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Is DNA A Religion?
for release 03-01-07
Washington DC
Ah, I remember the day when DNA tests were reserved for rapists and murderers. But now deoxyribonucleic acid has moved to the 'A' List. DNA has become fashionable.
Sure, I can understand why we would want to take O.J.'s DNA. And if you are convicted for rapin a woman that you never met, I'm sure DNA evidence could come in handy. The Duke Lacrosse Team loves it I'm sure.
Witness the court battles over Anna Nicole Smith's DNA, plus that of all her assorted paramours. Everybody is rushing down to give a sample. And now they are after James Brown's DNA in order to establish paternity of the children that he may have fathered while on the road. They didn't call him the hardest working man in show business for nothing. Al Sharpton wants a DNA test to confirm that he is Strom Thurman's long-lost nephew. They are even examining DNA that supposedly belongs to Jesus and Mary Magdelene. Everybody wants to get in on the act.
Watson and Crick had no idea what social and cultural changes that their discovery would bring. They probably imagined that it would be used for peaceful purposes, you know, for the good of medicine and mankind, cure a few diseases, that kind of thing. To them it was just a molecular slinky, an intellectual curiosity, a toy that happened to win them the Nobel Prize. They probably never imagined that the identity police would one day be running around poking their swabs in the vaginas of rape victims or inside the cheeks of every person arrested anywhere for anything. Soon we'll all have to lick a stamp before we can get on an airplane or make a purchase with a credit card. You'll have to show your genes to buy a pair of jeans.
They'll be able to determine the sex of a baby while it is still a gleam in it's father's eye. They'll be able to tell if you are a terrorist or if you are even Thinking about committing a crime just by the smell of your chromosomes. Or so they would have you believe.
DNA testing is used to match organ donors, Crick and Watson would have been proud of that application. It is used to verify parentage and lineage, and also racial heritage. It is used extensively in criminal investigations because it can prove that a certain person was at a certain place, even though, like the fingerprint, it can't tell you When the person was there. But it can take evidence from some pretty intimate places. It's hard to lift a fingerprint from a clitoris.
I'm not against DNA testing. I think that any method of attaining the truth is valid if it actually attains the truth. This requires a test that tells you what you really want to know. Have you ever heard of a pregnancy test registering a false positive? Urine tests are another example. They don't tell you what you want to know--whether a person is competent to do his job--they tell you if he's smoked pot or eaten antihistamines in the past thirty days. How about a lie-detector test? Do you know that they are almost as accurate as flipping a coin? No test is infallible. I had a friend who several years ago tested positive for AIDS. He began drawing up his will. Then he had another test done and was relieved to find that he was HIV negative. Should he have another test done? Who knows?
The point that I am making here is that science is not infallible. That's why it is science. It is subject to change and experimentation and improvement. The truth tomorrow might not be yesterday's truth. The Poet's Eye sees that part of science is a healthy skepticism. Seeing is believing, but you must look often.
The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
--Walt Whitman
When you believe in things that you dont understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition aint the way
--Stevie Wonder
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