The Darwin Awards Next Evolution: Chlorinating the Gene Pool

by Wendy Northcutt

  My friend is a schoolteacher who dabbles in photography, and as we walked, he would take various nature shots. Every fifteen minutes or so a train would fly by. My friend was seized by a creative urge to put stones on the tracks and take a photo as the train ran over them. An action shot, he called it.

  * * *

  “An action shot, he called it.”

  * * *

  I insisted that this was a bad idea, but he proceeded to place several fist-size stones on the rail. I took cover a good hundred yards away as he sat in wait, twenty yards from the tracks. Soon we heard the train approaching. He crouched down and put the camera to his face. As the train flew by, he fell flat on his back!

  Exactly what I had thought would happen, happened. The train sent stone shrapnel flying straight toward him, and one piece hit him in the face. I ran to his side. He was spitting out blood and two broken teeth. Despite the look of horror and surprise on his face I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d warned him! “At least, did you get the shot?” I asked.

  He gave me a look that said he wanted to kill me.

  When he developed the film, he found an “action shot,” all right. It was a blurred picture of the top of the train and the sky above it, snapped as he fell backward. I suggested posting the photo in his classroom along with a picture of his two broken teeth, and a sign explaining the dangers of playing with trains.

  This man, a teacher, is a role model for the next generation!

  Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account

  At Risk Survivor: Never Change

  Confirmed True by Darwin

  JANUARY 2006, AUSTRALIA

  Who would risk his life for some pocket change? A Darwin Award nominee, of course! A thirty-five-year-old Sydney man lost some change down a storm-water drain. Most sensible people would just let it go, especially as it had been raining. In fact, all sensible people would let it go.

  Not our man. He just could not let loose change go. He removed the cover from the sewer, lay down on the road, and stuck his head and upper body down the drain. In this position, fishing around for coins, his lower body was lying across the road.

  * * *

  “Most sensible people would just let it go.”

  * * *

  His financial plans went wrong when a Ford SUV turned the corner. The driver, of course, failed to notice him. One does not expect to see half a person lying on the roadbed. The vehicle’s bumper struck the man.

  Our nominee was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital in serious condition, with a broken pelvis and internal injuries. Had he been run over by the tire instead of struck by the bumper, police say it is likely he would not have survived.

  Loose change is not worth the risk!

  Reference: smh.com.au

  At Risk Survivor: Bed of Embers

  Confirmed True by Darwin

  APRIL 2007, TENNESSEE

  A twenty-two-year-old man was having a “barbecue moment.” Luke’s friends needed charcoal embers, and he had the means to deliver, that means being his trusty 1978 Chevrolet pickup truck. So he put his burning barbecue grill in the bed of the truck and set off down the road.

  “Obviously, we would urge people not to drive with burning grills in their vehicles,” Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ted Denny said later. The trouble was, the hot grill was not the only item in the bed of the pickup.

  * * *

  “We urge people not to drive with burning grills in their vehicles.”

  * * *

  Hot charcoal, meet propane tank.

  The propane tank exploded and the Chevy was engulfed in flames. But Luke was lucky. Due to the quick response of emergency crews the conflagration was extinguished. Luke escaped with burns to his lower legs, burns that will no doubt leave scars to remind him that few barbecue emergencies are worth the risk.

  Reference: TheLeafChronicle.com

  Reader Comment:

  “Bed of Embers”

  “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

  —Lady Bracknell, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest

  At Risk Survivor: RoboCop

  Unconfirmed

  FEBRUARY 2005, CANADA

  Canadian winter nights are long and usually quiet, but one exception was the night Constable Morgan responded to a drunk driver call. He caught up to the errant driver and fell in behind in order to establish the commission of the crime. In a short distance the driver missed a curve and slid into a snowbank. Morgan switched on his lights, stopped his patrol unit, and approached the driver’s door.

  The driver decided to flee. His tires, mired in the snow, spun wildly but the car went nowhere. Constable Morgan thought he would have a little fun. He began running in place alongside the driver’s window. The speedometer read 100 kph. The driver was surprised to see the constable keeping up with his car.

  Constable Morgan broke the window glass with his flashlight and ordered, “Pull over!” The driver’s response? He jammed the pedal to the metal!

  The car’s speedometer reached 175 kph, yet astonishingly, the constable was keeping pace and ordering the driver to stop. Finally, convinced he was never going to outrun the fleet-footed officer, the drunk man let off the gas, turned the wheel, and brought his car to a “stop.” The constable escorted the man to his patrol vehicle, which had magically followed the two on their mad dash across the snow-covered tundra.

  The man was charged with DWI, speeding, and failing to yield to a policeman. Brought before the judge for arraignment, the man, who had not quite regained his wits, saluted the incredible athletic prowess of the local officers.

  Reference: Canadian L.E. Bulletin, February 2005

  “If some Power the gift would give us,

  To see ourselves as others see us!

  It would from many a blunder free us,

  And foolish notion.”

