The Darwin Awards 6: Countdown to Extinction

by Wendy Northcutt

  Still, things are not adding up. Industrial saws require power, but the power was out! Was it a gas-powered or cordless circular saw? Besides, a fallen line doesn’t just sit there hissing for seven hours; a fuse blows or is pulled at the site by the utility company. And why would anyone take a saw to a downed electric line? This certainly will not restore power. If the old guy was mental, he would be disqualified based on Rule #4: Maturity.

  A polish reader suspects he was displaying a national trait: a perverted sense of justice. “Fair” is when everyone is doing equally badly, so perhaps he saw fit to deprive the whole area of electricity since his house still lacked it.

  The merits of this nomination are still being debated:

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/seesaw

  At-Risk Survivor: A Drilliant Idea

  Confirmed by Darwin

  Featuring spray paint, fire, and a drill

  13 JUNE 2009, WASHINGTON | A Spokane man with a spray paint can learned the wrong way to get around a clogged nozzle. Fire officials say the man used a cordless drill to penetrate the pressurized can. The contents spewed out of the hole, and a small spark from the drill ignited a flash fire. The man’s face was seriously burned, but he was treated at the Deaconess Medical Center and lived to spray another day.

  Reference: The Spokesman-Review

  TAG! YOU’RE IT.

  In 2002 another paint-bespattered person met Mr. Darwin. An electric train roof was suffering from a bad case of the flames. After fire crews extinguished the blaze, they found a puzzling lump of charcoal. Was it involved in the fire? The answer: Yes, and rather intimately. Hours before the blaze, this lump had walked right past high voltage warning signs, surmounted fences, and climbed onto the roof of a train to spray-paint his graffiti masterpiece. When he finished, he stood and raised his arms in triumph—and touched the 15,000-volt main power line. The electrical current permanently revoked his artistic license and incinerated the flammable wet paint of his final masterpiece.

  At-Risk Survivor: It’s the Cure That’ll Kill You

  Confirmed by Reliable Eyewitness

  Featuring women, a snake, and a Taser

  11 MAY 2008, CALIFORNIA | Working in a hospital’s emergency room can be described as periods of frenetic activity punctuated by moments of boredom. During the latter, I was explaining the nuances necessary for a truly good Darwin Award, and the extraordinary effort it takes to win one. As an example I referenced a truly bizarre occurrence in our own little hospital. Three of us were on duty on Mother’s Day in the ER when a pitiful woman was brought in suffering from a venomous snakebite to her right hand.

  She spotted a small brown snake . . .

  The fifty-three-year-old had been strolling with her family in celebration of the holiday, when she spotted a small brown snake that she misidentified as a garter snake. To her credit, everyone involved agreed that the snake had no rattles, but the fact that it SHOULD HAVE is indisputable. She was bitten on the middle finger, and the immediate pain and swelling alerted the group to the fact of a serious envenomation. This is all too common a story, but what ensued raises its novelty value.

  Our little city of Ojai has a well-deserved reputation as a hot-bed of alternative healing, unique lifestyles, and New Age philosophy. Still, the ER staff were surprised to hear the family’s account of their treatment for their mother. Someone in the group had heard a rumor that Tasers would counter the effect of a rattlesnake bite. Unfortunately this family did have access to a Taser weapon, and they zapped their poor mother!

  When the pain and swelling continued advancing up her arm, they did the only sensible thing: They Tasered Mom again. With little else in their armamentarium, or perhaps running low on batteries, they brought Mom to the emergency room—where they expressed considerable dismay as the staff ignored the Taser idea and proceeded to treat her with antivenom (standard snakebite care) and admit her to the ICU.

  Antivenom is purified from serum taken from an animal that has been injected with tiny amounts of venom to provoke an immune response. The antibodies bind to and neutralize the toxin molecules, halting further damage. Antivenom must be administered ASAP because it does not reverse damage already done. Historically, immunized horses were the animal of choice, but today sheep and goats are more common sources of antivenom because there is less chance of serum sickness caused by an immune response to the animal’s antigens.

  All ended well, even for the snake, rendering this just an anecdote among the truly terminal stories collated by Darwin. And for those still in doubt about the efficacy of a Taser against snake venom . . . thanks for the job security!

  Reference: Anonymous MD;

  Ojai Hospital Medical Records

  At-Risk Survivor: Spin Cycle

  Unconfirmed Personal Account

  Featuring holiday fun, fireworks, and a washing machine!

  4 JULY 2008 | Two coworkers decided to celebrate the 4th of July in their own special way. They loaded an old washing machine with tens of pounds of firecrackers, lit a fuse, dropped the lid, and ran . . . Nothing happened. Twenty minutes later, they decided that the fuse was a dud and went back to try again.

  Presumably neither was aware of the chemical friendship between oxygen and fire. As they lifted the lid the entire washer-load of fireworks exploded, landing them both in the hospital for several days. Shrapnel from the washer spread in a twenty-five-foot radius, leaving a large crater in its wake. Considering the size of the impact crater, each perpetrator suffered relatively minor wounds and burns.

