TOW #16 - Do Fingerprints Lie? (Written)

This article, titled Do Fingerprints Lie? and written by Michael Specter, tackles the subject of whether fingerprint evidence is as infallible as is generally accepted. For a very long time, the US court system would accept any sort of "expert testimony", regardless of whether they were legitimately experts. Opinions that were "generally accepted" in the field were allowed, even if they weren't factually proven. The case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals brought this into a more critical light and created stricter guidelines for what could be admissible.

This article begins with an anecdote about Shirley McKie, a police officer who was wrongly accused of a crime because her fingerprint had been found inside the house in which a murder occurred. However, she insisted that she hadn't even entered the house. It turned out, in the end, that the print that had been taken from the crime scene matched her left thumb very well, but it had actually been the print of the murderer's right forefinger. This anecdote serves to demonstrate the falsity of two different commonly accepted ideas about fingerprints: that everyone has unique fingerprints, and that they can be accurately matched to a single person by the police. It turns out, though everyone does have different fingerprints (they are created in the womb based on everyone's unique movements and friction), they are very very similar, and there is not necessarily enough training within the FBI to correctly and 100% accurately identify fingerprints all the time. The anecdote serves the purpose of disproving the things that the reader thinks they know to be true.

Specter also uses an abundance of quotes from experts to give the reader the best idea of what the general feeling in the fingerprinting community is towards the court case that was going on and the questioning of its validity. Specter himself is not an expert on this issue, so he realizes the need for expert testimony. He incorporates the opinions from different sides so that he can present an unbiased view of this very complicated issue.

TOW #15 - The Lives of a Cell (Written)

The essay The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas is about how around the world, there are no tangible connections between organisms, yet they still work together as one cell. He uses the extended metaphor of a cell within our own body as an example of how he is beginning to conceptualize the entire planet working together symbiotically. In a scientific manner, he splits his essay up into three "items". The first is that we, as humans, are made up of strange parts that don't really belong to us. We are not ourselves, we are the sum of completely unrelated parts working together. The second item is that the most surprising thing about Earth is not its diversity, but its uniformity. We are all similar to each other -- except for viruses, which he looks at as an evolutionary accident, a piece of DNA that was "dropped". His third item is that the earth shouldn't be looked at as an organism. It's too unconnected. It should be looked at as a cell, whose own parts are very disconnected and foreign yet still cooperate.

I believe Thomas's main point in writing this essay is to ask the reader to look inside themselves, not at the world, as he does in the beginning. By considering the world, and comparing it to a cell, we can look at ourselves and see how we are made up of the people in our lives, the things we use, the films we watch, the strangers who bump into us on the street. He says in the beginning, "it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe", and I believe he says this to encourage the reader to see themselves as something tough, something made up of many things yet resilient to many others. Just because you allow strange people or things you aren't familiar with into your life doesn't mean you are weak. Those things can build you up and make you even stronger. Stronger against the viruses of the world, which are accidents, things that were dropped, things that don't share the same goal as everyone else. Our world shares not one goal, but many abstract, unknowable goals, and we all work together in our vast yet small cell-like environment to protect ourselves, not just as humans but as organisms, the planet united.