Can This Pair Bond Be Saved?

摘要

DNA fingerprinting has had an asteroidal impact on the human justice system, especially in cases of disputed parentage. It turns out that what's sauce for the human is also sauce for the gander, and the long-standing notion that many bird species have monogamous relationships has been turned upside down. Before we had DNA fingerprinting, which was invented by Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester in 1985, individual identity in humans or animals was inferred by comparisons of blood groups and serum proteins. These tests had probabilities of 1-to-100 or 1-to-1000 of being the same for two individuals. In contrast, comparisons of minisatellite DNA can produce probabilities of one to a trillion, which is more than enough to distinguish every human on Earth from every other, except for identical twins.