The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction
Page 3
Hunter and hunted are engaged in a chemical arms race and have been for millions of years. Lab mice, and the unfortunate Nathan L ayton, never joined this race and are pretty much defenseless. Using them to gauge the strength of mamba venom is like testing a Tomahawk missile against a leather shield. The real-world potency of venom is likely far less than our inflated, artificial estimates.
So give snakes a break. Only about 10 percent of the world’s three thousand snake species are venomous enough to be dangerous to man, and they’re dangerous for good reason: They’re as nasty as natural selection dictates they should be. Yet they’re merciful, too. Remember the poor wood rat that became a meal for our western diamondback? He was unconscious in less than a minute and dead in five. As deaths go, you could do a lot worse.
REFERENCES:
J. E. Biardi, D. C. Chien, and R. G. Coss, “California ground squirrel (Spermophilus beecheyi) defenses against rattlesnake venom digestive and hemostatic toxins.” Journal of Chemical Ecology 31 (2006), 2501-2518.
H. W. Greene, Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
H. Heatwole and N. S. Poran, “Resistances of sympatric and allopatric eels to sea snake venoms,” Copeia (1995) 136-147.
M. D. McCue, “Cost of producing venom in three North American pit viper species,” Copeia (2006), 818-825.
WEIRD SCIENCE: HUMANS DATING CHIMPS
The idea of humans and chimpanzees swapping genes has been around for decades, but a 2006 Nature paper1 provides hard evidence: “The genome analysis revealed big surprises, with major implications for human evolution,” said coauthor and Harvard biologist Eric Lander. The human-chimp speciation occurred slowly, with episodes of hybridization between the emerging species that left a striking impact on the X chromosome. According to Australian anthropologist Colin Groves, species interbred in the wild quite often; even today it could be possible for humans and chimps to have sex and produce offspring, although there would be ethical problems.
CHAPTER 10
FATHER KNOWS BEST
Father to son: “Glad I stayed around to father you. Doesn’t that make you worry? ”
Readers share family stories showing that Father Knows Best—except when he doesn’t. Darwinian dads play with fire—fireworks, dynamite, gas, and ovens—and with ice, hauling refrigerators and hopping icebergs. These fathers survived, they reproduced, and they can only hope that the offspring did not inherit their questionable judgment!
Father (n.): male who begets children
Papa, pops, daddy, dad, padre, papi, abu, baba, sire, ‘rent, progenitor, antecedent, forebearer, paterfamilias, patriarch
Why I’m the Last of Nine Children • My Father, the PhD • Mr. Tinker • Popsicle • Blast from the Past • Volunteer “Fire” Man
Darwin Award Winner: Why I’m the Last of Nine Children
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring a father, fireworks, vehicles, and a living Darwin!
How my father eliminated himself from the gene pool
My father tried various ways to remove himself from the gene pool. Most methods were mundane: slow suicide by tobacco, alcohol, bad diet. But one incident stands out, caused by Dad’s habit of driving down the road while lighting firecrackers off his cigarette. Considering Dad’s Darwinian judgment, it was amazing his DNA was so successful.
He enjoyed throwing them out the window as he drove down the street. For convenience he kept the firecrackers in his lap. The fuses were wound together, so he would unwind one, light—throw—BANG! Unwind another, light—throw—BANG! You get the picture. Uh-huh.
Given time, a person such as this can be relied upon to cause himself harm.
Those who study Darwin know that, given time, a person such as this can be relied upon to cause himself harm. Dear old Dad accidentally added a bounce to his light throw-bang sequence: The firecracker bounced off the door and back into his lap! A few firecrackers popped, setting of the remaining firecrackers, and there was some prettycreative driving for a while, amid much smoke and cussing.
I do not know the extent of the damage to Dad’s reproductive organs—but I do know I was the last of nine children!
Reference: Anonymous daughter
WEIRD SCIENCE: SIX INTRIGUING HUMAN TRAITS
It is not obvious how some aspects of human nature enhance biological success. From the magazine New Scientist, some of our quirky foibles that defy explanation:• Blushing. Charles Darwin himself struggled to explain a response that puts humans at a social disadvantage.
• Laughter.
• Dreams.
• Superstitions.
• Kissing.
• Teenagers. Even the great apes move smoothly from juvenile to adult; why then do humans spend an agonizing decade skulking around in hoodies and ignoring their elders?
At-Risk Survivor: My Father, the PhD
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring a father, fire, a chainsaw, and more
“We have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment.”
—the Dalai Lama
Let an amused daughter tell you about her sire . . .
This weekend was the final straw. Being an extremely cost-conscious person, Dad decided to put half a can of varnish in the toaster oven to liquefy it, as this was the cheapest approach. You guessed it—the stuff caught fire! I found him in front of the flaming oven contemplating grabbing the can with his bare hands. Two-foot flames were shooting out of it, causing me to utter a line spoken far too many times in our home:
“What in god’s name were you thinking?”
