No More Learning

An elephant's penis swings at a frequency much slower than sound (although in the same ballpark as sound when you compare it with the ultra high frequencies of light). Nature offers us other periodic waveforms, of much lower frequency still, with wavelengths measured in years or even millions of years. Some of these have been subjected to the equivalent of Fourier analysis, including the cycles of animal populations. Since 1756, the Hudson's Bay Company kept records of the abundance
of pelts brought in by Canadian fur trappers. The distinguished Oxford ecologist Charles Elton (1900-1991), who was employed as a consultant by the company, realized that these records could provide a read-out of fluctuating populations of snow-shoe hares, lynxes and other mammals persecuted by the fur trade. The figures rise and fall in complicated mixtures of rhythms, which have been much analysed. Among the wavelengths that have been pulled out by these analyses is a prominent one of approximately four-year periodicity, and another of around 11 years. One hypothesis that has been suggested to account for the four- year rhythms is a time-lagged interaction between predators and prey (a glut of prey feeds a plague of predators, who then nearly wipe out the prey; this in turn starves the predators, then the consequent drop in predator population allows a new boom in the prey population, and so on). As for the longer rhythm of 11 years, perhaps the most intriguing suggestion connects it with sun spot activity, which is known to vary on an approximately 11-year cycle. How the sun spots affect animal populations is open to discussion. Perhaps they change the earth's weather, which affects abundance of plant food.
Wherever you find regular cycles of very long wavelengths, they are likely to have astronomical origins. They stem from the fact that celestial objects often rotate on their own axis, or follow repetitious orbits around other celestial objects. Twenty-four-hour rhythms of activity pervade almost all the fine details of living bodies on this planet. The ultimate reason is the rotation of the earth about its own axis, but animals of many species, including humans, when isolated from direct contact with day and night, continue to cycle on with a rhythm of approximately 24 hours, showing that they have internalized the rhythm and can free-run it even in the absence of the external pacemaker. The lunar rhythm of 28 days is another prominent component of the mix of waves in the bodily functions of many creatures, especially marine ones. The moon exerts its rhythmic influence via the succession of spring and neap tides. The earth's orbital rhythm of slightly more than 365 days contributes its slower pendulum to the Fourier sum, manifesting itself via breeding seasons, seasons of migration, patterns of moulting and growth of winter coats.
Perhaps the longest wavelength picked up by the unweaving of biological rhythms is a suggested 26-million-year cycle of mass extinctions. Fossil experts reckon that more than 99 per cent of the species that have ever lived have become extinct. Fortunately, the rate of extinction is, over the long term, roughly balanced by the rate at which new species are formed by the splitting of existing ones. But this doesn't mean they stay
constant in the shorter term. Far from it. Extinction rates fluctuate all over the place, and so do the rates at which new species come into existence. There are bad times when species disappear, and good times when they burgeon. Probably the worst of the bad times, the most devastating Armageddon, occurred at the end of the Permian era, about a quarter of a billion years ago. Around 90 per cent of all species became extinct in that terrible time, including on land many mammal-like reptiles. Earth's fauna eventually bounced back on to the denuded stage, but with a very different cast list: on land the dinosaurs stepped into the range of costumes left by dead mammal-like reptiles. The next largest mass extinction - and the most talked about - is the famous Cretaceous extinction of 65 million years ago, in which all the dinosaurs, and many other species with them both on land and in the sea, were wiped out, instantaneously as far as the fossil record can tell. In the Cretaceous event, perhaps 50 per cent of all species went extinct, not as many as in the Permian but nevertheless this was a fearful global tragedy. Once again, our planet's devastated fauna bounced back and here we are, we mammals, descended from a few fortunate relicts of the once rich mammal-like reptile fauna. Now we, together with the birds, fill gaps left by the dead dinosaurs. Until, presumably, the next great extinction.
There have been many episodes of mass extinction, not as bad as the Permian and Cretaceous events, but still noticeable in the chronicles of the rocks. Statistical paleontologists have gathered the numbers of fossil species over the ages and fed them into computers to perform Fourier analysis and extract such rhythms as they can find, as if listening for the flutter of preposterously deep organ notes. The dominant rhythm that has been claimed (albeit controversially) is a periodicity of about 26 million years. What could cause rhythms of extinction with such a formidably long wavelength? Probably only a celestial cycle.
