The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design

by Wendy Northcutt

  The sharks are often accompanied by remora, quasi-parasite fish that clean the sharks and sometimes attach to them with a suction cup for long rides. Just after one remora swam between Erich’s legs a shark followed, and—unaware that Erich’s yoga techniques had turned him into a fellow predator—snapped off a huge chunk of his left calf. He was pulled from the water in shock and flown by air ambulance to West Palm Beach, Florida, where doctors tried to save the remains of his leg and his life.

  He spent six weeks in the hospital trying to figure out what went wrong. He concluded that nothing went wrong; the shark simply mistook his leg for the remora in the murky water.

  The documentary, originally intended to prove Erich’s theory that bull sharks will not attack unless provoked, was retitled Anatomy of a Shark Bite. A former colleague told a diving magazine: “It was an accident waiting to happen. He’s more like a philosopher than a scientist. There’s no evidence to support his theories.”

  Erich is no longer called “Unbiteable.”

  Reference: Western Daily Press, The Telegraph, Cyber Divers Network News

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  Hundreds of shark species have been identified, but just three species are responsible for most attacks on humans: the great white (Carcharodon carcharias), tiger (Galeocerdo cuvier), and bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas). Divers often encounter bull sharks. Their preference for shallow coastal waters makes them potentially the most dangerous sharks of all.

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  More information:

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/shark.html

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  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: BUFO MARINUS

  1985, AUSTRALIA

  During my undergraduate years at James Cook University, I read a short article in the local newspaper regarding the peculiar antics of a pair of biology students required to dissect a cane toad.

  The South American cane toad, Bufo marinus, was introduced to Australia as a biological control for the cane beetle, which destroys millions of dollars of sugar cane each year. This was an environmental disaster! First, the toad never developed a taste for cane beetles, but instead slaked its prodigious appetite with all manner of endemic fauna. Second, its toxins are not restricted solely to the two poison sacs behind its head, making it poisonous fare for Australian wildlife during every stage of its lifecycle.

  In short, this toad eats anything smaller than it is, and poisons anything bigger.

  Back in the laboratory, one student confidently bet his lab partner $20 that he would not swallow the ovaries of the cane toad they were dissecting. In need of money, and impressed with the magnanimous offer, the lab partner ate the organs. He suffered FOUR cardiac arrests while in transit to the hospital.

  He is not eligible for a Darwin Award, since he did not die, but I suggest that he deserves an Honorable Mention.

  The final sentence in the article suggested that we still do not know enough about the cocktail of toxins possessed by the cane toad.

  Reference: Townsville Bulletin

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  Toads of the genus Bufo secrete a poisonous, mildly hallucinogenic alkaloid called bufotenin, C12H16N2O. For pictures of cane toads, visit:

  www.DarwinAwards.com/book/bufo.html

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  I want to hear from a reader from Townsville who can wade through the back issues and check the details.

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  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: DODGING THE DRAFT HORSE

  SPRING 1942, WISCONSIN

  My late great-grandfather told me this story, and my great-uncle swears it really happened. During World War II, Larry Shaw, a nineteen-year-old college dropout, received notice he was to be drafted. He was given orders to report to an army recruiting post. Already having lost an uncle and a cousin to the Japanese, Larry was afraid to go. He was aware that if he wasn’t in perfect health, the army would reject him. But if he hurt himself on purpose, he would go to jail!

  Larry, who worked at a farm with my great-grandfather, came up with a plan to “accidentally” hurt himself just enough to avoid the war, in a manner believable enough to pass as an accident.

  While he and his coworkers were in the field, and without alerting any of them to his intentions, Larry walked up to a horse and tried to get it to step on his foot and break his toes. The horse, however, refused to move. No matter how much Larry pushed and shoved the horse, he couldn’t get it to step on him. After trying for a long time, the frustrated Darwin hopeful got mad and kicked the horse in the tail. The startled horse responded by kicking back.

  Larry was struck in the throat and died a few hours later, successfully dodging the draft, if not the kick.

  Reference: Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING

  SUMMER 2003, USA

  I hired several laborers to prepare two garden areas for me. They needed some supplies, so I showed them the location of ice water and the bathroom, and left to obtain the supplies. Upon my return, I found an ambulance in front of my home, along with two police cars.

  The police informed me that the neighbor had called 911 to report a naked man screaming and running around my yard.

  As it turned out, one of the laborers had needed to answer the call of nature. Rather than use the bathroom, he went into the woods behind our house, dropped his trousers, and squatted down—right on top of a huge nest of hornets.

  He was released from the hospital after a week, having learned a very painful and nearly fatal lesson: Always watch where you’re going.