Father’s attempts at Darwin fame have included1. Tipping a small boat while fishing on a lake, nearly drowning my brother and himself. At the time, I thought Mom was being too hard on him when she said it was his own fault that he was in the hospital. I have since revised my judgment.
2. Removing a branch from a locust tree by climbing a ladder with a running chainsaw. The branch was not tied off properly, so it fell onto the roof that he was trying to avoid.
3. Rolling a lawn tractor on top of himself by mowing a roadside ditch at a steep angle, resulting in a broken rib—and poison ivy for me, because I spent ten minutes thrashing around in the vegetation while we tried to roll the tractor off Dad. Again.
4. Lighting a fire in a basement trash burner that was not connected to an exhaust pipe. The fire department loves us.
5. Wandering off to watch the evening news after setting some water to boil in an aluminum Dutch oven. Note that the Merck Index lists the melting point of aluminum as 660°C. When Mom discovered the situation, the sides were glowing bright red, the bottom was melted out, and the kitchen wall was smoking.A reader who works in the foundry industry warns, “Aluminum does not glow red when it is heated. Molten aluminum does not glow, and that makes it extremely dangerous.”
6. Testing the efficacy of old nitroglycerin tablets by swallowing three at once to see if they still worked. I did say he was cheap—er, cost conscious. The EMS came to the rescue because his blood pressure had dropped to an undesirable level and he had passed out at the kitchen table. Mere minutes before, he had been planning a drive to the doughnut shop. Thank god he didn’t make it to the car before his blood pressure dropped!
He may not yet have used up nine lives, but my father, the PhD, appears to have a running start on Darwin infamy.
Reference: Anonymous daughter
Reader Comments
“Working with PhDs, I’m completely not surprised by this . . .” “I have always said, the more degrees, the dumber.”
WENDY’S WORDS OF WISDOM
Most of the chairs in my house are on wheels; I often stood on them to reach high places. One day I read the Darwin Award about a fellow who stood on a rolling chair to fill his bird feeder . . . and rolled right off the twenty-fourth floor balcony. I no longer stand on those chairs in front of windows!
Learn from the mistakes of o
thers.
You won’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
At-Risk Survivor: Mr. Tinker
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring a do-it-yourself father
If you ever considered your male parent a doofus, read on.
You might feel better.
My father-in-law tinkers and most often fixes things. I have seen him take apart toasters, motors, electronics, and power washers. He often has several projects on the go. One day he came home with a neighbor’s broken microwave and disappeared into his workshop to suss out the problem.
He still tinkers today, but we keep a closer eye on him.
A while later I heard weird noises coming from the workshop, and peeked in. The microwave was now working fine but its front door was missing. The machine was running, and he had his head tucked inside the oven!
I ran in and pulled the plug.
He did not take himself out of the gene pool (not then) but the microwaves may have increased the odds of cancer: A few years later he developed a brain tumor. It was successfully removed and he still tinkers today, but we keep a closer eye on him.
See, there are worse parents . . .
Reference: Anonymous son-in-law
At-Risk Survivor: Popsicle
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring a father, water, alcohol, and a Double Darwin attempt!
In the mid-eighties my father sailed on the research ship Regina Maris to study whales in Greenland. One night he noticed there were a lot of icebergs floating by the boat. Icebergs!
After drinking several beers too many with a friend, he and the friend decided to do something stupid. A quick hop onto an iceberg proved that they could stand on it. So my dad decided to hop from iceberg to iceberg with his friend until they reached the nearest village two miles away. Hop after hop, they made their way across the ice floe. As the lights of the village and the shoreline grew nearer, they grew colder and began to pick up the pace. Alas, in their hurry, they accidentally hopped together onto one small iceberg. It broke under their combined weight, plunging them into the icy salt water where they quickly sobered up.
Dad decided to hop from iceberg to iceberg.
After thrashing about in the ch-ch-chilly water for several interminable minutes, they managed to climb out onto another iceberg, and carefully hopped the rest of the way to shore. The men limped into the village, where they were admitted to the hospital. Treated for hypothermia and a touch of frostbite and released little worse for the wear, to this day my dad never goes into the ocean
Reference: Anonymous son
At-Risk Survivor: Blast from the Past
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring a father, an uncle, vehicles, and dynamite!
MID-1950 s , about their youth and shared a rather Darwinian story. In their twenties, they succeeded in assembling one great car out of three junkers. After they accomplished this, they had enough parts leftover to make a second working car—but only barely. This car was missing most of its floorboards, so they could see the ground flash past while driving. They called this a feature rather than a flaw, and decided to have fun with it.
To make the dynamite sticks safer, they shortened the fuses.
