As much as fingerprints may be unique, the way to determine if two fingerprints match is a whole different story.
This linke provides some of the information that I think may be more helpful.
http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0011/feature_fingerprints.html
And the column being discussed is Do identical twins have different fingerprints?
I was commenting on Cecil’s comments about the use of fingerprints for law enforcement purposes, specifically the “the chances of duplicating even a portion of a fingerprint are 1 in 100 quintillion”.
No, the link doesn’t pertain to the question that Cecil was answering.
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[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 05-11-2001 at 02:20 PM]
Has anyone ever heard of identical twins having mirror-image fingerprints? It’s what I always thought until The Straight Dope, God bless it, enlightened me, but I just wanted to know if anyone else heard this.
Why would that be nelamm? One might just as well expect having one twin be right-handed and the other left-handed, or one of the twins having organs reversed (i.e. heart on the right-hand side), which was one of the physical characteristics of James Bond’s nemesis Dr. No, if memory serves.
Some (not all) identical twins are mirror image, with one’s organs the wrong way around and everything. Since there is a resemblance between the fingerprints of twins, I dare say they’d also be mirrored, though still not identical when reversed.
There is also at least one condition unrelated to twinning that produces reversed organs (Kartaganer’s syndrome).
ah, sorry for not having linked to the original article. I hadn’t realize that the message boards will have threads that may not correspond to the current article, especially after enough time has passed.
I had read a while back (I don’t remember where, unfortunately) that the condition where people’s internal organs are flipped from “normal” people is caused by genetic mutation or something else having to do with genes, rather than because they were born as part of identical twins. I don’t think there’s any reason why being part of identical twins would cause things to be mirror-imaged (it’s more a fallacy of our own visualization, that if you put twins side-by-side, you feel like there should be a virtual mirror between them, and consequently, they should have mirror-imaged features).
Besides, what happens if you have identical triplets?
Which brings up a question, are there any statistics about identical multi-births > 2? I’d think that it’s very rare, much more different from your usual multi-births, I’d think.
As I said, some identical twins are mirrors. It depends on when and how the original embryo divides.
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a Lord Peter Wimsey short story about a reversed twin - can’t remember the name of it just now, but it was a fun read.