Evidence is accumulating that the Cretaceous catastrophe was caused when a large asteroid or comet, the size of a mountain and travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, scored a direct hit on our planet, probably somewhere around what we now call the Yucatan peninsula in the gulf of Mexico. Asteroids hurtle round the sun in a belt which lies inside the orbit of Jupiter. There are plenty of asteroids out there - small ones are hitting us all the time - and a few of them are large enough to cause cataclysmic extinctions if they were to hit us. The comets have larger, eccentric orbits around the sun, mostly well outside what we conventionally think of as the solar system, but occasionally coming inside it, as Halley's comet does every 76 years and the Hale Bopp comet every 4,000 years or so. Perhaps the Permian event was caused by an even larger comet strike than the Cretaceous one. Perhaps the suggested 2 6-million-year cycle of mass extinctions is caused by a rhythmic boost in the rate of comet strikes.
But why should comets become more likely to hit us every million years? Here we launch ourselves into deep speculation. It has been suggested that the sun has a sister star, and the two orbit each other with a periodicity of about 26 million years. This hypothetical binary partner, which has never been seen but which has nevertheless been given the dramatic name Nemesis, passes, once per orbital rotation, through the so-called Oort Cloud, the belt of perhaps a trillion comets which orbits the sun beyond the planets. If there was a Nemesis that passed close to, or through, the Oort Cloud, it is plausible that it would disturb the comets, and this might increase the likelihood of one of them hitting earth. If this all happened - and the chain of reasoning is admittedly tenuous - it could account for the 26-million-year periodicity of mass extinctions that some people think the fossil record shows. It is a pleasing thought that mathematical unweaving of the noisy spectrum of animal extinctions might be the only means we have of detecting an otherwise unknown star.
Starting with the ultra high frequencies of light and other electromagnetic waves, we passed, via the intermediate frequencies of sound and the swinging elephant's penis, to ultra low frequencies and
the alleged 26-million-year wavelength of mass extinctions. Let's return to sound, and in particular that crowning feat of the human brain, the weaving and unweaving of speech sounds. The vocal 'cords' are really a pair of membranes which vibrate together in the breathing passage like a pair of woodwind reeds. Consonants are produced as more or less explosive interruptions of the air flow, caused by closure and contact of the lips, teeth, tongue and back of throat. Vowels vary in the same kind of way as trumpets differ from oboes. We make different vowel sounds rather as a trumpeter moves a mute in and out, to shift the preponderant sine waves summing into the composite sound. Different vowels have different combinations of harmonics above the fundamental frequency. The fundamental frequency itself, of course, is lower for men than for women and children, yet male vowels sound similar to the corresponding female vowels because of the pattern of harmonics.
Each vowel sound has its own characteristic pattern of frequency stripes, like barcodes once again. In the study of speech, the barcode stripes are called 'formants'.
Any one language, or dialect within a language, has a finite list of vowel sounds, and each of those vowel sounds has its own formant barcode. Other languages, and different accents within languages, have different vowel sounds which are made by holding the mouth and tongue in intermediate positions, again as a trumpeter disposes the mute in the
bell of the instrument. Theoretically there is a continuous spectrum of vowel sounds. Any one language employs a useful selection, a discontinuous repertoire picked out from the continuous spectrum of available vowels. Different languages pick out different points along the spectrum. The vowel in the French tu and the German uber, which doesn't occur in (my version of) English, is approximately intermediate between oo and ee. It doesn't too much matter which landmark points along the spectrum of available vowels a language picks on, so long as they are spaced far enough apart to avoid ambiguity within that language.
The story for consonants is more complicated, but there is a similar range of consonant barcodes, with actual languages employing a limited subset from those available. Some languages employ sounds which are far off the spectrum of the majority of languages, for example the clicks of some southern African tongues. As with vowels, different languages parcel up the available repertoire differently. Several of the languages of the Indian subcontinent have a dental sound which is intermediate between the English 'd' and 't'. The French hard 'c' as in comme is intermediate between the English hard 'c' and hard 'g' (and the 'o' is intermediate between the English vowels in cod and cud). The tongue, lips and voice can be modulated to produce an almost infinite variety of consonants and vowels. When the barcodes are patterned in time to form
phonemes, syllables, words and sentences, the range of ideas that can be communicated is unlimited.
Stranger yet, the things that can be communicated include images, ideas, feelings, love and exultation - the kind of thing that Keats does so sublimely.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness - That thou, light- winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
'Ode to a Nightingale' (1820)
Read the words aloud and the images tumble into your brain, as if you really were drugged by a nightingale's song in a leafy summer beechwood. At one level it is all done by a pattern of air pressure waves, a pattern whose richness is first unwoven into sine waves in the ear and then rewoven together in the brain to reconstruct images and emotions. Stranger yet, the pattern can be broken down mathematically into a stream of numbers, and it retains its power to transport and haunt the imagination. When a laser disc (CD) is made, say, of the Saint Matthew Passion, the rising and falling pressure wave, with all its wiggles and kinks, is sampled at frequent intervals and translated into digital data. The digits could, in principle, be printed as dull, black and white zeroes and ones on reams of paper. Yet the numbers retain the power, if transduced back into pressure waves, to move a listener to tears.
