The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (4 page)

Wendy’s Review

After at least a month of public review, I sort the Slush Pile based on popularity and begin reading through the submissions for that month. I refer to the moderator comments and decide whether each story is novel enough, and amusing enough, to write into a Darwin Award, Honorable Mention, or Personal Account. Approximately ten to fifteen stories per month are selected to enter the permanent archive.

The Final Cut

But that’s not the end of the process! In fact, it’s a new beginning, for stories in the archive enjoy a far greater audience than when they first appeared in the Slush Pile. Visitors read five million stories per month, and mistakes, corrections, and confirmations are frequently reported. The Darwin Awards are continually updated (or removed) based on new information, and this final review process continues for as long as the story remains on the website.

The accounts in this book have all been subject to this public scrutiny and are accurate to the best of my knowledge. But because the Darwin Awards are dynamic, they are not guaranteed to be entirely accurate, nor in their final form.

As you read the tales contained herein, keep in mind the lengthy submission process, as well as the care with which each gem was culled from dozens of competitors and honed to its current form.

H
ISTORY OF THE
D
ARWIN
A
WARDS

The origin of the first Darwin Award is obscure.

I fancifully hypothesized that the collective processing power of connected computers that formed the early Internet gave rise to an electronic consciousness, and that the Darwin Awards were this artificial life-form’s first successful attempt at humor. But recently, more information has come to light.

According to Google’s Usenet archives, the first citation in August 1985 referred to the fellow who pulled a soda machine onto himself while trying to shake loose a free can. The second citation was five years later, when the Urban Legend of the JATO Rocket Car surfaced. The author of that Usenet posting, Paul Vixie, credited Charles Haynes. I didn’t know how to contact Paul Vixie, or who he was. Along came Greg Lindahl, who opined, “Paul Vixie? Everybody knows who he is, he maintains BIND, which holds the Internet together.” So Greg wrote Paul an email. Paul, a consummate pack rat, produced a 1991 email from Charles Haynes in which Charles said that he heard the term from Bob Ayers: “We normally sit around talking about Darwin Awards after a hard day’s rock climbing. I wonder why…” At that point, the trail grew cold. Greg followed a few more leads, but was unable to track down earlier Darwin Awards.

My involvement with the Darwin Awards began in 1993. My cousin Ian emailed me one, and the tongue-in-cheek look at human evolution amused and tickled my scientific funny bone. I wanted more! But I could only find five, and tracing the Darwin Awards to their lair proved fruitless.

In 1993, I began writing new vignettes for my website as a hobby. I sent out newsletters, encouraged submissions, discussions, and voting. My hobby became a consuming passion, as I
assumed the alter ego “Darwin” and debated philosophy with readers. These conversations led to the refinement of the concept of a Darwin Award.

I let the Darwin Awards grow under the guidance of the readers. I pruned stories when they told me my judgment was flawed; for instance, if the deceased was the victim of a bizarre accident rather than his own poor judgment. We argued fine points such as whether offspring or advanced age ruled out a candidate. And through the years, I protected my audience from submissions that would make a hardened criminal cringe! I said NO to pictures of gory accidents, sad tales of impoverished people, politically biased stories, racial stereotypes, and just plain mean submissions.

And I dealt with flames sympathetically. When community or family members wrote, I respectfully listened to their point of view. Our discussions sometimes led to that particular story being removed. Other times, the family realized that their tragedy could have the small solace of helping others avoid the same mistake, if they let it be used as a “safety lesson.”

Part of the success of the Darwin Awards lies in the fact that we see a little of ourselves in every story. As one of the world’s biggest klutzes, my final hour will likely find me clutching a Darwin Award. If so, I know my family and friends will laugh through their tears, and say, “That’s just like Wendy. Oh, she was such an idiot!”

In 2000, my passion for this once-obscure Internet humor led to the publication of the first Darwin Awards book. And now
The Darwin Awards Movie
has been produced, starring Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder. But the heart and soul of the Darwin Awards is still on the Internet.

All the stories are available free on the website, updated with facts and comments from readers. The Slush Pile is brimming with new submissions. My goal is to maintain a network of people who love the Darwin Awards, and to keep this cultural icon true to its origins.

