You Look Like Twins

The genetic diversity of the Human Race is surprisingly limited.  I came to this conclusion when I was looking at a video of someone on YouTube who looks like a guy I knew from primary school.  It's not the same person, of that I can be sure as this guy is French and the guy from my primary school is not.  They're also almost ten years apart in age.  However the fact they look so alike and live hundreds of miles apart from one another in different countries with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds made me think about how limited in diversity of appearance we really are.

When you stop and take someone's appearance and break it down, there are a few characteristics that we use to distinguish one another.  The easiest way to demonstrate this is to look to video games, in particular The Sims, which includes a character creator called Create A Sim that lets you create Sims, which are characters that are used to simulate people.  The character creator lets you manipulate these characteristics.  Hair colour, hair style, eye colour, eye shape, skin colour, level of ageing, nose shape, lip shape, mouth shape, chin shape, and ear shape - you can also manipulate size and position but that's pretty much it for the face other than some aesthetic features.  That's not far from reality however in terms of how close our actual features are to conforming to a template.

If you think of real life and think of hair colour, in terms of natural hair colour, everyone is pretty much blonde, brown, black, red, or white haired.  You can then manipulate the intensity of those colours.  That's quite a limited selection when you think about it.  Of all the colours of the rainbow and the ways they could be combined, almost everyone conforms to one of those 5 colours - or they have no hair at all.  Skin tone too despite varying by race is mostly a gradient between white and black - although I never actually understood why white people and black people are named as such as most white people are actually a kind of pink and most black people are really brown skinned.

I am aware that this is getting racial and at this point I'd like to say this isn't specific to any race, this is an observation of humanity as a whole that I have.  There's a photo that trended on Twitter shortly after You Know Who was elected showing a panel on a US News network which was 4 white men with greying hair and it looked like someone had just taken the same model and stuck it in the Sims creator and changed one or two minor things - they all looked like the same person.

When you are younger and you have limited exposure to people in terms of volume, it's easier to see diversity and see the differences between people, but it seems the older you get and the more people you see and come into contact the more you start to see the same faces over and over again.  "You look just like X" becomes common, once something you only heard relatives say about people in the family you look like, it becomes more widespread.  You eventually reach a point where you realise that the number of characteristics you can tweak on that character creator is limited and with a population of seven billion and rising, it was inevitable that you would start seeing the same thing reappear time and again.

I've said before that we are not that different when it comes down to it and that "you're unique just like everybody else" is rather fitting; it's not something I ever applied to appearance before but the more I dwell on it the more I can start pairing people up who I have met in my life who look very similar, even people I have never met I can start pairing up in my mind.