  —Robert Burns

  At Risk Survivor: Hurdles

  Unconfirmed

  2004, UK

  I met James at a poetry event in a London café. He was a talented poet and semiprofessional footballer who referred to himself as an unpaid condom advertisement—take one look at him and you’ll never have kids, just in case. One day, James limped in. Naturally, I asked what had happened. The resulting account had me in stitches for a good long while.

  James had been preparing to cross the road. In a sensible fashion he looked both ways before starting to cross, but he failed to notice a car pulling out a bit up the road. Seeing this car heading toward him at a low speed, James realized he had to get out of the way.

  Most people would make a dash for the other side of the road or take a few steps back. However, James’s brain cells were out to lunch. The cells that were still on duty in his brain told him that the best way to avoid being struck was to jump over the car. He cleared the bumper and landed on his feet on the hood of the car, which continued to move forward at a slow speed. James lost his balance and fell on all fours, severely bruising both knees. He then fell off the car entirely, and the back wheel ran over his foot. Luckily nothing was broken.

  His doctor said that if he’d tried hurdling a car that was moving at the speed limit (thirty mph) he would have been killed or seriously injured. Needless to say he promised to stop trying to do hurdles over cars. He certainly gave himself a good reason for his new nickname!

  “Hurdles.”

  Reference: Anonymous eyewitness account

  “Human beings can always be counted on to assert with vigor their God-given right to be stupid.”

  —Dean Koontz, False Memory

  At Risk Survivor: Brothers Well-Met

  Confirmed True by Darwin

  OCTOBER 2006, MAINE

  Could it be genetic?

  Two brothers, seventeen and eighteen, were conversing on their cell phones when the vehicles they were driving met in a head-on collision. Nobody died, but both were injured. The two y
oung men were not even wearing seat belts! The innocent victims were two totaled cars: a 1994 Jeep Cherokee and a 1998 Ford pickup.

  Darwin kindly asks her readers to turn off those cell phones! Many times that erratic driver we pass has a phone in his ear. YOU are just as erratic when you are on that phone. For your own safety, and for the safety of those around you, HANG UP!

  Reference: Lewiston Sun Journal

  SCIENCE INTERLUDE: FLOWER POWER

  By Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew

  A few hundred years ago a new fad swept through the privileged ranks of European aristocracy. It was a substance refined from an enigmatic plant brought back from the New World. Hailed as a godsend by some, more recent experience has shown that long-term consumption can lead to erratic behavior, serious weight fluctuations, and systemic organ failure. Even first-time users can, although rarely, fall victim to fatal cardiopulmonary shock. But it is not all bad. I must confess, on my first date with my future wife, she and I both indulged. The mysterious extract soon worked its neurotransmitter magic. We gazed enraptured into each other’s now-blazing eyes, and we fell madly in love.

  If you travel back to the opening days of the Cretaceous Period, you are well advised to watch your step. Saurian monsters abound. Hungry eyes watch from ambush. Hordes of tiny ratlike mammals slumber by day in fur-lined burrows, emerging to feed at dusk. Aside from running afoul of a carnivorous titan, you must be careful of the little critters as well. Tread on the wrong lair and you might crush dear old Great-to-the-Zillionth Grandpa in his sleep, wiping out the entire human race and giving rise to the dreaded Grandfather Paradox. With so much to worry about, it is easy to miss the most important new organism to arise in ages, standing low in the tangled bank at the steamy water’s edge.

  It is the world’s first blossom.

  The little pockets of flowers were unobtrusive in a world ruled by colossal carnivorous monsters. But the small flowering shoots had already struck a partnership with the most successful animal taxon on earth, the insects, and would soon team up with the rest of the animal kingdom. In its own vegetable way, the flower was poised to take over the world.

  Botanists classify so-called higher plants, meaning those with roots, veins, and leafy structures, into two main groups: angiosperms and gymnosperms. Flowering plants are angiosperms. Conifers, which produce the familiar pinecone, are an example of gymnosperms. Both produce seeds. However, the seeds of angiosperms are surrounded by a fleshy vessel, or an angio in Latin, forming an often tasty wrapper. The seeds of gymnosperms lack an equivalent structure and thus are “naked,” or in Latin, gymno.

  The origin of flowering plants is a hotly debated topic. Some say there is indirect evidence for a possible ancestor over two hundred million years ago. But the oldest unambiguous fossil evidence for a flowering plant is found in China and dates to about 125 million years ago. It was named Archaefructus sinensis, “ancient Chinese fruit.”

  Regardless of when they first evolved, plants had hit on an ingenious survival strategy. Rather than playing an inadvertent role in the mandibles, jaws, and gullets of ancient insects, they created a sort of organic peace offering, free for the taking. Pollen and sweet nectar was given as payoff for cross-fertilizing the new angiosperms. The flower blossom itself likely evolved as a visual transponder beacon. The blooms even developed secret patterns invisible to the eyes of vertebrates, flashing rings and other enticing patterns in ultraviolet wavelengths to wave in their insect couriers.

