The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool (21 page)
Read The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool Online
Authors: Wendy Northcutt
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #General, #Stupidity, #Essays
Any story that begins, “Well I was building a pipe bomb,” can never end well. Lou is, on the surface, a bright and successful individual with an appetite for building new things. Things like axles and pipe bombs. One Sunday, bored and angry that the Broncos were losing, Lou decided to head to his basement workshop to try and build a bomb.
He welded a pipe closed on one end. Taking every precaution one can take when one is illegally creating high explosives, Lou was smart enough to let the metal cool before he put the powder into the pipe. When he was done packing the gunpowder, he realized that he had run out of welding rod. And so he set the half-finished pipe bomb on the scrap-metal heap for later.
Pipe bombs, like any other half-done task, have a tendency to stay undone for a great deal of time. That’s what happened with Lou’s project. He simply forgot about the pipe bomb for six long months, summer and fall.
“He forgot about the bomb project for six long months.”
A few days before hunting season Lou was loading his hunting gear into his pride-and-joy Ford Bronco, when he noticed that a shaft was cracked. Being an expert welder, he knew he could fix the cracked pipe himself. Need I say more?
Lou reached into his scrap-metal pile, pulled out a pipe, pulled down his welding hood, and struck an arc. He remembers a loud bang and not much else.
Shrapnel embedded itself up to the rafters of the third floor of his house! A piece of shrapnel even blew through Lou’s welding hood, missing his empty skull by half an inch.
No good ever comes from the phrase “Well I was building a pipe bomb.”
Reference: Eyewitness account by Mike
“We are all born ignorant but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
—Benjamin Franklin
At Risk Survivor: Roundabout Rocket
Unconfirmed
Two teens were playing with miniature rockets that they had acquired goodness-knows-where. Between the two of them the idea was formed to tie a string around the rocket, tether it to the backyard birdbath, and thereby cause it to whirl around the sky. Since no sturdy string was at hand, one had the brilliant idea to swipe some freely available yarn from his mother.
The scheme was laid.
They lit the rocket and skittered back from the wheel of sparks they expected. But their expectations were dashed. Instead of watching the rocket spin around its tether, a different experience was in store for them. The flame of the rocket propulsion quickly burned through the yarn, and the rocket found a new trajectory straight toward a vulnerable stomach.
The boy was alternately clutching his bruised gut in pain and smacking his shirt to remove the rocket and extinguish the flames. He came away from the experience with a large contusion and a ruined, and hastily hidden, shirt. The boys never told their parents what they had done.
Here’s the kicker: They had graduated from high school the day before! Heaven knows how.
Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account by a reader who says,
“The protagonist is my ex-boyfriend. I’m glad I am no longer in line to assist in propagating his genes!”
At Risk Survivor: Remember the
Hindenburg
Unconfirmed
Remember science class? Remember the time the teacher dropped crystals of sodium into a bowl of water? Students watch in awe as the element skips about, fizzing as it burns. Well, for one teacher this tidy little demonstration didn’t go exactly to plan.
A glass safety screen is usually placed between the bowl and the students so random bits of sodium don’t jump out and scald them. This particular teacher decided to put the screen over the bowl, lifting it up to drop in sodium. He did this several times, so all the children could see. When he was done he removed the screen from the bowl.
2 Na + 2 H
2
O = 2 NaOH + H
2
Sodium in water produces hydrogen gas. And this teacher had the bad judgment to have a Bunsen burner burning near the edge of his desk. When he lifted the glass screen the accumulated hydrogen exploded!
“They were picking bits out of the ceiling for a fortnight.”
The students were just leaving the classroom when they heard an almighty BANG. They turned back to see the teacher on his ass looking shell-shocked, with bits of the overhead fluorescent lighting falling down from the ceiling. None of the students was hurt (except aches from laughing), and the teacher really should have known better than to let hydrogen build up.
But that said, another teacher in the same department accidentally let a senior student make nitroglycerine. They were picking bits of lab equipment out of the ceiling for a fortnight. This submission only qualifies for an Honorable Mention since, despite their best efforts, these science teachers remain in the gene pool.
Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account
“It’s not getting any smarter out there. You have to come to terms with stupidity, and make it work for you.”
—Frank Zappa
At Risk Survivor: Hot Rod
Confirmed True by Darwin
29 JANUARY 2007, OREGON
At two-thirty
A.M
. a Volkswagen Jetta was hot-rodding down the interstate at speeds exceeding a hundred miles per hour. Suddenly the vehicle lost traction, cartwheeled, narrowly avoided a hundred-foot plunge into the Clackamas River, and smashed through the wall of a garage.
