What's the use of having a double

The conclusion reached by the researcher Manel Esteller after analyzing the genome of 32 pairs of people with great physical resemblance is, to say the least, dazzling: "We all have a double that looks a lot like us somewhere in the world.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
23 August 2022 Tuesday 23:38
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What's the use of having a double

The conclusion reached by the researcher Manel Esteller after analyzing the genome of 32 pairs of people with great physical resemblance is, to say the least, dazzling: "We all have a double that looks a lot like us somewhere in the world." Their study, published in the specialized journal Cell Reports, determines that people with an extraordinary resemblance have in common many of the 19,277 points called nucleotides (the letters of the genome) that affect facial features, without the influence of kinship or the environment in the who live. According to these data, Esteller is in a position to affirm that "it is a matter of probability that somewhere there is someone with the majority of these 20,000 points of the genome equal to ours", as can be read today in Society.

Although the researcher maintains that these results may improve forensic medicine in the future (from DNA there would be more reliable robot portraits of criminals), it seems clear that the main advantage of the study is, ultimately, to expand the limits of human knowledge. In other words, it would be one of those discoveries with limited transfer potential that, however, could become the basis for future discoveries. It is another example of the usefulness of what is apparently useless, if we are allowed to paraphrase successful informative formulas. The growing utilitarianism of contemporary societies tends to put aside areas of knowledge such as philosophy, art or basic science, ignoring that all of them are at the origin of the advances that have improved our hope and quality of life. As Manel Esteller himself maintains in his book Letters to a young researcher (RBA), “there is no basic or applied science; what there is is good science and bad science”.

In this context, it is suggestive that this finding be published in August, a propitious time for reading or rereading. Mythology, Hoffmann, Dostoyevski, Stevenson, Ishiguro or Cortázar are just some of the literary references that develop the attractive figure of the double, the Doppelgänger of the Germanic tradition, which also inspires the search for similar people in popular mobile applications, such as the inescapable TikTok .