Keats may not have intended it literally, but the idea of nightingale song working as a drug is not totally far-fetched. Consider what it is doing in nature, and what natural selection has shaped it to do. Male nightingales need to influence the behaviour of female nightingales, and of other males. Some ornithologists have thought of song as conveying information: 'I am a male of the species Luscinia megarhynchos, in breeding condition, with a territory, hormonally primed to mate and build a nest. ' Yes, the song does contain that information, in the sense that a female who acts on the assumption that it is true could benefit thereby. But another way to look at it has always seemed to me more vivid. The song is not informing the female but manipulating her. It is not so much changing what the female knows as directly changing the internal physiological state of her brain. It is acting like a drug.
There is experimental evidence from measuring the hormone levels of female doves and canaries, as well as their behaviour, that the sexual
state of females is directly influenced by the vocalizations of males, the effects being integrated over a period of days. The sounds from a male canary flood through the female's ears into her brain where they have an effect that is indistinguishable from one that an experimenter can procure with a hypodermic syringe. The male's 'drug' enters the female through the portals of her ears rather than through a hypodermic, but this difference does not seem particularly telling.
The idea that birdsong is an auditory drug gains plausibility when you look at how it develops during the individual's lifetime. Typically, a young male songbird teaches himself to sing by practising: matching up fragments of trial song against a 'template' in his brain, a pre- programmed notion of what the song of his species 'ought' to sound like. In some species, such as the American song sparrow, the template is built in, programmed by the genes. In other species, such as the white crowned sparrow or the European chaffinch, it is derived from a 'recording' of another male's song, made early in the young male's life from listening to an adult. Wherever the template comes from, the young male teaches himself how to sing in such a way as to match it.
That, at least, is one way to talk about what happens when a young bird perfects his song. But think of it another way. The song is ultimately designed to have a strong effect on the nervous system of another member of the species, either a prospective mate or a possible territorial rival who needs to be warned off. But the young bird himself is a member of his own species. His brain is a typical brain from that species. A sound that is effective in arousing his own emotions is likely to be as effective in arousing a female of the same species. Instead of speaking of the young male trying to shape his practice song to 'match' a built-in 'template', we could think of him as practising on himself as a typical member of his species, trying out fragments of song to see whether they excite his own passions, that is, experimenting with his own drugs on himself. And, to complete the circuit, perhaps it is not too surprising that nightingale song should have acted like a drug on the nervous system of John Keats. He was not a nightingale, but he was a vertebrate, and most drugs that work on humans have a comparable effect upon other vertebrates. Man- made drugs are the products of comparatively crude trial and error testing by chemists in the laboratory Natural selection has had thousands of generations in which to fine-tune its drug technology.
Should we feel indignant on Keats's behalf at such a comparison? I do not believe that Keats himself would have done so - Coleridge even less. The 'Ode to a Nightingale' accepts the implication of the drug analogy, makes it wonderfully real. It is not demeaning to human emotion that we try to analyse and explain it, any more than, to a balanced judge, the rainbow is diminished when a prism unweaves it.
In this chapter and the previous one, I have used the barcode as a symbol of precise analysis, in all its beauty. Mixed light is sorted into its rainbow of component colours and everybody sees beauty. That is a first analysis. Closer detail reveals fine lines and a new elegance, the elegance of detection, of the bringing of order and understanding. Fraunhofer barcodes speak to us of the exact elemental nature of distant stars. A precisely measured pattern of stripes is a coded message from across the parsecs. There is grace in the sheer economy of unweaving intimate details about a star which, one had thought, could be found only through the costly undertaking of a journey lasting 3,000 human lifetimes. On another scale, we find a similar story when we look at the formant stripes in speech, the harmonic barcodes of music. There is elegance, too, in the barcodes of dendrochronology: the stripes across ancient Sequoia wood which tell us precisely in which year BC the tree was seeded, and what the weather was like in every one of the intervening years (for weather conditions are what give tree rings their characteristic widths). Like Fraunhofer's lines transmitted across space, tree rings transmit messages to us across time, and again there is a supple economy. It is the power - the fact that we can learn so much by precise analysis of what seems so little information - that gives these unweavings their beauty. The same is true, perhaps even more dramatically, of sound waves in speech and music - barcodes on the air.
