Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete

I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:

What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is a very artificial material. It is unlikely that our ancestors would have encountered such smooth material often in their day-to-day lives. Therefore there would not have been much selective pressure to develop a good grip on glass or similarly smooth material. Tree branches, rocks, fur, bones, and other materials that might find their way into the grasp of a hominid or ape are much rougher than glass.

Clearly follow up research is needed. How do fingerprints behave when applied to other materials, and how does wetness affect their utility?

What did pique my interest was a different version of the story (or headline, at least): Urban Myth Disproved: Fingerprints Do Not Improve Grip Friction. I had not considered that this was an “urban myth.” If it hadn’t been tested, then it was an hypothesis, and in need of testing. I don’t really hang with the “what good are fingerprints” crowd, so I don’t really have a grip —ridge-augmented or not — on how this viewpoint was being advertised. In any case, though, I agree that the process has been mischaracterized — the media has sensationalized the discovery by casting the results as some sort of paradigm shift rather than an incremental additional of knowledge.

What interested me most about this story is how the media channels science news stories into a few themes with which they feel comfortable. Debunking a commonly held myth is one of those themes. While this story hold a kernel of that theme – it is more accurate to say, in my opinion, not that the grip hypothesis is wrong but that the story is more complex.

That is a much more useful theme for science reporting – because the story is almost always more complex – more complex than the typical publish understanding, and even of our previous scientific understanding.

Likewise, it is more meaningful in many cases to portray our prior models and theories not as “wrong” but as incomplete. Sometimes they are wrong, but that needs to be distinguished from ideas that are oversimplified and therefore incomplete, but not wrong.