In the fifties, high-powered explosives were still easy to acquire. So, with quarter sticks of dynamite at hand, my future father and his brother drove around throwing dynamite through the gaps in the floorboards, and basically scaring the daylights out of people in cars behind them. THIS WAS FUN! They even shortened the fuses to make sure that the sticks would “safely” explode before the car behind them drove over them.
When I heard this story, my first response was, “Weren’t you concerned about the gas tank below you?” To my amazement they both looked rather surprised, exchanged glances, and said, “We never thought of that!” My grandfather just laughed and walked out of the room.
Reference: Anonymous son
At-Risk Survivor: Volunteer “Fire” Man
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring fathers, alcohol, explosions, and do-it-yourself!
1978, INDIANA | My friend’s father, Mo2, was a volunteer fireman and a home mechanic. He was also a heavy drinker who never seemed to be without booze in his hand. One day I was helping him repair one of their cars. Mo, already well into a six-pack when I arrived, believed that the fuel line was blocked. His solution began with jacking the car up a few feet and draining twelve gallons of gasoline from the tank.
In the process of disconnecting the fuel line from the tank, gasoline spilled all over Mo, soaking his polyester shirt and flooding the floor of the garage. Mo then used several five-gallon buckets to catch the gasoline that was pouring out of the tank. Although the garage door was open to allow ventilation, the fumes were so thick that my friend and I had to step outside to breathe.
Mo continued to lie on the garage floor, in a pool of gasoline under the car.
While we were gulping down fresh air, the water heater, located ten feet from gasoline-soaked Mo, kicked on. Ordinarily this would not be a problem because gasoline fumes are heavy, and the universal building code requires gas-fired tanks to be installed eighteen inches off the floor to prevent accidental combustion But the circumstances were not ordinary.
The entire floor went up in flames, and a large fireball came rolling out the garage door toward us. My friend and I dove to the ground to avoid the flames.
After the initial blast, Mo picked himself up and reacted as the trained and experienced firefighter he was—grabbing an extinguisher to put out the flames. Only then did he realize that his polyester shirt had melted to his burned chest. He refused his wife’s assistance and, despite his inebriated state, drove himself to the local hospital.
My friend’s father lost most of the skin on his chest and most of the hair on his head. He also spent several days in the burn unit and was ultimately tossed out of the volunteer fire department.
Reference: George Leavell
Reader Comment
“This one’s for you, Dad. I just hope you’re smarter than this when you work on the Studebaker!”
SCIENCE INTERLUDE DNA FOSSILS: THE EVOLUTION OF HIV
By Kristin Sainani
In 1981, doctors in California and New York reported a baffling new syndrome: Young gay men were dying from a cluster of rare diseases usually seen only in the elderly or those with severe immune deficiencies. Doctors were witnessing the first glimpse of a frightening new illness soon to cause worldwide devastation—AIDS.
Phylogenetics: building evolutionary trees based on the genetic similarities between organisms
Amazingly the virus that causes AIDS is not new at all. HIV and its ancestors have plagued mammals for 100 million years. There are no confirmed cases of infection before 1959, and HIV leaves no fossil record, so how do we know so much about the virus’s history? Clues to its past lie in its genetic code.
By comparing the genomes of two organisms scientists can determine when they evolved from a common parent. This detective method, called phylogenetics, tells us, for example, that the DNA sequences of chimpanzees and humans differ by only 2 percent and—based on the mutation rate—that we shared Thanksgiving dinners with them five to seven million years ago.
But viral evolution takes place on a much faster time scale. Reproducing in days, not decades, with the higher mutation rate of an RNA genome, HIV evolves a million times faster than humans. A fascinating evolutionary history has unfolded in just a single century, and using phylogenetics, scientists have been able to reconstruct this history.
The History of HIV
The AIDS virus (HIV-1 M) first gained a foothold in what is now the city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The city experienced a population explosion in the 1940s that helped the virus build the critical mass it needed to seed a worldwide epidemic. By analyzing samples stored in the early eighties, scientists have shown that the virus traveled from Africa to Haiti a
round 1966 (likely carried by a single person) and then from Haiti to the U.S. around 1969, twelve years before the first cases were recognized by physicians. Like Haiti, the U.S. happened to be an early stop on the virus’s globe trot. HIV spread from the U.S. to Canada and parts of Europe. HIV also spread directly from Africa to Europe and Asia, seeding slightly different strains of the epidemic.
Genetic similarities prove that HIV evolved directly from SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), which infects African monkeys. SIV was transmitted from monkeys to humans on multiple occasions resulting in several different strains of HIV. One of these strains—HIV-1 M—gave rise to the current global pandemic, while the others remain confined to small groups in Africa. It’s clear that HIV-1 M came from chimpanzees in eastern Cameroon, but it is hotly debated as to when the original transmission occurred. Older studies put the date at about 1930, but a 2008 study shows it was most likely 1908.