Recently we have been hearing much about another kind of barcode - DNA 'fingerprints', barcodes in the blood. DNA barcodes expose and reconstruct details of human affairs that one might have supposed forever inaccessible even to legendarily great detectives. The main practical use of barcodes in the blood so far is in courts of law, and it is to them - and the benefits that a scientific attitude may bring to them - that we turn in the next chapter.
5
BARCODES AT THE BAR
And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. . . . Woe unto you, lawyers', for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.
Luke 11
On the face of it, the law may seem about as far as you can get from poetry or the wonder of science. Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it. In any case, that is not what this chapter is about. I shall be looking at an example of the role of science in the law: at a different aspect of science and its importance in society; a sense in which scientific understanding may become a valuable part of good citizenship. In courts of law, juries are increasingly asked to understand evidence which the lawyers themselves may not fully comprehend. Evidence from the unweaving of DNA - what we shall come to see as barcodes in the blood - is the outstanding example, and it is the main subject of this chapter. But it is not just facts about DNA that scientists can contribute. More importantly, it is the underlying theory of probability and statistics; it is scientific ways of making inferences that need to be brought to bear. Such matters stretch beyond the narrow subject of DNA evidence.
I am told on good authority that defence lawyers in the United States sometimes object to jury candidates on the grounds that they have had a scientific education. What can this mean? I would not question the right of defence lawyers to disallow the selection of particular jurors. A juror may be prejudiced against the race or class to which the defendant belongs. It is obviously undesirable that a raving homophobe should try a case of anti-homosexual violence. It is for this kind of reason that defence lawyers in some countries are allowed to cross-examine potential jurors and strike them off the list. In the USA lawyers can be completely blatant about their criteria for jury selection. A colleague tells me of a time when he was up for selection to a jury, on an injury litigation case. The lawyer asked, 'Would anyone here have a problem awarding a substantial amount of money to my client, perhaps in the millions? '
A lawyer can also disqualify a juror without giving reasons. Although this may be just, the only time I have seen it happen it misfired. I was a member of a panel of 24 individuals from which juries of 12 were to be selected. I had already participated in two juries with members of this panel, and I knew their individual foibles. One particular man was cast- iron prosecution fodder; he would take the same hard line almost regardless of the particular case. The defence lawyer waved him through like a breeze. The next one up, a large middle-aged woman, was the opposite: a guaranteed softie, a pure gift to the defence. But her appearance perhaps suggested the opposite, and it was against her that the defence lawyer chose to exercise his right of veto. I have never forgotten the look of wounded hurt on her face as, with a cutting movement of the hand, learned counsel struck her - whom he little knew could have been his secret weapon - out of the jury box.
But, to repeat the astonishing fact, lawyers in the United States have been known to use the following reason for striking down potential jurors: the prospective juror is well educated in science, or has some knowledge of genetics or probability theory. What is the problem? Are geneticists known to harbour deep-seated prejudices against certain sections of society? Are mathematicians especially likely to be of the "flog 'em . . . string 'em up . . . it's the only language they understand . . . law and
order' persuasion? Of course not. Nobody has ever claimed such a thing.
The lawyers' objections are more ignobly based. There is a new kind of evidence increasingly coming into the criminal courts: evidence from
DNA fingerprinting, and it is extremely powerful. If your client is innocent, DNA' evidence may well provide a knock-down convincing way to establish his innocence. Conversely, if he is guilty, DNA evidence has a good chance of establishing his guilt in cases where no other evidence can. DNA evidence is quite hard to understand at the best of times.
There are controversial aspects of it which are even harder. In these circumstances, you would think that an honest lawyer who wishes to see justice done would welcome jurors capable of grasping the arguments. Wouldn't it be an obviously good thing to have at least one or two people in the jury room who can redress the ignorance of their baffled colleagues? What kind of a lawyer is it who prefers a jury incapable of following the case that either attorney is making?
The answer is a lawyer who is more interested in winning than in seeing justice done. A lawyer, in other words. And it seems to be a fact that advocates, of both prosecution and defence, frequently disallow individual jurors specifically because they are educated in science.
