6/13/2023 0 Comments Fingerprint identification![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Thus we can know without doubt that people’s fingerprints are all different. Since all countries of East and West have been using fingerprinting, it has been put to the test repeatedly and two people with identical patterning have never been discovered. In 1920s China, for example, a fingerprint identification trainee named Chen Ruming explained the individual character of fingerprints in the following way: The idea that no two people have identical fingerprints has been a staple of the 20th-century literature on fingerprint identification. These pattern-types are illustrated below. When people make the claim that fingerprints are unique to the individual, they do not mean that there are no two people with the same number or configuration of arches, loops, and whorls on their fingers, because, in fact, there are. It is important to be clear about what “uniqueness” means in this context, however. It was on the basis of this notion of the individual uniqueness of fingerprints that police, forensic experts, and prison officials have been so confident that they could identify individuals using this technique. There might be two or even many more of them that would have the same general design, but even then we would find on careful examination that they were vastly different, or so much so that we could easily point out the difference when we compare the two prints. We might take hundreds of thousands of prints from as many persons and there would be no two that we could call absolutely alike in every detail. There is one point of which we are absolutely convinced, and that is: no two finger prints are alike. For example, we find a statement of this idea in the instructional materials of the University of Applied Science, an institution that provided training in fingerprint identification in the United States during the early decades of the 20th century: This assumption has, in turn, rested on another assumption: that no two people have fingerprints that are exactly identical in terms of the form and configuration of their patterning. Since its invention in the 19th century, modern fingerprint identification has relied upon the assumption that by examining a person’s fingerprints one can identify that individual with certainty and to the exclusion of all others. ![]()
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