Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Can biometrics differentiate Identical twins?

I had not given much thought on whether genetically identical twins have the same fingerprints until a close friend of mine gave birth to twins. It seems that they differ as fingerprints develop as a combination of genes and the development environment such as nutrition, position, rate of growth of fingers and blood pressure during pregnancy. More can be read from this article “Do identical twins have different fingerprints?”. It is for similar reasons that the iris patterns are different.  Nevertheless facial recognition will not be able to distinguish either twin in a large percentage of identical twins. Identical twins may have minor facial differences like position of moles and so on.
If facial recognition is relied upon then either twin an easily impersonate the other. This happens to be the most common form of identification used today. A twin also will be privy to the same set of personal information about each other which could be used to befuddle knowledge based verification.
Now to the crucial question. Can a DNA test positively identify each twins? At the moment the answers seems to be No. More can be read from this article Genetic Differences Between Identical Twins.

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