But seriously, folks…
What’s Wrong with the "Darwin Awards"?*
by Molleen Matsumura
One of my all-time favorite cartoons
showed a man telling a woman, “Do you know feminists don’t have any sense of
humor?” She replied, “No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.” In
breaking down barriers to full political and professional participation, feminists had to
question a broad range of practices, including grammar, etiquette and humor. Sometimes, as
this cartoon illustrates, they had to point out that if a joke was funny at all, the joke
was on the teller.
Could this be the case with the
"Darwin Awards"? There are good arguments that folks reading the Awards should
think twice (maybe even blush a little) after laughing, if not before; and definitely
engage brain before clicking the forward button in their email programs.
In case you’ve managed not to hear of
the "Darwin Awards", I’ll explain: they are not a prize for advances in
evolutionary science. They are a brand of internet story: sometimes taken as truth and
always as humor, they are short anecdotes about individuals who are recognized for doing
the human species a favor by “removing themselves from the gene pool” through
acts of extreme stupidity. An example is the tale of a man who, sleepily reaching for a
ringing telephone, took a gun from his night-stand, put it to his ear and shot himself.
These aren’t just any prize fools; they get the Darwin prize because their deaths supposedly
demonstrate “evolution in action”. At odd times, people get these anecdotes in
email, singly or in batches, and then forward them to friends. The "Darwin
Awards" have spawned numerous “official” and unofficial websites, and
speculations that they are among the most popular internet chain letters; at any rate, the
first Award anthology spent five months on the New
York Times best seller list. [i]
If you already know about the "Darwin
Awards", odds are you’ve laughed at many of them. You’ve got enough company
that you can afford to consider the possibility that sometimes, the joke is on the reader.
First ask whether folks can get so busy laughing they forget to exercise due skepticism.
The answer is often “yes”. It’s scientifically proven – or anyway,
it’s been proven by a scientist. New Mexican scientist Mark Boslough got a list of
Awards in his email one day in 1999, and decided to see what would happen if he made up
“the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale [he] could imagine”,
added it to the end of the list, and sent it to a few friends. He even made sure the
story’s characters had names like Baker, Burns, and Cooke that matched the story-line
a little too well. The result? Within eight months, the tale was printed in a column in
the Denver Post! (After hearing from Boslough,
the columnist printed a retraction; you can read all about it, and savor Boslough's puns, at the website of New
Mexicans for Science and Reason.)
Now, some people have questioned some of
the stories. Debunkings appear on urban legend websites and in the pages of Award
anthologies. Still, many of these tales are swallowed whole, and there’s a certain
tasty irony at the thought of people laughing at somebody
else’s “stupidity” just when they’ve taken the bait of an internet
legend.
So far, sounds fairly harmless. After all,
laughing at yourself can be one of the less painful ways of learning not to believe
everything you read. But after the first blush, a more serious question needs to be asked.
What do the "Darwin Awards" mean in a society where public understanding of
evolution is poor, and evolution education is continuously under attack? I should explain
first that I am passionate concerning this issue. For over seven years my profession was
defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. I lost count of how many times the
"Darwin Awards" were emailed to me during those years; my reaction was always,
“This doesn’t help!” Here’s
why.
The "Darwin Awards" are thriving
in a climate of ignorance. In the U.S., limited public understanding of science has been
documented in the National Science Board’s (NSB) biennial Science and Engineering Indicators[ii].
(This is not to say that there are not problems with scientific literacy elsewhere –
as one example below will show – but I am emphasizing evolution understanding in the U.S.)
In its 2002 survey, the NSB found, as in
earlier years, that, “Most Americans do not know a lot about [science and
technology]…,” and, “A
majority of Americans (about 70 percent) lack a clear understanding of the scientific
process….”[iii]
Where evolution is concerned, the NSB reports that, “For
the first time, a majority (53 percent) of NSF survey respondents answered
‘true’ to the statement ‘human beings, as we know them today, developed
from earlier species of animals,’ bringing the United States more in line with other
industrialized countries in response to this question.”
That’s a slim majority, and worse, when the survey group was asked whether “The earliest humans lived
at the same time as the dinosaurs”, only
48% answered correctly (down from 51% in the last survey). These findings are
consistent with repeated Gallup poll findings that nearly half [iv]
of Americans agree that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form
at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” and it is likely that a large
portion of these answers are due to scientific illiteracy, not religious belief.[v]
Also, the NSB noted, “On a
10-question ‘pop quiz’ on biotechnology, most Americans, Europeans, and
Canadians gave the incorrect answer (true) to the statement "ordinary tomatoes do not
contain genes, while genetically modified tomatoes do."