S
URVIVAL OF THE
F
ITTEST

Evolution is the process of a species changing over time to better suit its environment. The mechanism of evolution was referred to as “survival of the fittest” by Alfred Russell Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution. He thought that the term “natural selection,” coined by Charles Darwin, incorrectly implied a directed force behind the selection—i.e., an intelligent design. In a sense, what is most intelligent about the process of evolution is its utter simplicity: the ability to improve a species incrementally over thousands of generations, all through differences in individual rates of reproduction, aided by the raw material of random mutations.

Evolution gradually eliminates drivers who weave around on the freeway while yakking on a cellphone or typing on a laptop, or the more spectacularly foolish acts that earn Darwin Awards, like the men who tried to see who could hang the longest off a busy freeway overpass.
¹⁰

There are many biological questions answered by evolution. For instance, humans apparently began wearing clothes seventy thousand years ago, according to the silent testimony of the lice that inhabit us. The human head louse lives on the scalp, while the body louse lives in clothing. The two lice genetically diverged when we began wearing fabric clothing, creating a
new habitat. Researchers are now trying to date when humans lost their body hair, by analyzing the genes of pubic lice.

Yet despite the evidence, creationists continue to use squirrelly logic (squirrelly: cunningly unforthcoming or reticent) to claim that there is no such thing as evolution. So let’s use our furry little friends, the squirrels, to illustrate the principles of natural selection.

In order for “survival of the fittest” to cause a species to evolve there are four requirements. 1) The species must show variation, and 2) that variation must be inheritable. 3) Not all members of the population survive to reproduce, but 4) the inherited characteristics of some members make them more likely to do so.

Wild adult squirrels can live about four years, and they have two litters of three pups every summer. Given these numbers, a single pair of squirrels could multiply to sixty-four quadrillion in thirty-three years if they all survived. That’s more than enough squirrels to blanket the entire surface of the planet! Obviously, most squirrels do not reproduce so prolifically.

If you spend time watching squirrels, you will see that some are fatter than others, some hide better, and some are more aggressive about obtaining food. Because not all squirrels survive to reproduce, there is a selective pressure that favors inherited traits that play a role in survival. The parents of each new generation are the most successful squirrels from the past summer. Thus, successful traits become more prevalent over time, and less successful traits eventually disappear.

Like squirrels, not all humans survive to reproduce. Case in point is the human who dies clutching a Darwin Award. Although we regret his passing, we claim (tongue in cheek) that he has done the rest of us a favor, by sacrificing himself, thereby ensuring that our children don’t have to breed with his children in the next generation.

O
RIGIN OF THE
N
OVEL
S
PECIES
N
OODLEOUS DOUBLEOUS
: E
VIDENCE FOR
I
NTELLIGENT
D
ESIGN

Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.

Abstract

Penne rigate
spontaneously inserts into
Rigatoni
(order
pasta
) under liquid to gas transition conditions of H
₂
O to create the previously unobserved species
Noodleous doubleous
. The estimated probability of this spontaneous generation event is too low to be explained by thermodynamics, and therefore apparently represents Intelligent Design.

Introduction

Intelligent Design advocates
^*
claim that patterns observed in nature with a sufficiently low probability of occurence provide direct evidence for intelligent design, i.e., God. Here I report evidence for the spontaneous formation of a new life form in a prebiotic
pasta
soup.

Materials and Methods

Two point five L of pre-filtered, activated carbon–filtered, and reverse-osmosis purified H
₂
O was poured into a 24.0 cm (inner diameter) 4.7 L open metal nonstick-coated container to a final depth of 5 cm, and brought to 100 degrees C (liquid to gas
transition). No NaCl was added. Forty pieces each of
Penne rigate
and
Rigatoni
were dropped into the boiling H
₂
O. At five-minute intervals the mixture was stirred with a flat lignin paddle. At ~18 minutes the mixture was stirred a final time and then poured through a rigid plastic netting (square holes, sizes 3 mm x 4 mm and 4 mm x 4 mm) to capture the final products.