Courts of law have always needed to establish individual identity. Was the individual seen hurrying from the scene Richard Dawkins? Is the hat dropped at the scene of the crime his hat? Are those his fingerprints on the weapon? A yes answer to one of these questions does not by itself prove his guilt, but it is certainly an important factor to be taken into account. Most of us, including most jurors and lawyers, have an intuitive sense that there is something specially reliable about eye-witness evidence. In this we are almost certainly wrong, but the error is a pardonable one. It may even be built into us by millennia of evolutionary history in which eye-witness evidence really was the most reliable. If I see a man in a red woolly hat climbing a drainpipe, you will have a hard time persuading me later that he was actually wearing a blue beret. Our intuitive biases are such that eye-witness evidence trumps all other categories. Yet numerous studies have shown that eye-witnesses, however convinced they may be, however sincere and well-meaning, frequently mis-remember even conspicuous details such as the colour of clothing and the number of assailants present.
When individual identification is important, for instance when a woman who has been raped is called upon to identify her attacker, courts perform a rudimentary statistical test known as the identity parade or line-up. The woman is led past a line of men, one of whom the police suspect on other grounds. The others have been pulled in off the streets or are out-of-work actors, or police officers dressed in plain clothes. If the woman picks out one of these stooges, her identification evidence is discounted. But if she picks out the man the police already suspect, her evidence is taken seriously.
Rightly so. Especially if the number of people in the identity parade is large. We are all statisticians enough to see why this is. The prior suspicion of the police must be open to doubt - otherwise there would be no point in seeking the woman's evidence at all. What impresses us is agreement between the woman's identification and the independent evidence offered by the police. If the identity parade contains only two men, the witness would have a 50 per cent chance of picking the man already suspected by the police, even if she chose at random - or if she were mistaken. Since the police might also be mistaken, this represents an unacceptably high risk of injustice. But if there are 20 men in the line, the woman has only a 1 in 20 chance of choosing, by guesswork or error, the man the police already suspect. The coincidence of her identification and the police's prior suspicion probably really means something. What
is going on here is the assessment of coincidence, or the odds that something might happen by chance alone. The probability of meaningless coincidence is even less if the identity parade has 100 men, because a 1 in 100 chance of error is noticeably less than a 1 in 20 chance of error. The longer the line-up, the more secure the eventual conviction.
We also have an intuitive sense that the men chosen for the line-up must not look too obviously different from the suspect. If the woman originally told the police to look for a man with a beard, and the police have now arrested a bearded suspect, it is clearly unjust to stand him in a line with 19 clean-shaven men. He might as well be standing by himself. Even if the woman has said nothing about the appearance of her attacker, if the police have arrested a punk in a leather jacket it would be wrong to stand him in a line of suited accountants with furled umbrellas. In multiracial countries such considerations have added importance. Everyone understands that a black suspect should not be placed in an otherwise all-white line-up, or vice versa.
When we think about how we identify somebody, the face first leaps to mind. We are particularly good at distinguishing faces. As we shall see in another connection, we even seem to have evolved a special part of the brain set aside for the purpose, and certain kinds of brain damage
disable our face-recognition faculty while leaving the rest of vision intact. In any case, faces are good for recognition because they are so variable. With the well-known exception of identical twins, you seldom meet two people whose faces are confusable. It is not totally unknown, however, and an actor can be made up to look very like somebody else. Dictators often employ doubles to perform for them when they are too busy, or to draw the fire of assassins. It has been suggested that one reason charismatic leaders so often sport moustaches (Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Saddam Hussein, Oswald Mosley) is to make it easier for doubles to impersonate them. Mussolini's shaven head perhaps served the same purpose.
Apart from identical twins, ordinary close relatives are sometimes sufficiently alike to fool people who don't know them well. (Unfortunately the story that Doctor Spooner, when Warden of my college, once stopped an undergraduate and said, 'I never can remember is it you or your brother was killed in the war? ' is probably not true, like most alleged Spoonerisms. ) The resemblance of brothers and sisters, of fathers and sons, of grandparents and grandchildren, serves to remind us of the huge pool of facial variety in the general population of non-relatives.
But faces are only a special case. We are riddled with idiosyncrasies which, with sufficient training, can be used to identify individuals. I had
a school friend who claimed (and my spot checks confirmed it) that he could recognize any member of the 80-strong residence in which we lived purely by listening to their footsteps. I had another friend from Switzerland who claimed that when she walked into a room she could tell, by smell, which members of her circle of acquaintances had recently left the room. It is not that her colleagues didn't wash, just that she was unusually sensitive. That this is in principle possible is confirmed by the fact that police dogs can distinguish between any two human beings by smell alone, with the exception, yet again, of identical twins. As far as I know, the police haven't adopted the following technique, but I bet you could train bloodhounds to track down a kidnapped child after giving them a sample sniff of his brother. A way might even be found to use a jury of bloodhounds to decide paternity cases.
