Most people have heard humans being compared to snowflakes - no two are exactly alike. For the longest time I’d accepted that as true. But you know how you’ll be going along with your happy little life and run into somebody and say/think “That person looks so much like __!" or "He/She’s the sptting image of!” I do it all the time! I’ll see somebody and think it’s somebody else, or they have a certain physical quality or way of speaking that is so similar to somebody else I know, it’s almost frightening.
Now the question is this: Are there/has there never been two people exactly alike? I know that even identical twins have their slight differences, but there’s no way of really knowing for sure. I mean how could you know if there wasn’t a person that looked exactly like you 100 years ago? And really, how many different combinations and variations of heads, arms, legs, eyes, ear, and other features can there be? Billions I’d imagin, but there have been sssoooooo many people to walk the Earth since the beginning of the human species. Would it be entirely off to say that someone somewhere has had/will have somebody who looks exatcly like him/her at some point in time?
It kind of makes you think…
I think the whole human=snowflake thing is more about looks and personality together than just looks alone. I would think that the chances of someone looking exactly like you in every way would be pretty slim (excluding clones of course) because no one will randomly have the exact same DNA as you.
Yeah, but did they look so alike you’d have trouble recognizing them side-by-side?
A lot of the way you look is determined by genetics. Aside from identical twins, no two people who’ve ever lived have ever shared DNA. No, this can’t be shown empirically. I can’t prove it. But the math shows that it’s so astronomically unlikely as to not be worth considering. I once found myself wondering how likely it was for a couple to have two genetically-identical children by chance. After all, assuming a simplistic model where each parent randomly picks one chromosome from each pair, 23 pairs in total, the odds of both parents picking the exact same way are one in over 70 trillion. That’s picking from the exact same starting material (and yes, if you want to get pedantic, the way DNA works is actually considerably more complex than that.)
So could two people ever have been genetically identical? No. And furthermore, a person is not the sum-total of their genes. Even identical twins have different fingerprints, and if you’ve ever known any, you’ll see that their personalities tend to differ some as well. And that’s considering two people who’ve grown up in a very similar environment. What happens to you, and what you do, have a profound impact on how you end up. If you’re malnourished growing up, you’ll be shorter. If your childhood is spent in a war zone, you’ll be more anxious. If you read books instead of playing at recess, you’ll end up less well-adjusted. If you eat crappy food all your life, you’ll be fat. No two people ever have the same environment, and their environment, and what they do within it, has an immense effect on how they turn out. Even if the one in God knows how many quadrillion odds came up and two genetically identical people were born.
(BTW - is it known that no two snowflakes are alike? Or is this just “common knowledge”, never tested but assumed? How alike are we talking, anyway? There’s been a lot of snowflakes. I have a hard time believing that there have never been two that would have been indistinguishable with only a magnifying glass, at least.)