Customer Reviews

The Darwin Awards Evolution In Action

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After reading and enjoying volume 4 of the series, I had to get more. So I tried the original, and I was not disappointed.

The original collection of life's little lessons of what not to do in order to survive (or at least to procreate). Entertaining, humorous, even hilarious at times. Not that death is funny. Just as history is destined to repeat itself, those lacking common sense are desined to attempt (unintentionally) to pull themselves out of the gene pool, winning the coveted Darwin Award.

I also appreciate the format of the book, since it can be taken bit-by-bit in little doses, like when waiting in the emergency room for your non-life-threatening treatment. Or swallowed all at once, when in the recovery room, waiting to be discharged.

A great gift for the person lacking common sense, or those who love the bizarre. I guess both describe me!

To win a Darwin Award, you must meet five criteria: The winner is he (or, less often, she) who removes himself (or herself) from the gene pool, while exhibiting an astounding misapplication of judgment.
You must do it yourself, be capable of sound judgment, and Wendy Northcutt must be able to verify it.
Style points are awarded. Thus, a lively debate was waged at [..] when John F. Kennedy Jr. flew himself and his family into the ocean. (Darwin Awards are democratic, though Northcutt casts the deciding vote.)
The verdict on Kennedy: He was plenty stupid enough but lacked style. No award.
There may be no typical winner, but consider Eric of Reston, Va., who in 1997 decided to do a bungee jump off a 70-foot-high bridge at Lake Accotink Park.
Eric carefully measured the distance, then taped together a bunch of bungee cords, tied one end to his foot, the other to the bridge rail (no, he didn't forget that part) and over he went.
Although the retracted length of his cord was less than 70 feet, the stretched length was rather over.
It would be hard to say what a perfect 10 in the Darwins would require. It helps if the task the awardee was working on was not worth accomplishing even if done successfully.
The classic example occurred in 1999, when a group of five BASE (building, antenna, span, earth) parachute jumpers decided to demonstrate the safety of their sport to rangers at Yosemite National Park. The rangers, who had experience of cleaning up after failed BASE jumpers,were skeptical, but the daredevils were insistent.
The last one off the top of El Capitan failed to find her D-ring and fell on the rocks, 800 feet down. Her proud husband videotaped the performance.
The addition of low cunning to malevolence makes an even better nominee, and probably the awardee who came closest to perfection was the terrorist who sent off a letter bomb. It came back to him, for insufficient postage, and he opened it.
Not all the stories in this book are authentic. Northcutt includes some charming urban legends and several "unconfirmed" reports that we all hope are true.
There is at least that she "confirms" that I cannot believe, but in general, Darwin Awardees show considerable creativity -- surprisingly much, considering that their other mental attributes are so deficient.
The concept of the Darwin Award raises some tricky philosophical questions. While a man can win at almost any age, can a woman over, say, 55 do anything else to take herself out of the gene pool?
What about priests and others who have taken a vow of celibacy?
These points are debated with scholastic vigor on the Web site.
It has been agreed, there, that you need not die to qualify. Destroying the family jewels is good enough, and there is a whole chapter of curious ways men have accomplished this.
While the Darwin Awards are, basically, just a chance to jeer at the misfortunes of our inferiors, there is a veneer of seriousness to the project.
Northcutt, a Berkeley graduate in molecular biology, is qualified to speak to the technical aspects of Darwinian self-selection, but the standards of the discussion are lax.
While many awardees attempted things that their ancestors could never have encountered (like all the many examples in the chapter on explosives), it is not true that they inherited genes that had been tested in an environment containing "nothing more toxic than broccoli."
Nor is the premise that Darwin Awardees are improving the breed really tenable. For every awardee who removes himself from the gene pool, there are several wannabes who remove innocent bystanders while escaping themselves.
The drunken driver who wipes out a busload of Sunday schoolers while walking away himself without a scratch is a classic, and frequent, example.
There is also the regrettable habit, exemplied from Socrates to Lavoisier and beyond, of morons banding together and deliberately killing off the intellectual stars of the race.
So it is not really true that Darwin Awardees "ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion."
But to afford a smile to the rest of us, that's something.