  By the Middle Cretaceous, some ninety million years ago, birds were probably in on the act, recruited by flowers to carry plant pollen in their feathers and seeds in their stomachs. They flew across the young and growing Atlantic Ocean to every island and continent. Flowers of all kinds evolved, each in elegant resonance to the needs and desires of their local animal partners. By the Late Cretaceous, twenty million years later, the luxuriant emerald-green world of the dinosaurs had been adorned with bright blossoms and sweet scents.

  * * *

  Research shows that flower fragrances travel only one-third as far today as they did in less-polluted years.

  * * *

  After dinosaurs disappeared sixty-five million years ago, plant-munching mammals rose to prominence, and flowering plants came up with their next smash hits: fruits and grasses. Citrus fruits in particular, of the group Rutaceae, are a favorite of tree-dwelling animals. The animals eat the fruity prize; the seeds are safely transported all over the jungle and then deposited in a steaming pile of rich animal fertilizer. Liliopsida, an angiosperm better known as grass, appears widely in the fossil record in the Eocene. By thirty million years ago grasses dominated the flat savanna and provided food for the largest mammals ever to walk the earth.

  Over the next twenty-five million years a few of these hardy flowering grasses evolved into the forerunners of modern cereal grains: wheat, corn, and rice. Those three grains account for over half the calories in the modern human diet. A whopping five trillion calories of cereal are consumed each day, and two trillion more in the form of tubers, vegetables and vegetable oil, fruits, syrups, and other sugars made from flowering plants. Added to that, every pound of meat we eat conservatively represents thousands of calories of commercial cereals and wild grasses.

  The Plant Kingdom could not have supported the kinds and numbers of animals it does today before the advent of flowering plants. And even with the sweet fruits and toothsome grains they offer, artificial selection was required, operating over millennia on hundreds of angiosperm species, so that humans can harvest the amount of food we currently eat.

  Quite literally, human beings are flower-powered.

  Teosinte (top) began as a single stalk of kernels, each enclosed in its own individual husk. Over time artificial selection produced strains with large kernels and softer husks, until we can recognize the first corncobs (center). Modern corn (bottom) is a mutant version so freakishly large it cannot survive or reproduce without human cultivation and care. Illustration by Karen Wehrstein.

  How is all this ancient flowery history known or suspected? Some is educated guesswork. But much of it falls under the purview of paleobotany and palynology, the study of ancient pollen. Most small plants don’t lend themselves to fossilization. But plant pollen is tough and fossilizes well. Particular groups of plants can often be distinguished by their pollen. Thanks to the painstaking dedication of thousands of botanists over the years, we have developed a robust database of ancient pollens, tracing the evolutionary radiation of angiosperms onto the global stage.

  Of course, the flowering plants could never fully trust their new animal partners. Given half a chance the animals would gobble down the whole plant: fruit, nut, flower, leaf, stem, and root. Evolution quickly produced critters that did exactly that. The plants responded by incorporating substances that give the offending critter a stomachache or worse if it eats the wrong part at the wrong time.

  Many of our early medicines and modern drugs come from such defenses. The plant chemicals are bioactive by definition, because they are meant to affect the biology of the animal that eats them. Quinine from tree bark, caffeine from the coffee bean, narcotic painkillers from the opium poppy, and aspirin from the willow tree are substances that don’t pose quite as much danger to us as they do to insects and their ilk. Unlike the bugs’, our bodies come complete with sophisticated, factory-installed detoxification systems. In fact, for humans, the effects of some of those natural insecticides are downright addictive.

  Which brings us back to that first date with my future wife and the highly habit-forming, brain-altering substance we ingested at the dawn of the new millennium. The source was an enigmatic flowering plant found in the New World. The substance it produces is sublime. Yet we broke no drug laws. It was first used in a crude form thousands of years ago by Native Americans in what is now called Central America. The Aztecs called it xo-co-latl. But we know it today as chocolate.

  Cretaceous dating:

  Ji, Q., H. Li, L. M. Bowe, Y. L
iu, and D. W. Taylor, 2004. Early Cretaceous Archaefructus eoflora sp. nov. with bisexual flowers from Beipiao, Western Liaoning, China. PDF (3.11 MiB). Acta Geologica Sinica. 78(4): 883–896.

  Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew is a freelance science writer and contributing editor to the popular progressive weblog Daily Kos. He lives in Florida near the Kennedy Space Center with his wife, Mrs. “DS,” a dog named Darwin, and a cat named Kali.

  CHAPTER 4

  MEDICAL MALADIES

  Treatments, injections, bullet wounds, and such populate these eyewitness accounts from medical professionals present at the aftermath of astoundingly stupid decisions. Due to patient confidentiality, most are unconfirmed. But these stories are all plausible…and mind-bogglingly ludicrous!

  Darwin Award: Not a Shred of Sense

  Unconfirmed

  The ambulance responded to a frantic call concerning a neighbor’s trip through an industrial tree shredder. It seems the individual had decided to prune his own trees rather than hire a professional. Why not? After all, the local shop rented shredders that could make quick work of yard debris, including tree limbs up to eight inches in diameter.

  * * *