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The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element. If you could ful
by carbocation 9y ago
The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element. If you could fully execute the program encoded by a person's DNA, I'd expect to see a reproduction of their face.
However, that depends on correctly mapping the program to its output. I'm skeptical that we're at the point where we can model this correctly. I think this is why you see that all of the predicted faces in the Venter paper look like a generic/averaged face.
- Ygg2 9y agoYeah, but they also grew in same uterine environment.
- carbocation 9y agoTrue! But this seems to set some limits the timeline of significant environmental influence.
- mbreese 9y agoThey also probably grow up together, have similar diets, speak the same language... there are lots of correlated environmental factors with twins aside from their DNA. A better comparison would be separated twins (widely separated). But I'm not sure if anyone has looked at the relative differences between twins raised together vs apart.
- findyoucef 9y agoThere is a documentary I think on Netflix of twins who find each other randomly on the internet. I think the were Korean and we're adopted by two families. One in California and another in France.
- bmsran 9y agoIt is common to compare traits in monozygotic vs dizygotic twins to help control for shared environments.
- Mayzie 9y ago> A better comparison would be separated twins (widely separated). The two people in The Parent Trap are twins and were widely separated, yet they still looked identical, so much so that their parents could not even tell them apart.
- mchahn 9y ago> The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element. I don't see how you get to that conclusion. If a set of twins inherited nothing from their parents they could still be identical. The DNA could be generated randomly and then duplicated. This is just a logic argument as clearly everyone inherits many things from parents.
- aptwebapps 9y agoYou can argue about the effects of different genes but you can't reasonably argue that children do not get their genes from their parents.