The unfortunate resident leapt out of bed in alarm and rushed down the hall and into the garage. A car was jammed halfway through the wall! It was resting on the passenger side, and the air was thick with gasoline fumes. And someone was rummaging around in the backseat!
“There’s gas, there’s gas!” the resident shouted.
“I need my knife,” the figure yelled back. His knife? The figure flicked open a lighter, apparently the better to see. The flame jumped from the lighter to the backseat, from the backseat to the front, and the whole interior of the car was in flames!
A bold and heroic neighbor grabbed a fire extinguisher, shattered the back window, and sprayed inside. Just as the driver was pulled free through a rear window, the fumes exploded! The car kept burning until it was extinguished by professional firefighters.
The driver, twenty-two, was lucky to survive with minor burns. He was cited for driving under the influence with a suspended license.
After the excitement was over, the unfortunate residents of the apartment went to a friend’s house for the remainder of the night. “We needed a nap.”
Reference:
The Oregonian,
oregonlive.com
6 MARCH 2007, TEXAS
In a similar incident a flaming car crashed into a house in Waco. What happened? The vehicle had run out of gas earlier in the evening, and after replenishing the tank from a gas can, the driver tossed the “empty can” into the backseat. Later, while searching for the overturned gas can, he flicked a lighter…giving a new meaning to the term
hot rod
.
Since discretion is the better part of valor, the brave driver abandoned the burning car and watched as it rolled into a nearby house. One wonders just how he explained things to the homeowner. “I dropped the Olympic torch while delivering it to Beijing”?
Reference:
Waco Tribune-Herald
At Risk Survivor: Helmet Head
Confirmed True by Darwin
12 AUGUST 2006, INDIANA
At a party somewhere between Nashville and Bloomington, a young man was drinking and watching people set off fireworks. Suddenly a great idea occurred to him. He could improve upon this amateur fireworks display! He put down his drink and set to work.
“He put down his drink and set to work.”
When it comes to fireworks, your brain can’t be much safer than sheltered inside a football helmet. He found an old helmet, duct-taped a mortar-style firework to the top, put it on his head, and lit the fuse….
A bright flash of light nearly blinded observers. When their eyes recovered, they saw him lying on the ground, unconscious and bleeding. Astoundingly, the twenty-one-year-old survived this party stunt with only a mild concussion and burns.
His helmet, however, was blown to pieces.
Reference:
Bloomington Herald-Times,
WSBT.com, Associated Press
Reader Comments:
“That sounds fun!” “Fourth of July, Darwin-style.”
Darwin Award: Garden Bomb
STATUS: Unconfirmed, Possible Urban Legend
2006, AUSTRALIA
In the suburbs of Adelaide, the “undisputed cannabis capital of Australia,” sleeping residents were awakened by a resounding explosion. A smoking hole was found in a neighbor’s backyard, still reeking of the pungent odor of marijuana. Police found the remains of a man at the bottom of the hole.
“A smoking hole was found in the backyard, still reeking of marijuana.”
Darwin says: Is this an urban legend? I received many skeptical comments, including some from residents of Adelaide. I found a promising lead purporting to be an Australian police document from the relevant territorial force; however, their entire online media center is offline at present. The veracity of each story relies on reader input, so contact Darwin to confirm or refute: www.DarwinAwards.com/book/contact.html
They learned that the deceased had set up a hidden hydroponic system in a large water tank buried in his backyard. He used a CO
2
generator—a small flame from a butane gas bottle—to improve plant growth. On this particular evening the man had climbed down into his garden paradise, only to find that the flame had gone out. Without knowing how many days the gas had been leaking into his, er, bomb, he relit the flame….
By Tom Arnold
Introduction
From the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien sprang legendary adventures of cunning warlocks, elegant Ents, monstrous Ringwraithes, sword-wielding heroes, beatific elves, and demonic villains. In 2001 they were brought to the big screen by the very real wizards of special effects, in a movie adaptation of
The Lord of the Rings
. These tales are considered sheer genius, unadulterated fun, and of course pure fantasy. But on the shores of a tiny island in the Pacific the ancient bones of a forgotten race lay buried in an Indonesian Middle Earth. A few years ago the fossils surfaced, and we realized Tolkien was right: Here there be Hobbits.
