Fingerprints

The Germans have no word for 'fingerprint'. They just say 'fingerprint', in English. It seems strange to think that no one in Germany had felt the need to refer to fingerprints until they'd heard the English word. Surely fingerprints are fairly primitive. I mean, Neanderthals, in order to eat meat, must have understood animal tracks to help them hunt. And fingerprints are sort of the same thing, aren't they? The tracks we leave behind, the proof of where we've been and what we've touched.

I saw a documentary last year about two people who had the same fingerprints. Some American researcher was doing a university study for some reason, and he discovered that a middle-aged woman in Beijing had the exact same fingerprint as a teenage car thief in America.

This kid was from Nebraska or Wyoming or somewhere, one of those states you don't see so much on the TV, where there aren't many people. The only reason his fingerprints were on record was because he'd stolen a car when he was about fifteen. He'd never left the USA in his life; and the Chinese woman had never left her country either.

So this researcher from New York or wherever has all these random fingerprints from all over the world, when suddenly he realises two of them match. And I mean exactly.

The world's science community, if there is such a thing, was up in arms, obviously. Because it's one of the most basic things that you learn, right from when you're a child - no two people have the same fingerprint. So they tracked down this Midwestern kid and the Chinese lady and they did all these tests - DNA and stuff - trying to figure out how it could possibly be true.

And in the end they just realised - they were forced to conclude - that they'd been wrong. We'd all been wrong, all along; we were told wrong. It was just fluke. These two very different people from opposite sides of the world just happened to have the exact same fingerprint, because - as it transpires - there isn't an infinite number of configurations of the lines on a human finger. Sometimes, by chance, two people will be born with the same fingerprints after all.

Some of the scientists interviewed on the documentary were excited about this new discovery, but many were disappointed, and it was easy to see why. I'm no scientist, but even I felt let down by it. The realisation that something we've all just taken for granted as fact turned out not to be true. It almost made me understand religion a little bit - I mean, it's all fictional bullshit to start with, but if you can find it in yourself to believe in it you'll be safe in your beliefs, because as much as it can't be proved it can't be absolutely, conclusively disproved either. Religion may be a lie but it's an arrogant lie, sure of itself, and that makes it strong. Science is fallible and it is fragile. It destroys itself.

But the one scientist who really was happy was the original guy who'd been doing the research, the one who found the two fingerprints and discovered the truth. Because he had done it. He had single-handedly found something that proved a concrete scientific fact to be false. This man - who, like the rest of us, had grown up not just believing but knowing that no two fingerprints are the same - had in one moment, without even looking for it, found conclusive proof that this was not the case. He took fact and made it theory - and incorrect theory, at that. He took what we'd all believed, what we'd all known, what was an absolute truth, and he crushed it with his truth; what he knew to be the real truth.

And in that moment, he was God.


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BRIT ALERT
Please read before you review
I'm British and, as such, spell things differently than Americans do. Having been "corrected" on correct British spellings in many reviews before, I decided to add this disclaimer to some of my stories. Please bear in mind that many words ending -or in the US end -our in the UK; words ending -ize in the US end -ise in the UK; and we do not have the word "gotten" — over here it's simply "got". There are various other differences, of course, these are just a few that I'm always getting picked up on. Please consider our cultural differences before "correcting" my spelling and word usage!