The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (40 page)

Patterson, Richter, Gnerre, Lander, and Reich, “Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees,”
Nature
441 (2006), 1103 -1108.

Name changed to protect the privacy of the protagonist.

The Stella Awards recognize the most frivolous civil lawsuits, such as the diabetic obese man who sued McDonald’s.
www.StellaAwards.com

Name changed to protect the privacy of the protagonist.

Researchers were trying to determine whether chalcone synthase (CHS) was the rate-limiting enzymatic step in anthocyanin biosynthesis, the pathway that makes petunias purple. They
overexpressed
CHS DNA in petunias, expecting more purple, or no change—but instead got white or splotchy flowers. They measured CHS protein levels; the levels were far
lower
than normal, confounding common sense! Thus, from a failed experiment, the hypothesis of gene silencing was born.

NP-Complete describes a large class of problems in computer science. The good news is that a solution to any one of them would provide a solution to all; the bad news is that in forty years, no one has found a solution to even one. NP-Complete problems are often easy to identify, and once a problem is shown to fall in this possibly impossible category, the researcher is spared a frustrating wild goose chase. UC-Santa Cruz professor Scott Brandt often tells his students of his last days in industry, when his boss asked him to solve a difficult problem. He quickly determined that the problem was NP-Complete, and that no solution would be forthcoming. His boss said, “That’s not good enough. Work on it some more!” Shortly thereafter, the frustrated professor returned to the academic life.

Sex is a choice a species can make, an evolutionary path a
species
can take. We do not intend to imply that
any
creature can choose between sexual or asexual reproduction modes. Having learned to clone mammals, humans have become the first creature that is able to make this choice on an individual, conscious basis.

National Center for Science Education, “The List of Steves,”
http://ncse.com/taking-action/list-steves
.

Pause for a moment to consider what else koalas might be doing with their
enormous fleshy tube
s . . .

Zap Car is a play on Zipcar, the laudable car-sharing company with a fleet of low-emisson vehicles.

Who else is in there?

HapMap Project: A catalog of genetic differences among populations around the world. Three million point mutations have been identified; medical advances are one of the many benefits expected to emerge from the HapMap Project. ScienceDaily has a fascinating article about the project:
http://tinyurl.com/23qpymp

See “Evolving Cancer” (p. 171) for more about the battles our bodies wage against cancer.

Sounds like a rehab program: “New Beginnings.”

In fact, humans are evolving faster than ever before.

For more on human evolution, read Rapid Evolution, p. 211.

Note the beauty of this number.