It struck the anthropological world like a lightning bolt: Anatomically modern humans,
Homo sapiens,
may have shared the planet with another human species as recently as twelve thousand years ago! Christened
Homo floresiensis
, or Flores Man, after the island on which it was discovered, the species is better known by the nickname “Hobbits.”
Debate now rages over Australian archaeologist Mike Morwood’s 2003 discovery. Are Hobbits truly a separate human species, or merely an extreme variant of modern humans?
Meet the Hobbits
Skeletons and Artifacts
The Hobbits’ skeletons and artifacts, ranging from 100,000 to 12,000 years old, present a confusing picture. They are perhaps best described as miniature
Homo erectus
, a species that lived 1.8 million to 250,000 years ago. But the Hobbit tools found by archaeologists are a much older design. They are similar to Oldawan flaked stone choppers used by
Australopithecus
3 to 2.3 million years ago, or tools used by
Homo habilis
2.3 to 1.6 million years ago. This discrepancy can be explained by a theory advanced by archaeologist Hallam Movius, who noticed that early prehistoric human sites east of a line through northern India produced only Oldawan-like chopper tools. One explanation is that
H. erectus
left Africa before the development of hand-ax technology. The Hobbits apparently hunted game, including pygmy elephant and giant rat, using these unsophisticated flaked stone choppers.
Hobbit Brains
The undisputed Hobbit celebrity is a nearly complete skull of a middle-aged female, known affectionately as “Flo.” Flo’s skull, like those of the other skeletons, is small. But the fact that these petite primates made stone tools and hunted large game suggests that their mental capacity was not small.
To shed light on this puzzle, the discrepancy between brain size and apparent intelligence, scientists sought more information about Hobbit brains. Brains are soft tissue, but their surface features sometimes leave impressions inside the skull. Those surface features reveal a lot about brain structure and complexity. So endo-casts, three-dimensional models of that interior, are often created to examine brain surface features.
Hobbit skulls were too fragile for traditional plaster casts, so a virtual endocast based on a CT scan was created by Dean Falk of Florida State University. Although the size of the brain was as small as a modern chimp’s, the shape was similar to that of
H. erectus erectus
. Of particular interest in the Hobbit brain was the enlargement of Brodmann’s area 10, which in modern humans is associated with planning.
Hobbits Only Recently Extinct
Unlike earlier hominid populations that disappeared when modern humans arrived, the Hobbit population may well have survived and coexisted with modern humans. Local island folklore describes the
ebu gogo
, a small creature that lived in the jungle, had a huge appetite, a limping walk, and spoke in a quiet, indistinct fashion. Could the folklore preserve a cultural memory of another human species? According to fossils evidence Morwood’s Hobbits disappeared about the time a local volcano erupted twelve thousand years ago. The eruption may have destroyed their habitat, or perhaps the Hobbits were caught unawares and, like Pompeii citizens, quickly engulfed by the eruption.
The discovery of a Hobbit shire complete with Hobbit bones, brains, and tools might seem to be conclusive evidence for the existence of these little people. But that is not how science works. The discovery challenges previously held theories that must be reconciled with the new data. The resulting scientific debates make a battle with Orcs seem tame by comparison.
Controversial Implication: We Were Not Alone
So why does the discovery of Hobbits intrigue archaeologists and paleoanthropologists? Prior to this discovery it was thought that humans have not shared the planet with another species of the genus
Homo
since 30,000 years before the founding of Rome. Modern humans and Neanderthals genetically diverged about 450,000 years ago. When Neanderthals (
Homo neanderthalensis
or
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
) died out (or were absorbed into the European population) 33,000 years ago, archaeological evidence indicates that we became the sole winner of a two-million-year
Survivor
competition against all other
Homo
species, such as
Homo habilis
and
Homo erectus
.
If the Hobbit hypotheses proposed by Morwood’s team are accurate, this widely accepted story will need to be rewritten. Since the field is fraught with contradictory evidence and conflicting scientific opinions, it will not be easy to rewrite the human story.
Ancestors of Humans
Paleoanthropologists by and large agree that
Homo ergaster
, an early form of
H. erectus
found in Africa, is the earliest direct ancestor to anatomically modern humans. Later
H. erectus
remains found outside of Africa are thought to represent an offshoot—an evolutionary dead end—rather than a link to modern humans, but this is still hotly debated.
It is also widely agreed that
Homo erectus
, as a distinct species, existed from 1.8 million years ago to about 250,000 years ago, with the Indonesian fossils dating from 1.6 million to 700,000 years ago. More recent finds, however, indicate that
Homo erectus
may have been living on Java less than 100,000 years ago. The latter dates would bolster the interpretations of Morwood and his colleagues.