Voices are as idiosyncratic as faces, and various research teams are working on computer voice recognition systems for authenticating identity. It would be a great boon if, in the future, we could dispense with front door keys and rely on a voice-operated computer to obey our personal Open Sesame command. Handwriting is sufficiently individual for the written signature to be used as a guarantee of identity on bank cheques and important legal documents. Signatures are actually not particularly secure because they are too easily forged, but it is still impressive how recognizable handwriting can be. A promising newcomer
to the list of individual 'signatures' is the iris of the eye. At least one bank is experimenting with automated iris-scanning machines as a way of verifying identity. The customer stands in front of a camera which photographs the eye, digitizes the image into what a newspaper described as 'a 256 byte: human barcode'. But none of these methods of verifying human identity even comes close to the potential of DNA fingerprinting, properly applied.
It is not surprising that police dogs can smell the difference between any two humans except identical twins. Our sweat contains a complicated cocktail of proteins, and the precise details of all proteins are minutely specified by the coded DNA instructions that are our genes. Unlike handwriting and faces, which vary continuously and grade smoothly into one another, genes are digital codes, much like those used in computers. Again with the exception of identical twins, we differ genetically from all other people in discrete, discontinuous ways: an exact number of ways that you could even count if you had the patience. The DNA in each one of my cells (give or take a tiny minority of mistakes, and not including red blood cells which have lost all their DNA, or reproductive cells which contain a random half of my genes) is identical to the DNA in all my other cells. It differs from the DNA in every one of your cells, not in some vague, impressionistic way but at a precise number of locations dotted along the billions of DNA letters that we both have.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the digital revolution in molecular genetics. Before Watson and Crick's epochal announcement in 1953 of the structure of DNA, it was still possible to agree with the concluding words of Charles Singer's authoritative A Short History of Biology, published in 1931:
. . despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a 'mechanist' theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. Further, though the theory speaks in terms of genes as the atomic theory speaks in terms of atoms, it must be remembered that there is a fundamental distinction between the two theories. Atoms exist independently, and their properties as such can be examined. They can even be isolated. Though we cannot see them, we can deal with them under various conditions and in various combinations. We can deal with them individually. Not so the gene. It exists only as a part of the chromosome, and the chromosome only as part of a cell. If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me except in its living surroundings any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus the last of the
biological theories leaves us where the first started, in the presence of a power called life or psyche which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.
This is dramatically, profoundly, hugely wrong. And it really matters. Following Watson and Crick and the revolution that they sparked, a gene can be isolated. It can be purified, bottled, crystallized, read as digitally coded information, printed on a page, fed into a computer, read out again into a test tube and reinserted into an organism where it works exactly
as it did before. When the Human Genome Project, which set out to work out the complete gene sequence of a human being, is completed,
probably by the year 2005, the full genome will fit comfortably on two standard CD ROM discs, leaving enough space for a textbook of
molecular embryology. These two discs could then be sent into outer space, and the human race could go extinct secure in the knowledge that there is now a chance that at some future time and in some distant place, a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to reconstitute a human being. Meanwhile, back on earth, it is because DNA is deeply and fundamentally digital - because the differences between individuals and between species can be precisely counted, not vaguely and impressionistically measured - that DNA fingerprinting is potentially so powerful.
I assert the uniqueness of each individual's DNA with confidence, but even this is only a statistical judgement. Theoretically, the sexual lottery could throw up the same genetic sequence twice. An 'identical twin' of Isaac Newton could be born tomorrow. But the number of people that would have to be born in order to make this event at all likely would be larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Unlike our face, voice
or handwriting, the DNA in most of our cells stays the same from babyhood to old age, and it cannot be altered by training or cosmetic surgery. Our DNA text has such a huge number of letters that we can precisely quantify the expected number shared by, say, brothers or first cousins as opposed to, say, second cousins or random pairs chosen from the population at large. This makes it useful not only for labelling individuals uniquely and matching them to traces such as blood or semen, but for establishing paternity and other genetic relationships. British law allows people to immigrate if they can prove that their
parents are already British citizens. A number of children from the
Indian subcontinent have been arrested by sceptical immigration officials. Before the advent of DNA fingerprinting it was often impossible for these unfortunate people to prove their parentage. Now it is easy. All you do is take a sample of blood from the putative parents and compare a particular set of genes with the corresponding set of genes from the child. The verdict is clear and unequivocal, with none of the doubt or fuzziness
that creates a need for qualitative judgements. Several young people in Britain today owe their citizenship to DNA technology.