  They decided that the fuse was a dud.

  Reference: Lisa Perry

  In 1998, two East Java villagers took a creative approach to celebrating the feast that marks the end of Ramadan. They purchased a large quantity of firecrackers on the black market, twisted the fuses into a rope, and connected the rope to a motorcycle battery. When they started the engine, the resulting explosion could be heard two kilometers away!

  At-Risk Survivor: A Putty Bullet

  Confirmed by Darwin

  Featuring a gun

  12 MARCH 2009, OKLAHOMA | A Shawnee-area marksman suffered an accidental gunshot wound when he fired a round of Plumber’s Putty into his own abdomen. The twenty-one-year-old explained to deputies that he had exchanged the BB pellets in shotgun shells for putty and test fired several rounds outside. Satisfied, he decided to perform more tests on the modified projectiles.

  For instance, what would happen if he put a pillow between himself and the gun? He allegedly shot himself with no problem. Then he tried the experiment without the pillow. He was taken to Unity Health Center for injuries to his abdomen, shirt, and winter coat. Removal of the wad (a plastic shell component that encloses the pellets) may eventually be necessary, but otherwise he survived the navel piercing no worse for the wear.

  The young man admitted that “something went wrong.”

  But what? Sheriff’s Captain Palmer pointed out the obvious. “Shotgun shells and Plumber’s Putty don’t mix.”

  Reference: Pottawatomie County Sheriff Archive; The Shawnee News-Star

  Reader Comments

  “Silly Putty.”

  “Putty-Putty Bang Bang”

  “Guns don’t shoot people, people shoot people.”

  “A shotgun is rather long. Did he pull the trigger with his toes? Was it a sawed-off shotgun?”

  “Perhaps the soft ‘rubber’ bullets were intended to drive away trespassers without causing injury—so through a series of somewhat scientific experiments he tested the device on himself.”

  “At Harvey Mudd College in 1990, North Dorm’s motto—Piss on East—was taken verbatim by the occasional group of North-dormers. Someone in East Dorm decided to string a defensive electric wire across the outer perimeter. Of course, he tested it first to make sure it was safe . . .”

  SCIENCE INTERLUDE RAPID EVOLUTION

  By Jane Palmer

  If the human race is suffering from terminal information overload, there is worse to come: We’re
going to have to do more with less. Our brains are shrinking.

  It’s true. Or at least our skulls are shrinking. Take the mammoth skull of Robert the Bruce, the fourteenth-century king who freed Scotland from the grip of the English. Nearly twenty centimeters long, sixteen centimeters wide across the forehead, Bruce’s sturdy skull was designed to take a bash or two—which it most likely got from the vengeful English.

  Robert the Bruce is not alone in his massive brain box.11 Our predecessors have us beaten when it comes to skull size. Five thousand years ago our skulls were approximately 150 cubic centimeters larger than they are now—the size of a large bag of M&M’s—able to house 10 percent more brains!

  Heads Are Not All That Are A-Changing

  A dwindling brain is just one of a plethora of changes taking place in our species in recent history. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new traits and talents to deal with an equally fast-changing environment. This gives birth to the concept of rapid evolution—rapid and evolution being two words you never expected to see in the same sentence.

  Human evolution, anthropologists say, accelerated a hundred-fold in the past ten thousand years. Ironically even evolution has to keep up with the pace of life.

  Lobe finned fish, the famous fish that first crawled onto land, lived in ponds subject to seasonal drought. Fleshy fins allowed them to “walk” from drying pools to deeper water, and the swim bladder evolved into a sac able to breathe air. Lobe finned fish are the ancestors of amphibians and all higher types of vertebrates, including man.

  Shrinking brains were a big surprise. But a hundred-fold increase in the speed of evolution is almost inconceivable! To come to this startling conclusion, anthropologists themselves had to evolve from a group obsessed with skeletons, to one that also fully embraces molecular technology. Today the skeleton geeks are sifting through not only dirt, but also DNA sequences to find point mutations (affecting a single nucleotide) that show just when various evolutionary changes took place.

  How can scientists tell how old a particular mutation is? One hundred years old—or older than before our genome diverged from the ape or the lobe-finned-fish? Luckily there’s a giveaway.

  The Molecular Clock

  Each mutation has “hitchhiking neighbors” nearby—in science jargon, juxtaposed genes—that, like our own neighbors, simply happen to live close to one another. When our diploid chromosomes recombine into haploid eggs or sperm, any given piece of DNA usually sorts out with its nearby neighbors. In each generation, the probability of two neighbors being shuffled apart is low. Only over time do the neighboring DNA sequences separate.

  Scientists observe how many hitchhiking neighbors are associated with a mutation, and compare results from different samples. If many common neighbors are founds, the mutation is recent. If not, then the mutation is older and its neighborhood has changed over a period of time. This is the so-called molecular clock. We share most of our juxtaposed genes with other humans, many of our juxtaposed genes with apes, and some of our juxtaposed genes with the lobefinned fish that lived 400 million years ago, By cross-referencing this information with data obtained from the fossil record, we can date when each mutation, point by point, changed us from fish to amphibian, monkey to man.

