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i.
Generation by nature.
The Belgian statistician Quetelet is acknowl-
edged as one of the first to comment on the diversity exhibited by nature.
His aphorism that “Nature exhibits an infinite variety of forms” (Thornton,
1986a) supports the cornerstone of our belief in human individuality. As we
reviewed in Chapter 2, Bertillon based the first organized system of personal
identification on Quetelet’s theories. Thornton (1986a) points out that
Quetelet’s original remark has been transmogrified through the years into
“Nature never repeats herself.” This takes the concept one step farther and
may or may not have been Quetelet’s original intent. Nevertheless, it is clear
that nature’s factory generates both class characteristics, as we discussed
above, and individual characteristics. Individual characteristics result from
random variation. In living organisms this is constrained to nondetrimental
alterations; in abiotic material, no such constraints apply. Examples of ran-
dom patterns resulting from biological processes include grain and coloration
in wood,* DNA mutations,** and fingerprint minutiae*** (Figure 6.3).
Examples of random patterns resulting from purely chemical or mechanical
processes include the deposition of layers in sedimentary rock, erosion of ice
by water, and the often-mentioned formation of individual snowflakes.
* The growth of “tree rings,” which ultimately determine wood grain, occurs on a seasonal
basis, but is highly dependent on climactic conditions, nutrition, and other factors.
Although it was once thought that one could tell the age of a tree just from counting the
rings, this is no longer considered reliable. The myriad of factors influencing the number,
width, and color of the rings, and the asymmetric nature of tree trunks in general, combine
to make wood grain a highly random characteristic. The Lindbergh case is an excellent
example of how this individualizing characteristic was used to good advantage (Koehler,
1973; Palenik in Saferstein, 1998).
** Both sequence and length mutations accumulate freely in the “non-coding” regions of
any genome (Lewin, 1997).
*** Although the gross pattern of a fingerprint is determined genetically, the minutiae,
upon which fingerprint comparison is based, appear to form randomly during embryological
development (Ashbaugh, 1996).
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