Thread by @AdamRutherford

Dear all, A thread on bad science: The story doing the rounds about the identification of Jack the Ripper via DNA from a shawl is doing the rounds again.
1/n

It is predicated on the publication of this paper
bit.ly/2ULxp2Q

Which is the study first described in 2014 in a book and in the Mail on Sunday.
3/n

On #bbcinsidescience we forensically took it apart, notably that there was no paper for us to dissect, but the author came on the radio and we discussed it
bbc.in/2UHz9tJ
4/n

I asked him if this evidence would stand up in court if the murder had taken place recently, and he said no. So why do we even vaguely consider that 130 years later it would be valid?
5/n

None of that matters anyway, cos the provenance of the shawl is comical and would not be considered believable by even the most lazy historian.
6/n

Furthermore, even if it was really present at the murder scene, and bizarrely was kept (none of Catherine Eddowes' other clothes were), and kept unwashed, the way it has been handled since would render DNA analysis cripplingly problematic.
7/n

I went further in my book A Brief History of EveryOne Who Ever Lived,
pointing out that the original stats were impossible due to the size of the database they were referencing for mtDNA, and that the sample had been mislabelled.

amzn.to/2UGODy5

Not only that, but the owner of the shawl is photographed in the Mail holding it with bare hands. We later found out that Catherine Eddowes' descendants had been in its presence recently, therefore making potential contamination even worse.

9/n

As this has been doing the rounds, another Ripper historian has claimed that the shawl was in the back of his cortina for a few years and in his shed - also not great for getting quality DNA off it.

10/n

You might hope that the new paper might clarify some of this, but it does not. It doesn't list the primers used, and has scant methods that would alleviate such scientific doubts.
11/n

In short, this is terrible science, and terrible history. It doesn't warrant discussion in the popular press, let alone in an academic journal.
12/n

There is a colossal industry around the murders of five women by the man known as Jack the Ripper. The question of his identity, I am confident, will never be known.
13/n

Nonsense like this paper and a gullible media does nothing but foment scientific and historical illiteracy built upon the grotesque romanticisation of the brutal murders of five women. And we should all try harder to be better than this.
14/14

15/14, Addendum, @HallieRubenhold has just published a book about the women, called the Five. As she says, they were not pieces in a puzzle, they were vulnerable women
amzn.to/2UN3R4V

@HallieRubenhold 16/14 Addendum 2: @Turi__King, the scientist largely responsible for the high bar of forensic DNA historical cold-cases with Richard III, saw an early version of the shawl paper and said: 'it was unpublishable due to lack of scientific content or explanation of methods!'