The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (9 page)

Emergency services was called to attend to a motor-vehicle fire on the Monash Freeway, a beltway around Melbourne. On arrival they found an agitated young man watching his car go up in smoke.

After extinguishing the fire, they inspected the small four-cylinder vehicle, which was tightly packed with camping gear. Upon raising the hood, they discovered the cause of the fire: smoldering camping gear that had been stashed in the engine bay, including a bottle of gas used for a portable barbecue!

The driver explained that he was taking an extended camping trip and had run out of room in the passenger compartment, so he decided to use all that “wasted space” in the engine bay.

Our Aussie correspondent says, “I reckon that the only waste of space was between this bloke’s ears. If the fireys hadn’t arrived when they did, we would have had the first Ford in orbit.”

Reference: Channel 9 News

Like a true country child, Tom was born, born to be wild…even though he had grown up to be a county sheriff. The wild one had taken to the road in the company of another lawman and his brother, riding his hog without a helmet to the big motorcycle rally in South Dakota.

No road trip would be complete without a commemorative photograph. With the wind streaming through his hair at sixty-five miles per hour, Tom decided the conditions were right. He took his camera and turned around to take a picture of the bike behind him. This of course required the bold Harley rider to take his hands off the handlebars.

As a state trooper described it later, the motorcycle drifted to the right and headed for a telephone pole. Tom lost control trying to wrestle the bike back onto the highway and went sailing through the air, probably wishing he had worn his helmet after all. When he landed, he broke his eye socket, four ribs, and a shoulder bone, and suffered other head injuries and road rash. There’s no word on whether he got the photograph or not.

Tom had been following a beloved motto: “No Helmets 4 Harleys.” Although he miraculously survived, he nearly proved another adage: “There are old riders, and bold riders, but no old bold riders!”

Reference: Associated Press,
Casper Star-Tribune

Luke was pushing sixty when youthful memories of
Easy Rider
brought him to the local Harley-Davidson dealership. “It was a mid-age crisis,” he told a reporter. “I’d see dudes with women and thought a motorcycle would put me in like Flynn.”

When the dealer delivered the gleaming new hog to Luke’s front door, his eyes lit up like a boy receiving a Red Ryder two-hundred-shot carbine air rifle with a compass in the stock—and no grownups around to warn him that his new toy could put an eye out!

Luke started the engine and felt its pulsing, guttural power. It had been thirty years since he had been in the saddle of a babe-magnet like this. He revved the engine and listened to it purr. He kicked it into gear and roared off down the road. Born to be wild!

Ten seconds and a tenth of a mile later, Luke slammed into a neighbor’s utility trailer at forty miles per hour as he tried to remember how the throttle worked. The cops who investigated told him it was a miracle he was alive. He survived with just a few broken ribs. “Oh my God,” he said, “I hurt in places I didn’t know could hurt.”

Insurance covered repairs to the bike and the trailer. Luke sold the restored dream machine for $800 less than he paid, but every few weeks, he continues to receive mailings from his complimentary membership in the Harley Owners Group. Some dreams die hard.

Reference: AP

My father and uncle were reminiscing about their youth, and they shared a rather Darwinian story. In their twenties, they succeeded in assembling one great car out of three junkers. After they accomplished this, they had enough parts left over to make a second working car—but only barely. This car was missing most of its floorboards, so they could see the ground flash past while driving. They called this a feature rather than a flaw, and decided to have fun with it.

In the fifties, high-powered explosives were still easy to acquire. So, with quarter sticks of dynamite readily available, my future father and his brother drove around throwing dynamite sticks through the gaps in the floorboards, basically scaring the daylights out of people in cars behind them. THIS WAS FUN! They even shortened the fuses to make sure that the sticks would “safely” explode before the car behind them drove over them.

When I heard this story, my first response was, “Weren’t you concerned about the gas tank below you?” To my amazement, they both looked rather surprised, exchanged glances, and said, “We never thought of that!”

