 | Darwin Awards: Encyclopedia - Darwin Awards
Darwin Awards
A Darwin Award is an honor given to people who supposedly help to improve the human gene pool by "removing themselves from it in a spectacularly stupid manner." The prizes are named in honor of the evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, are awarded over the World Wide Web, and are frequently distributed via email. There is no monetary or material prize associated with the Darwin Award, only infamous recognition.
To take the premise of the award seriously is to suppose the stupidity of the awardees to be genetically determined, arguing that nature affects behavior more than nurture in the nature versus nurture debate.
To qualify, one must behave in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, such as juggling hand grenades (Croatia, 2001), jumping out of a plane to film skydivers while not wearing a parachute oneself (North Carolina, 1987), using a lighter to illuminate a fuel tank to make sure it contains nothing flammable (São Paulo, 2002), or heating a lava lamp on top of a stove. While most Darwin winners receive the award posthumously, self-sterilization is sufficient for the award.
Honorable Mentions go to those who, though not deficient in stupidity, failed to remove themselves from the gene pool. Their foolish and dangerous acts are worth mentioning, if only to keep others from standing near them at their next attempt. Some of these include a man chasing a beer can and getting hit by a truck (Texas, 2002), people petting sharks during their feeding frenzy on a dead whale (Australia, 2001), and two people getting burned while trying to set fire to an arcade machine (unknown area, 2002).
Personal Accounts go to stories that fit most of the requirements for a Darwin Award or Honorable Mention, but cannot be independently verified for several reasons. This can be because the submitted incident was witnessed by (or happened to) the submitter and was not witnessed by members of the general public. It also applies to submissions by medical professionals about the people that they have crossed paths with in the line of duty; due to the legal and occupational protections in place to ensure the privacy of patients, the details that are necessary for such a submission to be classified as an Honorable Mention or Darwin Award cannot be provided. [1]
Some of the stories, such as that of the JATO Rocket Car, have been shown to be fictitious [2].
While lists of Darwin Awards have been circulating via email for some time, the awards were popularized by webmistress and author Wendy Northcutt, a.k.a. Darwin. Her site, darwinawards.com, is by far the best known of the Darwin Award sites.
Darwin Awards - Rules
Darwin Awards - Requirements
The five requirements for a Darwin are
- Inability to reproduce - Nominee must be dead or sterile.
A disputed issue, due to age, cloning, donation of reproductive cells, and celibacy. Should the elderly be allowed to win, their death having no impact on the gene pool? The general rule of thumb is that if the candidate no longer has the physical wherewithal to breed with a mate on an otherwise uninhabited island, they are out of the gene pool. However, one living man won a Darwin Award without losing his genitals because he had superglued himself to rhino buttocks and gotten sprayed with feces, so supposedly no female would have any interest in him. A marginal case is women whose stupidity imprisons them long enough for breeding to be improbable.
- Excellence - Astounding misapplication of judgment.
The candidate's idiocy must be unique and sensational. A number of commonly stupid activities (such as someone who goes to bed with a lit cigarette in their mouth or someone who drinks alcohol to death) are specifically excluded from consideration, unlike someone who asks a friend to shoot him with cigarette butts (Woodbine, New Jersey, 2002).
- Self-Selection - Cause of one's own demise.
A hapless bystander being hit by an anvil dropped from a skyscraper has suffered from bad luck. If one is hit by the anvil one rigged above your balcony to kill pigeons, one is eligible for a Darwin Award. The death of innocent bystanders rules one out. There is no award for taking someone else out of the gene pool in an extraordinarily stupid manner (even if the bystander did have some genes in common with the idiot). Thus, the Camden, New Jersey man who ran over a nun while smoking crack cocaine and driving with his feet at the same time will never be given an award. However, the Virginia murderer who wrote a gloating letter of confession to the prosecutor's office "to show you how stupid y'all are" after his acquittal is eligible. Generally if others are harmed or endangered in the course of the action, the nominee is disqualified (though exceptions exist); this renders, for example, most drunk drivers ineligible, even if they were not disqualified by lack of excellence.