  Molecular Clock: the DNA surrounding a point mutation that reveals whether the mutation is recent, ancient, or somewhere in between

  Now let’s turn the molecular clock forward, and shed some light on the modern day. When this phenomenally informative tool was applied to a large collection of human DNA, the HapMap Database12, we discovered that hundreds of genes have changed in the last ten thousand years. In fact, small or large changes occurred in approximately 7 percent of all human genes. That’s a lot!

  If evolution had been ticking steadily at the current rate for the last six million years—since humans and chimpanzees separated—there would be 160 times more differences between us and the chimps than we actually observe. Pretty weird, huh? Evolution used to be slower, and it’s speeding up!

  What is driving this whirlwind of genetic activity?

  It turns out that behind the accelerated rate of evolution are two familiar forces: civilization and a population explosion.

  Nobody farmed, milked animals, or lived in cities thirteen thousand years ago. Vast changes in cultures and ecological niches have resulted in new opportunities for adaptation. Our genes had to hustle to enable us to survive and thrive in all that chaos called “civilization.”

  Add to that an unrelenting drive to reproduce that has increased our population from millions to billions in the last ten thousand years. More people means more mutation opportunities.

  Malaria, Milk, and Earwax

  Peek inside the human body and check out some recent mutations. Some we can explain, others are still mysteries.

  In Africa, India, and Pakistan, where inhabitants face the longstanding and pervasive threat of malaria, 10-15 percent of the population has evolved resistance to the disease. This resistance developed within the last four thousand years, in the unlikely form of the gene for sickle cell anemia. The same gene that damages red blood cells, resulting in life-threatening tissue damage, also prevents the malaria parasite from turning innocent blood cells into malaria factories. Our new genetic defense is a double-edged sword.

  Eight thousand years ago, the gene that enabled adults to digest milk first made its appearance in Europe. This mutation is a simple regulatory change that allows lifelong production of the infant enzyme lactase. The ability to digest milk from cradle to grave suddenly made dairy a rich source of food for adults. Dairy farming became such a wildly successful means of feeding your family that the “dairy gene” quickly spread. How quick is quick? After eight thousand years, approximately 95 percent of the German population has the gene, as well as the Masai in Africa and the Lapps in Finland.

  Earwax is on the wane.

  Endemic malaria and the advent of dairy farming have associated mutations that show how environments mold our genes, but the rationale for some mutations is still baffling. Hop over to Asia where we find rapidly spreading genes that suppress body odor and earwax! Less sweat could conceivably offer a slight benefit in cold climates, but no scientist yet has claimed to understand what survival advantage less earwax might confer.

  Our scientists are searching for human mutations big and small, from those involving the onset of speech to those that might impact Q-tip sales. From a genetic vantage point, we are finding that the human race resembles a diverse cluster of weird mutants. But one new evolutionary trend is shared between populations in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, Anerica, and every country where anthropologists have been able to take calipers: The human skull is shrinking, even as our bodies grow.

  WENDY’S SEXY NEIGHBOR NOTION

  If an advantageous mutation occurs, the neighborhood around that mutation is selected for too. So something really great like X-Ray vision or the ability to smell flowers can be linked to something meaningless, like green eyes. We can track some beneficial mutations just by looking at associated visible traits. Imagine that green eyes were linked to a wildly successful mutation allowing the immune system to defeat cancer13. How many generations would it take before we notice that the healthiest people are green-eyed? How long before they are sought as wives and husbands for their longer life spans? If eye color becomes a marker for improved health, how long before the marker itself is considered sexy?

  Whether our intelligence is also shrinking is a question for debate. When it comes to our cerebral cortex, size isn’t everything—Albert Einstein and Anatole France, the infamous French novelist, were both pea-brained geniuses. But even if our wits are waning, in a world where you can outsource many of your mental tasks to a computer, and where the onslaught of modern media rewards those with the attention span of a gnat, the downsizing of our intellect could be a huge plus. Big brains are expensive to make and maintain, and if Mother Nature can get by with less—she will.

&nb
sp; We could be evolving rapidly toward idiocracy.

  REFERENCES:

  I. J. Deary et al., “Skull size and intelligence, and King Robert Bruce’s IQ,” Intelligence 35 (2007), 519-525.

  J. Hawks et al., “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.” Proc Nat Acad Sci 104 (December 2007) http://tinyurl.com/rapid-evolution.

  John Hawks, “Rapid evolution: Can mutations explain historical events?” New Horizons in Science (2009).

  Arthur Keith, “The brain of Anatole France,” The British Medical Journal 2 (349) (1927), 1048-1049.

  CHAPTER 2

  RANDOM ACTS OF RIDICULOUSNESS

  “Remember, they do it to themselves . . .”

  Introducing a smorgasbord of creative demises: Slide down a mountainside, zip across a glacier, paint your face, ride the storm, be a ninja, hide in a locker, get “up close and personal” with a tennis machine! Darwin himself never could have dreamed up such inventive ways of skimming debris from the gene pool.