My grandfather just laughed and walked out of the room.

Reference: Eric Vane, Personal Account

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

I am a keen mountain biker, and was the proud owner of a fairly expensive mountain bike. My bike was fitted with “V” brakes, which are extremely effective though prone to squealing.

My dear brother decided to have a ride on my bike one day while I was out. He noticed the squealing as he cycled down the hill we live on, toward the invariably busy crossroads at the bottom. Being a helpful sort, he headed back home and proceeded to pour a generous amount of 3-IN-ONE oil onto the brakes, before once more setting off down the hill.

The oil worked! The only reported squealing came from my brother, as he slammed into the side of a moving VW Beetle. To this day he sports an impressive scar running from his eye socket to just past his ear.

And yes, the bike was totaled.

Reference: Personal Account

During my second year of residency in orthopedic surgery, a thirty-five-year-old roofer was admitted to the hospital after falling from a roof. His boss had told him to tie himself off to prevent a fall, but he was an experienced roofer and knew that wouldn’t happen. Nevertheless, he fell off the roof, fracturing his pelvis, his right femur, and his left tibia. An avoidable accident, but certainly not worthy of a Darwin Award. The patient underwent surgery, and was discharged from the hospital after an uneventful three-day postoperative course.

So far, so good.

The patient returned by Care Flight nine hours later, looking worse than he had the first time. He had torn the external fixator from one side of his pelvis, fractured his femur below the rod that had been used to fix it the first time, and fractured his tibia above the rod used to fix that, as well. And he hadn’t been anywhere near a roof.

It turned out that he and his brother-in-law had decided to go barhopping to celebrate his recovery. Since he was stuck in a wheelchair, they figured the best way to get him from bar to bar was to
duct tape his wheelchair
to the bed of the pickup truck. The plan worked perfectly all evening, as they got more and more soused. Now, if only they had duct taped the roofer to his wheelchair….

They were on their way home when his brother-in-law took a corner too fast. The roofer shot out of his wheelchair and landed on the street.

The patient was repaired, and he recovered fully, much to the annoyance of natural selection. I don’t know if he ties himself off when roofing these days, but he hasn’t been back to my hospital. I’m not sure how long he’ll remain in the gene pool, though, and he certainly deserves an Honorable Mention.

Reference: Personal Account

Stephen Darksyde, Science Writer

N
ot everyone is comfortable with the idea that humans are animals, or that we’re apes. But the fact is, the cells that make up our bodies have nuclei and organelles such as mitochondria, we’re capable of locomotion, and unlike plants we consume other organisms to survive. That’s all it takes for an organism to be classified as an animal. And we’re mammals, primates to be exact, with large brains and no external tails. That puts us in the class of hominids along with our closest cousins: the gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan, and gibbon.

But humans do possess a number of unique attributes in our form and structure, the most obvious being that we are obligatory bipeds: We walk on two legs, and we don’t have much choice about it. We’re not the only large vertebrates to walk on two legs—dinosaurs, birds, and kangaroos are bipedal, but they’re like teeter-totters, with their upper and lower bodies balanced over the fulcrum of their hips. Humans are like pogo sticks, with our heads balanced precariously atop a double-curved spine. This anatomy is unique in all the animal kingdom.

Our form of bipedalism comes with many drawbacks that
four-legged animals don’t suffer from. Fallen arches, shin splints, hernias, and back problems are all caused by walking upright. Given the high price we pay for walking on two legs, it’s tough to imagine what original, critical advantage was gained by our proto-bipedal ancestors, whose bodies were even less adapted to the rigors of bipedal locomotion.

Why we became bipedal is mystery enough, yet other oddities are even harder to explain!

Our unique human qualities also include being bald and chubby. We are nearly hairless, and to the detriment of our self-esteem, we carry a high body-fat content compared to most mammals. Much of the fat is stored just under our skin. Also unusual is that humans can control breathing beyond the capabilities of most mammals.

