Today's judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver's license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from excavated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’.

Khan analyzed the data and was relieved to find that his son’s DNA was “pretty boring.” In the brave new world of personal genomics, “boring” is the new “great.”

I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible.

Do you know why it's so hard to solve a Redneck murder? Because the DNA's all the same and there's no dental records.

[W]hat does DNA do? As biological molecules go, not very much.

It is easy to think of DNA as the information by which a body makes another body like itself. It would be more correct to see a body as the vehicle used by DNA to make more DNA like itself.

Sure enough, the notion of decoding their personal DNA appealed to more than a few well-off individuals, even if it amounted to the scientific equivalent of purchasing a vanity license plate.

We are closer to understanding ourselves and our environment than we were two centuries or two thousand years ago, so we are definitely more equipped with knowledge and information than the Buddha was, or even Darwin was. Darwin didn’t know about DNA, we know about DNA. Just imagine if we could go back in time and inform Darwin about DNA or inform Buddha about it. What they were dealing with was intuition, with a logical breakdown of what they had observed. We have scientific tools for those things. We are using the energies of the past to create something new and I’m very confident that what I’ve done has never been done before. I feel no pressure about it, I’m just taking the next step.

He also expresses his opinion about the Vedas that “whatever their original and/or secondary purposes may have been, they were not intended as data bases for latter-day historians”, and suggests that “whatever historical evidence they contain, therefore, can only be gleaned by a careful, philologically well-grounded reading of the lines – and between the lines – of the texts” (HOCK 2005:303).He emphasizes the need for “other” and “better” evidence (than astronomical references in the Rigveda) “to establish a date for the Rigveda” (HOCK 2005:303) and (than isolated words in the Avesta) to determine “historical movements in the Indo-Iranian linguistic territory” (HOCK 2005:295).

One of the big ways that data becomes useful is when it is tied to other data.

The reason for this is simple: data is only as useful as the questions it can help answer. Joining, linking, and graphing datasets together allows one to ask more and different kinds of questions.

What is found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier ones. While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. While DNA could be claimed to be both simple and elegant, it must be remembered that DNA almost certainly originated fairly close to the origin of life when things were necessarily simple or they would not have got going. Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

Lack of mobile laboratories for DNA tests is a problem. You realise that there are crimes that are not investigated because of such challenges.