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dexable t1_ir35fof wrote

Reply to comment by Laserbarrage in See lifelike facial reconstructions of a medieval Scottish woman, priest and bishop by unheated1

There is an exhibit called Probably Chelsea at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It depicts several different sculptures based off the same DNA of a person. There is a lot of room for interpretation of things like DNA it seems.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/probably-chelsea

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Renjuro t1_ir387nc wrote

Very interesting. I’d say you have more to work with if you have the person’s skull though.

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dexable t1_ir5jsv4 wrote

I believe the more information you have the more accurate you can probably get. I realize my response could read as a skeptical one. I just find this stuff very interesting and my personal thoughts on this are kind of a side tangent so I didn't include them in that post. I did in another response in this thread though if you are interested.

In the case of Chelsea there was no skull because well, she's still alive.

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LeagueOfLegendsAcc t1_ir52tci wrote

I don't think they do sculptures off of the DNA when they make these renderings. I'm pretty sure I watched a doc one time and it explained that they actually re build the muscular features based off the skeleton and then add skin and other features on top. Not sure about that Chelsea exhibit but for the ones they did during the doc that's how it was done and it seems like a better method than trying to reconstruct based off of DNA alone.

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dexable t1_ir5hzlb wrote

I think the more information you have the more accurate you can get. In the case of Chelsea there only was DNA available. Personally I find this stuff to just be very interesting. While some people are skeptical I just find this to be an intersection of art and science. In the Probably Chelsea exhibit they explain that the ones picked to show the media were of the higher percentages. However since Chelsea was open to it there was more they could depict based of her DNA. It's a pretty powerful exhibit to see because some of the possibilities look nothing like Chelsea. A person with that face would be identified as a completely different race as Chelsea. To me it empathized how much the concept of race is really a social response to the expression of a person's DNA. The idea that we could look like basically anybody else is really powerful.

It's a side tangent but if you are In San Francisco I recommend checking out the Exploratorium. It's a really fun and thought provoking science museum.

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jalamole t1_ir49dnm wrote

This was really interesting. Thank you for posting

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fuzzygondola t1_ir6jbbz wrote

Can we really not accurately detect "obvious features" like skin tone of a person based on the DNA? It's baffling to me. Those 30 predicted faces seem to have features randomly from all over the world.

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dexable t1_ir6rdhn wrote

This does kind of get to the point of the exhibit. The researcher gave the press of the higher percentages to the press to give a more "potentially accurate" model. However most of the sculptures were created to showcase all the possibilities. Meaning there was a small chance that Chelsea could have looked like some of those but it was still there.

Skin tone is an interesting one, we would think it is simple but it is not. To use myself as an example my skin tone shade is closer to my mother's: light than my father's: medium-dark. However the undertone of my skin tone matches my father's golden undertones versus my mother's pink undertones. Which means the more of a tan I have the more I look like my dad to people. I also have my mother's eye shape but my father's eye color. My mother's hair color but my father's hair texture pattern.

I could go on but the point is that genes can really express themselves in a lot of varying ways.

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dr_king_papa t1_itfffu1 wrote

Hmm, I feel something is off here. I saw this exhibit and maybe I didn't read all the details, but from what I remember, it was made by an artist, not a scientist. From the presentation, it seemed to suggest that the path from DNA to appearance has quite a bit of variance. If it is really so random, why do identical twins not display the same sort of variance in appearance? Yes, of course, any outcome is possible, but if it's astronomically unlikely, what's the point of highlighting it? Maybe I'm missing something?

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dexable t1_itgm0ph wrote

Science requires one to cast aside ones prejudices and have an open mind to come to new understanding. Identical twins have more than just DNA in common. Look up some studies on identical twins if you are interested.

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dr_king_papa t1_ithf50h wrote

Good science, and indeed rational thought, involves a prior belief (what one might call a prejudice), which is updated to form a posterior in the face of new evidence. The stronger the prior, the stronger the evidence needs to be to overcome that prior. I have not seen any new evidence, but I am open to integrating it if it is presented.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_extraordinary_evidence

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dexable t1_ithgrqt wrote

Strong words from someone who clearly didn't click on the original link and watch a 5 minute video.

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keenox90 t1_ir9704l wrote

If that's true, it means we don't seem to know anything about how DNA influences looks. Those portraits look as random as they can be.

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