  Reference: Cy Stapleton, Personal Account

  PERSONAL ACCOUNT: SHORTCUT CUT SHORT

  SUMMER 1990, CALGARY, CANADA

  Although this story does not qualify for a Darwin, I’d like to share the most spectacular case of extreme stupidity I’ve ever seen. I was a soldier of the Lord Strathcona’s Horse, an armored regiment stationed in Calgary. We were hosting elements of the British Army at Canada’s main training center in Wainwright, Alberta. I think they were the 17th/21st Lancers.

  We took some of our new British friends to town, to party at the Wainwright Hotel bar. Around one A.M., we decided to save cab money and walk back to the base. This was a trek of about three miles, because one must detour around a large, fenced pasture to reach the front gate.

  That pasture holds some of the last Plains bison in Canada, a herd of about forty animals. Bison are not the friendliest ruminants on the planet. Safety signs are posted every ten feet along the fence, and warnings read, “Unless you can cross this pasture in nine seconds, do not attempt it. The bison can do it in ten.”

  We reached the pasture and started to walk around it, but one of our drunken Brit companions decided that the warnings were fake. “Real, live buffalo don’t exist!” Despite our protests, he opted for a shortcut. He hopped over the five-foot fence and disappeared into the dark field.

  We watched and waited.

  Seconds later, a high-pitched and very un-British profanity was heard from the pasture, and our friend came tearing back toward the fence at a speed that would have done credit to Donovan Bailey, the fastest man in the world. A fully mature and quite unhappy Plains bison thundered behind him.

  The only reason the young gunner survived was sheer, fear-induced acceleration. He vaulted the five-foot fence without breaking stride. His rear foot caught on the top rail, sending him spinning into the grass on the safe side, half a second before two thousand pounds of extremely unfriendly hamburger smashed into the fence at full steam.

  The fence is constructed of extremely solid steel pipes, yet the two-foot dent made by the bison remains to this day. The animal staggered, snorted, shook his head, and rumbled off with a splitting headache. Our friend escaped with a broken ankle, moderate concussion, dislocated shoulder, and a great deal of bleeding from his uncontrolled landing.

  Had he not cleared the fence, he would have been pile-driven to smithereens by the huge bull. Fear had drained the alcohol from our systems, but we were s
till laughing too hard to be sympathetic as we gave him first aid and summoned help.

  If you’re looking for the dent, it’s on the “town” side of the paddock, about halfway up. Last I heard, it was still there.

  Reference: David R. Organ, Personal Account; Edmonton Journal

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  Readers say bison aren’t just strong, they’re also quick. They have seen a buffalo cow toss a pesky calf twenty feet off to the side with perfect grace and absolutely no strain. In Yellowstone Park, they report many instances of bison overturning cars, trucks, and snowmobiles with men, women, and children on board. Bison are noted for their ability to stand off a full-grown grizzly bear.

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  READER COMMENT:

  “I am wondering if rear feet only occur in Britain.”

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  CHAPTER 5

  Alcohol

  Alcohol plays a role in many Darwin Awards, but this is the first chapter devoted exclusively to the boneheaded things we do while inebriated. Get ready for a spy device, freeway calisthenics, saliva, bar bets, sunglasses, revenge, a beer-filled condom, window glass, a drinking glass, auto repair, firecrackers, and a submarine. But before you settle in with that glass of wine, read this science essay on the flu virus, and what it says about human evolution.

  DISCUSSION: ENDOGENOUS RETROVIRUSES AND EVOLUTION

  “More than a hypothesis, it’s a theory!”

  Stephen Darksyde, Science Writer

  Every winter as the season turns and Santa comes to visit, a less welcomed traveler makes the rounds. It’s influenza, a truly horrid little critter. And right now, in the throes of delirium, flush with fever and cold, I confess; I really despise influenza. I go to sleep feeling chipper and wake up feeling beaten with baseball bats and heated by a microwave to a toasty 103 degrees.

  This damn flu is caused by a virus, of course, just one of many viral pathogens that curse mankind. No one knows how these quasi-living, self-replicating packets of genetic material first came to be. Perhaps they’re a vestigial remnant of a long-gone RNA-based world that thrived in the nearly boiling sea of a planet unrecognizable as Earth, billions of years ago. Maybe they’re errant bits of code from a more traditional bacterial microbe that began freelancing on its own.

  However they arose, the viral vector is here to stay.

  They all have the same grisly modus operandi. First, the dastardly buggers break through the cell wall. Some pick the lock of an existing portal and sneak past the molecular doorman disguised as legitimate cargo. Others are constructed like an off-shore drilling platform. They land on jointed legs, drop a drill bit onto the exterior of their target, and then begin boring in for all they’re worth.

  Once the membrane is breached by whatever means, viruses inject a packet of trouble into the interior, which makes for the nucleus and commandeers the genetic machinery to make more viruses. The end result is a person who sickens, and sometimes dies.

  But there is a consolation prize. Geneticists have found that this viral scourge is incredibly useful in shedding light on all manner of mysteries biological.

  Viruses Are Our Friends, Part 1

  Some of these little influenza bugs are retroviruses like HIV and feline leukemia.