Enter Elaine Morgan, a feisty Welsh feminist and writer. In the early 1970s, Morgan began to develop and promote a controversial hypothesis seeking to unite a number of human oddities within a single explanatory framework. Her hypothesis is that human ancestors lived in close proximity to water for extended periods, and spent so much time beach-combing, wading, and diving for foodstuffs that they evolved to suit their environment. We’re not merely apes, we’re Aquatic Apes!

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is astonishing, but Morgan makes some good points. For starters, take bipedalism: If a chimp tried to maintain an erect posture, the physiological consequences would not bode well for the animal. Over time it would incur problems keeping its blood pressure up, and suffer skeletal damage as it repeatedly moved from an upright to a reclined position. But if a chimp or a gorilla were wading on two legs and supported by water, those problems would be
greatly reduced or eliminated. And there is an immediate survival benefit for a bipedal ape wading in three or four feet of water: The animal would have its head above the surface and be able to breathe! Given an immediate benefit, a new food supply to exploit, and the advantages of walking on two legs in water, natural selection would have a platform from which to work—and perhaps eventually craft apes that were obligatory bipeds.

The Aquatic Ape hypothesis explains our high body-fat content as more than energy storage: It represents critical insulation. Body hair prevents heat loss only when an animal is dry; however, a wet, furry mammal loses heat almost as fast as one with no hair. Among aquatic mammals—whales, walruses, and seals—hair is sparse, just as it is on our bodies. Most large mammals store subcutaneous fat for one of two purposes: seasonally for hibernation, or year-round because they’re partially or fully aquatic.

Is the Aquatic Ape hypothesis valid? Any useful scientific hypothesis must make predictions that can be tested. If these predictions are validated through observation and experiment, then the hypothesis gradually becomes a scientific theory. The more data the theory unifies under a single coherent explanation, and the more successful its predictions, the stronger it becomes. If the evidence comes from independent sources that all interlock with the theory in a consistent manner, and this consistency keeps up as more and more information is discovered, then that theory will become part of the scientific consensus and you really have a winner.

Charles Darwin’s original idea is an example of a hypothesis that became a theory. The evidence for common descent, one of the key predictions of the theory of natural selection, in
cludes mountains of empirical data from the fossil record, molecular biology, and physiology. Common descent is so solidly supported by so many independent lines of evidence that it’s considered an inferred fact by almost all scientists today.

To explain a few existing anatomical structures and physiological processes, the Aquatic Ape Theory is satisfactory. But we have little other evidence to support it.

In particular, the fossil record does not advance the Aquatic Ape conjecture. We have only a few fossil scraps of human ancestors from the time before bipedalism was well developed three million years ago, represented by the archetype
A. afarensis,
a.k.a. Lucy. And that’s the critical period when an aquatic ancestral phase would have had to exist for it to explain the origin of bipedal locomotion. Even if we had a complete skeleton from the exact time and place required, how would we distinguish a partly aquatic hominid from a close relative that was not aquatic at all? It would be tough to peg a sea otter, a beaver, or a polar bear as partially aquatic from fossils, if we’d never seen such an animal in the flesh.

Some scientists think that the case Morgan makes has been overstated. Maybe there is a bit of elitism going on with a few of her critics; Elaine Morgan is not a paleontologist or an anthropologist by training. But some of the critics also put forth alternative explanations for the anatomical congruencies between humans and aquatic mammals. For example, people do store more fat than most of our land-dwelling mammalian relatives, but maybe that’s because it’s an effective reservoir of fluids, energy, and critical trace nutrients, all of which would be useful for a creature that moved from the steamy jungle to the arid plains.

For now, the Aquatic Ape scenario remains an intriguing hypothesis and not much else. But science moves in mysterious ways. One can never predict what will be found next.

Now that we’ve investigated the possibility that humans evolved to live in a liquid habitat, let’s dive into stories featuring water, where one soon sees that our evolutionary adaptations are not yet complete.