How To Live With Uncertainty: Knowing We Can’t Know

The more we know, the more we think we can know, and so we reach out further, and when we want to know about things that we still can’t know, we are tempted to act as though we did.

Photo by Jamie Street

The more we know, the more we think we can know, and so we reach out further, and when we want to know about things that we still can’t know, we are tempted to act as though we did.

I was reading about DNA again — as you do — and how much our knowledge has advanced in this field over the past two decades. Not only can we now match samples more accurately, but we also need much less quantity of the sampled material to get a match. In fact, scientists have already been able to collect DNA from the air.

However, it is important to note that precisely because we need a lot less DNA material to extract a functional profile, the resulting profile won’t be as reliable as one built on a richer sample. Equally, the sample’s quality matters: the technology may be there to discern an individual’s DNA from a contaminated sample, but the quality of the DNA will be much lower than if extracted from a properly obtained sample.