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  retrovirus (n): genes carried on single-stranded RNA, which co-opts the nucleus of the infected cell to convert itself into DNA. This DNA sometimes inserts itself into the cell’s chromosomal DNA.

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  These viruses are RNA, and typically “reverse-transcribe” their RNA into DNA for integration into the host’s genome. When that happens, they snip the DNA and insert themselves surreptitiously into the host’s chromosome, where they lie dormant, sometimes for years, before activating. Later, they activate and begin making more RNA, which in turn inserts itself into the genome, until the entire cell basically falls apart. Then the RNA retroviruses are off to seek new, healthy cells for more viral adventures.

  But if the retrovirus doesn’t reactivate, this life cycle fails. While the infection is contained, the cell is left with inert viral sequences scattered throughout its genome. They can cause problems. The inert sequences may disrupt a key gene, for example, and uncontrolled replication may ensue—the beginning of cancer. Or it could spark an autoimmune disorder like multiple sclerosis, or exotic forms of painful, debilitating inflammatory disease. But often the retrovirus simply sits in the chromosome, inert and disregarded.

  Now consider inheritance. Sometimes, by a stroke of fate, the infected host is a sperm or egg cell, which becomes a child. That child has those inert viral sequences in every single cell of his body. If those sequences happen to lie near an allele (one member of a pair of genes) that becomes ubiquitous in the population through natural selection, then all members of the species will carry the same genetic “signature” in every cell of their body. These ghosts of infections past are called endogenous retroviruses, or more affectionately, ERVs.

  An ERV found in the same DNA location in two people provides powerful evidence, admissible in court, that they share a common ancestor. All humans share many ERVs in identical locations, which is no surprise. We all have common ancestors if one looks far enough back. But here’s where it gets interesting: Chimps and humans also have ERVs in common. If identical ERVs serve as evidence of relatedness in court, then ERVs are equally convincing evidence that chimps and humans are related!

  The human and chimp genomes have been sequenced over the last decade, and we’ve found a dozen separate ERVs (hundreds of repeats each) identical in both genomes, in exactly the same locations. When these sequences are checked for time of introduction, they indicate a common ancestor five to seven million years ago. That is consistent with other molecular divergence studies and the fossil record.

  But wait, there’s more!

  Consider a repeat sequence of base pairs like an ERV—or any other nonfunctional DNA sequence for that matter—found in the same locations in the genome between two species. Geneticists have looked at shared sequences between humans and mice, and compared those to the shared sequences between humans and chimps. They found that in humans and chimps, the same mouse sequences have been overwritten, just like a new CD recorded over an old one. This is exactly what we’d expect if ancestors of chimps and humans diverged more recently than primates and rodents diverged.

  Creationists hate ERVs. They usually ignore them, or recursively label them “intelligent common design.” ERVs have no known function. They code for viral proteins used only by viruses. Even if these things did have a function to us, common descent (common ancestors) explains how they got where they are in both species. The odds against two species by sheer chance being identically infected are enormous: one in ten followed by a hundred zeros. You have a better chance of winning the lottery ten times in a row than of being infected by a dozen distinct ERVs in the same hundreds of locations in your genome as any other individual or creature.

  Viruses Are Our Friends, Part 2

  Viruses do more than shed light on evolutionary relationships. Their study holds great promise for novel health therapies. We may someday tailor viruses that eat only cancer cells. And since a virus can literally perform nano-surgery on the chromosomes of a cell without so much as breaking the patient’s skin, we might enlist them to remove genetic abnormalities and replace the pathological sequences with healthy ones. Inherited susceptibility toward cardiopulmonary disease, diabetes, and cancer—the three greatest killers of humanity—might be permanently eliminated. Afflictions like sickle-cell anemia, lupus, irritable bowel syndrome, muscular dystrophy, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and on and on, would all become words found only in history books. What a wonderful gift of health to bestow on our children!

  Science is slowly but surely domesticating the virus. This is only fair. We’ve suffered from these little beasts for way too long. A little payback is overdue. At least that’s my firm opinion as I lie here immobilized with flu on the couch, temporarily lu
cid between waves of total mental incapacitation. God, my body aches…Where the hell did I put that aspirin?

  Now that it has been firmly established that mankind evolved from mice and monkeys, here are stories of inebriated innovations that make mice and monkeys cringe when we say we’re related to them….

  DARWIN AWARD: HOMEMADE WINE

  UNCONFIRMED BY DARWIN

  2004, GEORGIA

  At a “convenience dump,” where local residents could drop off waste for later delivery to the main county dump, monitors were paid to ensure that residents deposited only allowed waste. One keen-eyed inspector noticed a bottle in the trash compactor that looked suspiciously like homemade wine. He fished the bottle out of the compactor. At this point, you may be thinking this is a “man crushed by compactor” story—but no!