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So, for fingerprints, have actual similarity studied been performed on a sample size large enough to draw conclusions about the test of the population?

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There’s a long history of fingerprint identification in law enforcement. That’s a far bigger sample size than any academic study could hope for.

On the other hand, the issue here seems to be less about how unique fingerprints are, and more about how unique the machine’s reading of a fingerprint is. That has more to do with the machine than the biology.

It is all based on the way the machines read our fingerprints. Only a very few specific data points are stored by the machines and not the entire fingerprint itself(guess it is called minutiae). This loss of information increases the probability for false positives.

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