Ancestors of Hobbits
Several fossil species have been suggested as the ancestors of the Hobbits. These include
Homo habilis
, Handy Man, or the ancient
Australopithecus
, of which Lucy is the most famous specimen. Until recently these ancestors seemed unlikely, because there was no evidence that either species had left Africa. However, recent finds in the Republic of Georgia indicate that a small tool-making hominid may have left Africa as early as 1.7 million years ago.
Controversy
The field of human evolution is a minefield of contentious opinions. Since the subject of human origins is emotional, bragging rights over who has discovered our oldest direct ancestor (the legendary missing link) can bring fame if not fortune to the discoverers. New discoveries and potentially new species can upset long-held views that earlier researchers had developed careers and reputations on. Thus, the Hobbit discovery was quickly dismissed by some paleoanthropologists as improbable. Perhaps they are the remains of modern humans suffering from micro-cephaly, a genetic disorder that causes a skull deformity and mental retardation. Others have suggested that the remains represent modern humans suffering from a deficiency in iodine and selenium, and a diet of cyanide-rich foods such as cassava.
These notions have been dismissed by the Australian team who discovered the fossils. The detractors did not have access to the original fossils or casts, and they contended that it is not credible that a group of physically and mentally deformed people survived and successfully hunted game for nearly a hundred thousand years.
Island Dwarfism
In an isolated environment with limited resources the slow scalpel of natural selection speeds to a ruthless blur. Large social mammals such as mammoths or rhinoceroses grow smaller because the efficiency of small size offers a powerful adaptive advantage. Conversely, small animals such as birds, lizards, and rats may become quite large without the selective pressure of traditional predators. Which animals will grow large or shrink depends on a complex combination of factors.
Mike Morwood cites the principle of island dwarfism to explain the small size of the fossils. Once on the island the isolated population would have begun to evolve along its own trajectory, guided by regional conditions. One of these changes was shrinkage in their physical stature. On the island of Flores island dwarfism also affected a species of elephant that shrank in size and a species of rat that grew larger.
Sadly, the Hobbit remains were caught up in a petty dispute by anthropologists who disagreed with Morwood’s interpretation. When the specimens were recovered, key pelvis and jawbones were damaged and contaminated with modern human DNA.
With many questions still unanswered, public interest waned.
Controversy over early hominid remains have a long association with Indonesia. Java Man, cousin to Peking Man, was found in 1891 on the Indonesian island of Java by the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois. On returning to Europe he exhibited his finds, claiming he had found the “missing link” between humans and apes. However, Dubois’s claims were not widely accepted. He became resentful and eventually refused to show the fossils to anyone.
Another Dwarf Hominid!
Then lightning struck again! In 2008 on the island nation of Palau, not far from Flores, another group of dwarf hominids was unearthed. The “Palau Pygmies” appear to be anatomically much closer to modern humans than the comparatively small-brained Hobbits from Flores. They were also tiny—a little over one meter tall and weighing roughly seventy pounds. Even more stunning, the new remains date back only a couple of thousand years! Based on the limited information released to date our genetic cousins may have been running around on one side of the world, while the Roman Empire rose and fell on the other.
The Profound Question of Humanity
Both discoveries bring up profound questions about what it is to be human. Today we struggle with the definition of human life at a fundamental level. Rival camps argue whether a fetus, a blasto-cyst, or a fertilized egg should be guaranteed the full rights of a person. What if creatures similar to the Palau Pygmies and Flores Hobbits are found to exist in isolated jungle pockets? Should they be displayed in zoos? Put to medical or experimental uses? Protected in their native environment as rare and endangered species? Liberated from their stone age existence? And what if the Flores Hobbits
evolved from modern humans
, as some researchers suspect? That would make
Homo sapiens
the transitional species.
Paradoxically, answering the question of whether the Hobbits and Palau Pygmies are human might teach us more about our own humanity than the humanity of the island dwarves.
Additional Reading:
Morwood, Mike, and Penny van Oosterzee,
A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Wong, Kate, 2006. The littlest human. In
Becoming Human: Evolution and the Rise of Intelligence. Scientific American
Special Edition. Vol. 16, No. 2: 48–57.
Tom Arnold
(no Roseanne jokes, please, I’ve heard them all) has a Ph.D. in archaeology from Simon Fraser University. Tom currently lives in London, Ontario, Canada, trying to earn a living working in consulting archaeology. His aged mother would like him to find a real job/career whenever he decides to grow up.
