Our population increases quadratically every 25 years. Is there a chance that there are identical people walking the earth who are not twins? Both in appearance and character?
Answer
Hello Bert,
The chance is not zero, but will be extremely small.
First reason: our DNA (“nature”):
Our DNA consists of more than 3 billion letters. Each letter can be A, C, T or G. That means you can make 4 to the power of 3 billion different combinations. That number is unimaginably large.
Second reason: our environment (“nurture”):
Who we are, what our character is, how our body is formed and what we look like, depends very much on our environment. For example, of twins where one grew up in Central Africa and the other in northern Canada, one will have noticeably darker skin than the other, just to give one example.
Therefore: the chance is not zero (never say never!) but almost non-existent.
Regards,
Benjamin
Answered by
dr. Benjamin Moeyaert
Biochemistry, biophysics, spectroscopy, microscopy, neuroscience, virology, gene therapy
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/
.