The
survey also found that Americans get most of their information on recent developments in
science and technology by watching television, but when they want answers to specific science questions, most people turn to
the Internet. Then what do they find? To check this, I visited seven major search engines
– such as Yahoo and Google – and searched on the word “Darwin”. In
every case, references to the "Darwin Awards" appeared on the first page of
links[vi],
and on six pages, the top of the screen displayed “meta-links” to sets of links
for common topics, including numerous sites about the "Darwin Awards". Searching
on “evolution” was better, yielding links to sources of accurate and engaging
information about evolution; unfortunately, the first page of links for either search also
yielded links to creationist sites (where evolution is frequently described as Darwinism). Add to these results the likelihood
that more people get emails about the "Darwin Awards" than about, say, major
fossil discoveries, and the picture that emerges is one in which a common source of
“information” about Darwin and evolution is the misinformation people get from the "Darwin
Awards".
The
premises of the "Darwin Awards" match existing misconceptions about evolution.
By “premise”, I mean the joke’s assumptions about reality. Any joke has
them, even when the humor depends on stretching them. For example, when a cartoon
character steps off a cliff, they may fall and smash into sharp edged bits, fall and
bounce like a rubber ball, or flap their arms a bit before falling, but in every case the
(true) premise is that people who step off cliffs fall. The joke would fall flat for a
viewer who was ignorant of gravity.
There
isn’t room to discuss all the misconceptions; I’ll mention two. The most obvious
is that Awardees’ genes are removed from the gene pool. Awardees are always adults,
who have had plenty of time to reproduce plenty of times. Natural selection depends on
people lasting long enough to reproduce. It is
just this kind of detail that makes it hard to teach and learn about evolution.
The
most serious problem is the premise that, “These people deserve to die.”
I’ll admit the most tempting tales are the ones about would-be murderers caught in
their own traps. But many (more?) stories are about people who are just trying to have a
good time, or to survive. The "Darwin Awards" promote the idea that
“evolution in action” means nothing more than weeding out the “unfit”,
coupled with over-simplified notions of fitness. They reinforce the perception
creationists strenuously cultivate: that evolution is a doctrine of cruelty, and the
foundation of racism.[vii]
A public that isn’t well educated about evolution is susceptible to such claims:
Witness the legislation introduced in Louisiana in 2001, which would have curtailed the
teaching of evolution on grounds that "... the core concepts of Darwinist
ideology [are] that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to
others….”[viii]
A related problem is that scientists
working to defend evolution are frequently accused of “arrogance”. One reason is
that they are seen through the lens of popular ideas about evolution. There is a
"Darwin Award" anecdote that I believe merits the charge of arrogance; it
isn’t a far-fetched tale of elaborate machinations gone wrong, but a story of
misfortune that actually was reported in newspapers. It is the story of an Egyptian farmer
who climbed into a well to retrieve a chicken that had fallen in; he, and those who
attempted to save him, were drowned by an unsuspected underground stream. As I write this,
in August 2002, some coal miners who survived drilling into a water-filled shaft, and
those who worked to save them, are being hailed as heroes. This isn’t the first such
mining accident, and when miners drown it’s called a tragedy. Both the farmer and the
miners took miscalculated risks while trying to make a living. The farmer is judged
“stupid” because we forget that to a subsistence farmer, a chicken can be a
serious economic loss. This comparison reminds us that it is easy to misjudge what is
“stupid” or ignorant, rash or heroic.
Scientists from Stephen Jay Gould to
Joseph Graves[ix]
have worked hard to dissociate evolutionary theory from misconceptions about “genetic
superiority”. Such work is vital to breaking down resistance to evolution education,
which in turn is crucial to good public understanding of science. The premise of the
"Darwin Awards" undermines that work.
Many
jokes stop being funny precisely when people take them seriously. Possibly the humor of
the "Darwin Awards" would be more innocent, and even funnier, in a world in
which evolution is better understood. As it is, I urge people who really honor
Darwin’s rich legacy to pass along other facts and fantasies. Samples of silly
creationist pseudoscience might be a good choice!
**For my article on
the value of Darwin Day, click here.
*©2002. Originally published in Darwin Day Collection One: The Single
Best Idea Ever by Amanda Chesworth (Editor), published by the Darwin Day Celebration . Slightly adapted for web publication. For
permission to reprint, contact the publishers.