- Maturity - Capable of sound judgment.
The nominee must be at least middle/late teen years of age and free of mental handicaps. However, some very rare Darwins like the thirteen-year-old girl who sniffs bug spray to her death (New Zealand, 2001) have been on the site, though this is not permitted anymore.
- Veracity - The event must be verified. (See urban legends)
The story must be backed up by reliable sources i.e. reputable newspaper articles, confirmed television reports, and/or responsible eyewitnesses.
Also, the nominee must have been discovered in the year of nomination. For example, if the winner of a hide-and-seek contest five years ago disappeared, he must be nominated within one year of his skeleton being discovered in a well.
Darwin Awards - Not Darwins
The following have been specifically stated as not making one eligible for a Darwin as they are too common (meaning that for fairness an excessive number of awards would need to be given) or violate the above criteria in other ways.
- Sliding along an electric wire
- Smoking in an oxygen tent
- Being hit by a train or automobile (except in cases of truly extreme stupidity, such as stepping in front of a bus to throw a brick at it to show one's dislike for the driver)
- Pressurized or liquid-filled containers in the oven
- Climbing into zoo cages (although one award was given for placing a garland around a tiger's neck as part of a New Years celebration [3])
- Falling off a precipice while posing and/or urinating
- Self-mutilation (disqualified due to implications of mental distress or insanity)
- Urinating onto electrified wires, subway rails, et cetera
- Certain forms of carelessness with fuels and other flammable liquids (and particularly using gasoline/petrol to start a campfire)
- Being a repeat of an already submitted story.
- Criminals who killed themselves or were killed in the process of running from the police.
There are some exceptions to the above rules, but these are rare. In order for a nominee to be considered regardless of the presence of one of the above conditions that would normally make them ineligible for an award, the stupidity displayed by the nominee must be extreme, even for a "normal" Darwin contender.
Schadenfreude, Testosterone poisoning
Darwin Awards - Urban legends
If a story is found to be untrue, it is disqualified and placed in a special section of the archives entitled "urban legends".
Darwin Awards - History
Life Imitates Art: The darwinawards.com site fails to give credit where credit is apparently due concerning the history of the Darwin Awards which originated in two fictional Darwin Awards postings on Usenet, the 1985-08-07 Vending Machine Tipover which wasn't mentioned on usenet again until it was referenced in the 1990-12-07 version of the JATO Rocket Car. It lists the JATO Rocket Car urban legend that incorporated the second recorded use of the term "Darwin Award" back in 1990 and was very widely distributed in 1995-1997 as merely a 1995 recipient that was determined to be a hoax and not mentioning it at all in their history page. The oldest version of the prior www.officialdarwinawards.com site at archive.org also fails to credit the JATO urban legend and vending machine for the origin of the Award and mentions that the site coexists with a number of other Darwin Awards sites.
Northcutt began collecting the stories in 1993 when she was working at Stanford University. She began a short mailing list of her friends, and as they forwarded these e-mails around, the rate of nominations steadily grew.
Darwin Awards - Books
Three books of the best stories have been published.
- The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action (2002) ISBN 0452283442
- The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection (2003) ISBN 0452284015
- The Darwin Awards III: Survival of the Fittest (2004) ISBN 0525947736
Darwin Awards - Movie
A film version, The Darwin Awards, directed by Finn Taylor featuring Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder, is due to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2006.
See also
- Schadenfreude
- Testosterone poisoning
Other related archives1987, 2001, 2002, 2006, Australia, Camden, New Jersey, Charles Darwin, Croatia, JATO Rocket Car, January 25, Joseph Fiennes, New Zealand, North Carolina, Schadenfreude, Stanford University, Sundance Film Festival, São Paulo, Testosterone poisoning, Texas, Virginia, Wendy Northcutt, Winona Ryder, Woodbine, New Jersey, World Wide Web, anvil, automobile, cloning, crack cocaine, email, evolutionary, gene pool, human, lava lamp, mental handicaps, murderer, nature versus nurture, nun, pigeons, reproductive cells, stupid, theorist, train, urban legend, urban legends, urinating
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Darwin Awards", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