"A similar method was used to identify skeletons discovered in Yekaterinburg and suspected of belonging to the executed Russian royal family. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose exact relationship to the Romanovs is known, graciously gave blood, and from this it was possible to establish that the skeletons were indeed those of the Tsar's family. In a more macabre case, a skeleton exhumed in South America was proved to belong to Doctor Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal known as the 'Angel of Death'. DNA taken from the bones was compared with blood from Mengele's still-living son, and the identity of the skeleton proved. More recently, a corpse dug up in Berlin has been proved, by the same method, to be that of Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy, whose disappearance had led to endless legends and rumours and more than 6,000 'sightings' around the world.
Despite the name 'fingerprinting', our DNA, being digital, is even more individually characteristic than the patterns of whorls on our fingers. The name is appropriate because, like true fingerprints, DNA evidence is often inadvertently left behind after a person has departed the scene. DNA can be extracted from a bloodstain on a carpet, from semen inside a rape victim, from a crust of dried nasal mucus on a handkerchief, from sweat or from shed hairs. The DNA in the sample can then be compared with that in the blood taken from a suspect. It is possible to assess, to almost any desired level of probability, whether the sample belongs to a particular person or not.
So, what are the snags? Why is DNA evidence controversial? What is it about this important kind of evidence that makes it possible for lawyers to bamboozle juries into misinterpreting or ignoring it? Why have some courts been moved to the despairing extreme of ruling out this evidence altogether?
There are three major classes of potential problem, one simple, one sophisticated and one silly. I'll come to the silly problem and the more sophisticated difficulties later but first, as with any kind of evidence, there is the simple - and very important - possibility of human error. Possibilities, rather, for there are plenty of opportunities for mistakes and even sabotage. A tube of blood may be mislabelled, either by accident or in a deliberate attempt to frame somebody. A sample from the scene of a crime may be contaminated by sweat from a lab technician or a police officer. The danger of contamination is especially great in those cases where an ingenious technique of amplification called PCR (polymerase chain reaction) is used.
You can easily see why amplification might be desirable. A tiny smear of sweat on a gun butt contains precious little DNA. Sensitive though DNA analysis can be, it needs a certain minimum quantity of material to work on. The technique of PCR, invented in 1983 by the American biochemist Kary B. Mullis, is the dramatically successful answer. PCR takes what little DNA there is and produces millions of copies, multiplying again and again whatever code sequences are there. But, as always with amplification, errors are amplified along with the true signal. Stray scraps of DNA contamination from a technician's sweat are amplified as effectively as the specimen from the scene of the crime, with obvious possibilities for injustice.
But human error is not peculiar to DNA evidence. All kinds of evidence are vulnerable to bungling and sabotage, and must be handled with scrupulous care. The files in a conventional fingerprint library may be mislabelled. The murder weapon may have been touched by innocent people as well as the murderer, and their fingerprints have to be taken, along with the suspect's, for elimination purposes. Courts of law are already accustomed to the need to take all possible precautions against mistakes and they still, sometimes tragically, happen. DNA evidence is not immune to human bungling but nor is it particularly vulnerable, except in so far as PCR amplifies error. If all DNA evidence were to be thrown out because of occasional mistakes, the precedent should rule out most other kinds of evidence, too. We have to suppose that codes of practice and rigorous precautions can be developed to guard against human error in the presentation of all kinds of legal evidence.
The more sophisticated difficulties that bedevil DNA evidence will take longer to explain. They, too, have their precedents in conventional types of evidence, although this point often does not seem to be understood in law courts.
Where identification evidence of any kind is concerned, there are two types of error which correspond to the two types of error in any statistical evidence. In another chapter, we shall call them Type 1 and Type 2 errors, but it is easier to think of them as false positive and false negative. A guilty suspect may escape, through not being recognized - false negative. And - false positive (which most people would see as the more dangerous error) - an innocent suspect may be convicted because he happens, by ill luck, to resemble the genuinely guilty party. In the case of ordinary eye- witness identification, an innocent bystander who happens to look a bit like the real criminal could consequently be arrested - false positive. Identity parades are designed to make this less probable. The chance of a miscarriage of justice is inversely related to the number of people standing in the line-up. The danger can be increased in the ways we have
already considered - the line-up being unfairly stacked with clean-shaven men for example.
