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...wrote, Rabinow was interested groups and the criteria around which they form. Of course, human beings are biosocial beings: biological animals and social animals. But the fact that many groups of people can be loosely characterized in both biological and social ways, and that the 'bio' and the 'social' reinforce each other, prompted his term. This phenomenon is immediately evident: what are families or extended kinship structures if not biosocial groups? Currently, the genetic imperative--the drive to find biological, but above all genetic, underpinnings for all things human, in sickness or in health, in success or in strife--is fueling fascination with this concept.
After an initial deterministic enthusiasm, almost everyone came to realize that everything is not in our genes, to cite the important polemic of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin. (2) One, there are not enough genes; second, it is the when and where and how of the expression of genes that counts; third, junk DNA and other primordial stuff are not as junky as they seemed; fourth, proteins are now where the action is; and so on. Nevertheless, the biological, and then the genetic, imperatives are facts of modern life. And far from increasing determinism and limiting opportunity, the life sciences are creating more choices. On the one hand, we have, in a sense, more biologies to choose from than we anticipated. On the other hand, new societies form along newly recognized (or, at any rate, newly asserted) biological or genetic lines, forging new alliances and loyalties. Forging new identities.
Some would say that Rabinow accepts too readily the self-image that life technologists would like to project. For example, when Lewontin was mounting his critical onslaught on the police's simplistic use of DNA fingerprinting, Rabinow published in 1992, the year he gave us 'biosociality,' a piece called "Galton's Regret: On Types and Individuals." (3) In it, he describes Francis Galton, the genius who, among many other accomplishments (including the invention of the silent whistle for police dogs), developed a system to identify criminals using their fingerprints. He adapted his system from the Indian Civil Service's, which was necessary because imperial administrators found it hard to recognize many of their subjects definitively. His regret was that, although a complete set of fingerprints does identify a person uniquely, it says absolutely nothing about that person's character.
In some ways, the work of Galton's rival, Alphonse Bertillon, who invented the French system of identification by ears, might well have proven more relevant for recognizing character traits. That, at any rate, was the speculation during the heyday of the criminal anthropology inspired by Cesare Lombroso. Anyone who has a green card conferring resident-alien status in the United States can check and see that the photo thereon conforms to Bertillon's demand that an ear always be shown.
But DNA fingerprinting--here perhaps I am carrying Rabinow's analysis a step too far--a method of identification intimately connecting you with a genetic profile, does indeed show a lot about who you are and who your ancestors were. Also where you come from, that is, the neighborhood in which you live. Galton would have loved it. But not only Galton: the entire European tradition of criminal anthropology has been brought back to life, although few dare to mention it because it is thought to be as disreputable as Galton's eugenics. (4)
Lewontin's critique was invaluable. There had been an all too glib enthusiasm for DNA identification following its initial successes in the United Kingdom. In addition to technical objections based on genetics or American jurisprudence, an elementary difficulty arose at once. There is the old adage that crimes against the person are most often committed by family members or neighbors. Family members share a lot of genetic traits, and neighbors live in neighborhoods--whose members tend to clump in historical and geographical, that is, ethnic, ways. Thus, the probability of finding a DNA match should not be the probability of finding such a sequence in the world's population, or even that of the northeastern United States. There the probability may be minute. Rather, the relevant figure is the probability of having such a match within a few blocks of the crime, where it will most likely be a lot larger. Let alone when the suspects form an extended family. So the chance of a false conviction based on the early DNA probability calculations was far greater than was at first supposed.
The criticisms made by Lewontin and others had impact, and in part thanks to changes that resulted, genetic fingerprinting is now considered remarkably reliable. One little-noticed effect was on the law-enforcement system. The FBI now has an enormous data bank containing DNA profiles of certain neighborhoods. If you come from a neighborhood where crime is common (in fact, as opposed to local folklore), the FBI knows an awful lot about your neighbors' genomes and, by statistical implication, perhaps your own. Hence, we can now assess DNA evidence with more relevant probabilities, or 'reference classes.'
The technique applies exactly as well in ethnically diverse neighborhoods that break into recognizable subgroups. For example, suppose DNA is left on the scene of a crime in a heterogeneous Los Angeles neighborhood, 40 percent of whose members are recent immigrants from the Republic of Armenia and 40 percent quite recent immigrants from Mexico. DNA evidence may indicate that the suspect is Armenian. Obviously, we do not then want to use the reference class of all inhabitants of the neighborhood to compute the probability of a random match between the evidence and our suspect. Instead, we want the reference class of Armenian immigrants, who may well be so genetically similar that reliable identification is very difficult. Especially if they all came from the same neighborhood in the old country.
DNA criminal identification needs innumerable cautions--some technical, some common sense. Lewontin rightly feared that poorly analyzed genetic evidence would make false convictions all too easy. At its worst, almost any member of an already targeted group could plausibly be made to fit the crime. However, in principle, if not always in practice, the new local data banks make that far more difficult. And however much DNA has made securing convictions easier, genetic fingerprinting has also helped free a significant number of individuals previously convicted on inadequate evidence.
The House on 92nd Street, a wonderful movie made in 1944, provides a point of comparison between the new fingerprints and the old. Made with the full cooperation of the FBI (apparently before Hiroshima, although released only after), the movie shows how the FBI caught German spies stealing atomic secrets. (5) In it is a shot of a vast arena where young women searched the entire bank of fingerprints the FBI possessed in 1944 in order to identify the guilty parties. The filming took place on the real site, long since torn down. The room is auditorium-sized, but the procedure is automated, using Hollerith cards, derived in the first instance from the Jacquard cards for industrial weaving of long ago and the predecessors for the punch cards developed by IBM, which descends from Hollerith's original company.
One sees the force of the metaphor 'data bank.' It is not just a secure place to store masses of data; the endless stacks of cards are 'banks' in another sense of the word. For anyone who has trouble with gene sequencing and computers, this scene is a reliable metaphor for...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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The convictions of Peter Debye.(Biography), September 22, 2006
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