Fingerprints and DNA as Evidence
The Secret History of the Future podcast takes topics that feel like state-of-the-art today, and then shows you the parallels to anything from the distant past. The examples are usually unintuitive: who’d imagine driverless cars of today and the start of the automobile era a century ago bring up similar questions! This blog is about an episode on the similarity between fingerprinting (been there for centuries) and DNA (far more recent) in the use of crime solving. Both are considered unique to an individual, and the judicial system treated both as clinching evidence in their heyday (Ok, DNA is still in its heyday). That’s the problem, says the podcast. TV shows and movies have reinforced the belief that they are clinching evidence. But there were errors in matching fingerprint: 1 in 1,000 positive errors (called a match when it wasn’t really a match), and 1 in 20 negative errors (not called a match when it was really a match). Think about how many wrong convicti...