overall scores as identical twins who were studied by the same facial recognition software. Their genetic similarities were spurred on by human growth rather than some miraculous connection. The more humans there are in the world, the more DNA will randomly repeat itself, leading to every human alive having a doppelgänger. As unique as we may feel, we know that somewhere there’s someone who looks just like us. Have you found yours?