In the case of DNA evidence the danger of a false positive conviction is theoretically very low indeed. We have a blood sample from a suspect, and we have a specimen from the scene of the crime. If the entire set of genes in both these samples could be written down, the probability of a false conviction is one in billions and billions. Identical twins apart, the chance that any two humans would match all their DNA is tantamount to zero. But unfortunately it is not practical to work out the complete gene sequence of a human being. Even after the Human Genome Project is completed, to attempt the equivalent in the solution of each crime is unrealistic. In practice, forensic detectives concentrate on small sections of the genome, preferably sections that are known to vary in the population. And now our fear must be that, although we could safely rule out mis-identification if the whole genome were considered, there might be a danger of two individuals' being identical with respect to the small portion of DNA that we have time to analyse.
The probability that this would happen ought to be measurable for any particular section of the genome; we could then decide whether it was an acceptable risk. The larger the section of DNA, the smaller the probability of error, just as, in an identity parade, the longer the line-up the safer the conviction. The difference is that an identity parade, in order to compete with the DNA equivalent, would need to contain not a couple of dozen people but thousands, millions or even billions in the line. Apart from this quantitative difference, the analogy- with the identity parade continues. We shall see that there is a DNA equivalent of our hypothetical line-up of clean-shaven men with one bearded suspect. But first, a little more background on DNA fingerprinting.
Obviously we sample the equivalent parts of the genome in both suspect and specimen. These parts of the genome are chosen for their tendency to vary widely in the population. A Darwinian would note that the parts that don't vary are often the parts that have an important role to play in the survival of the organism. Any substantial variations in these important genes are likely to have been removed from the population by the death of their possessors - Darwinian natural selection. But there are other parts of the genome that are very variable, perhaps because they are not important for survival. This isn't the whole story because in fact some useful genes are quite variable. The reasons for this are controversial. It's a bit of a digression but . . . What is this life if, full of stress, we have no freedom to digress?
The 'neutralist' school of thought, associated with the distinguished Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura, believes that useful genes are equally
useful in a variety of different forms. This emphatically does not mean that they are useless, only that the different forms are equally good at what they do. If you think of genes as writing out their recipes in words, the alternative forms of a gene can be thought of as the very same words written in different typefaces: the meaning is the same, and the product of the recipe will come out the same. Genetic changes, 'mutations', that make no difference are not 'seen' by natural selection. They aren't mutations at all, for all the difference they make to the life of the animal, but they are potentially useful mutations from the point of view of the forensic scientist. The population ends up with lots of variety at such a locus (position in a chromosome), and this kind of variety could in principle be used for fingerprinting.
The other theory of variation, opposed to Kimura's neutral theory, believes that the different versions of the genes really do different things and that there is some special reason why both are preserved by natural selection in the population. For example, there might be two alternative forms of a blood protein, A? and ss, which are susceptible to two infectious diseases called alfluenza and betaccosis respectively, each being immune to the other disease. Typically, an infectious disease needs a critical density of susceptible victims in a population, otherwise an epidemic can't get going. In a population dominated by A? types, there are frequent epidemics of alfluenza but not of betaccosis. So natural selection favours the ss types who are immune to alfluenza. It favours them so much that after a while they come to dominate the population. Now the tables are turned. There are epidemics of betaccosis, but not of alfluenza. The A? types now are favoured by natural selection because they are immune to betaccosis. The population may keep oscillating between A? dominance and ss dominance, or it may settle down to an intermediate mixture, an 'equilibrium'. Either way, we'll see plenty of variation at the gene locus concerned, and this is good news for the finger-printers. The phenomenon is called 'frequency dependent selection' and it is one suggested reason for high levels of genetic variation in the population. There are others.
However, for our forensic purposes, it matters only that there are variable sections of the genome. Whatever the verdict in the controversy over whether the useful bits of the genome are variable, there are in any case lots of other regions of the genome which are never even read, or never translated into their protein equivalents. Indeed, an astonishingly high proportion of our genes seem to be doing nothing whatsoever. They are therefore free to vary-, which makes them excellent DNA fingerprinting material.
As if to confirm the fact that a great deal of DNA is doing nothing useful, the sheer quantity of DNA in the cells of different kinds of organisms is
wildly variable. Since DNA information is digital, we can measure it in
the same kind of units as we measure computer information. One bit of information is enough to specify one yes/no decision: a 1 or a 0, a true or a false. The computer on which I am writing this has 256 megabits (32 megabytes) of core memory. (The first computer that I owned was a
bigger box but had less than one five thousandth of the memory capacity. ) The equivalent fundamental unit in DNA is the nucleotide base. Since there are 4 possible bases, the information content of each base is equivalent to 2 bits. The common gut bacterium Escherichia coli has a genome of 4 mega-bases or 8 megabits.