Years after Ronald was imprisoned, DNA evidence proved that Jenniferhad been raped by...

Years after Ronald was imprisoned, DNA evidence proved that Jennifer
had been raped by another man. In the U.S., DNA has helped to overturn
hundreds of convictions, and 70% of those involved
eyewitness testimony. It's not just our memories of crimes
that can become contaminated. It's the memories that tell us who we are
and where we came from. Researchers interviewed
a group of 14-year-olds, and then, decades later, asked them
to recall their teenage years. What their relationship with their parents
was like, how they had felt about sex
and religion, what activities they had enjoyed. Their memories, it turned out,
were uniformly poor. For most memories, no better than chance. So this poses the question:
Why would we have a memory system that is so unreliable and error-prone
if it was designed to remember the past?