The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (29 page)

Presumably neither was aware of the chemical friendship between oxygen and fire. As they lifted the lid the entire washer-load of fireworks exploded, landing them both in the hospital for several days. Shrapnel from the washer spread in a twenty-five-foot radius, leaving a large crater in its wake. Considering the size of the impact crater, each perpetrator suffered relatively minor wounds and burns.

Reference: Lisa Perry

 

 

12 MARCH 2009, OKLAHOMA | A Shawnee-area marksman suffered an accidental gunshot wound when he fired a round of Plumber’s Putty into his own abdomen. The twenty-one-year-old explained to deputies that he had exchanged the BB pellets in shotgun shells for putty and test fired several rounds outside. Satisfied, he decided to perform more tests on the modified projectiles.

For instance, what would happen if he put a pillow between himself and the gun? He allegedly shot himself with no problem. Then he tried the experiment
without
the pillow. He was taken to Unity Health Center for injuries to his abdomen, shirt, and winter coat. Removal of the wad (a plastic shell component that encloses the pellets) may eventually be necessary, but otherwise he survived the navel piercing no worse for the wear.

The young man admitted that “something went wrong.”

But what? Sheriff’s Captain Palmer pointed out the obvious. “Shotgun shells and Plumber’s Putty don’t mix.”

 

Reference: Pottawatomie County Sheriff Archive;
The Shawnee News-Star

 

“Silly Putty.”

“Putty-Putty Bang Bang”

“Guns don’t shoot people, people shoot people.”

“A shotgun is rather long. Did he pull the trigger with his toes? Was it a sawed-off shotgun?”

“Perhaps the soft ‘rubber’ bullets were intended to drive away trespassers without causing injury—so through a series of somewhat scientific experiments he tested the device on himself.”

“At Harvey Mudd College in 1990, North Dorm’s motto—Piss on East—was taken verbatim by the occasional group of North-dormers. Someone in East Dorm decided to string a defensive electric wire across the outer perimeter. Of course,
he tested it first
to make sure it was safe . . .”

 

 

If the human race is suffering from terminal information overload, there is worse to come: We’re going to have to do more with less. Our brains are shrinking.

It’s true. Or at least our skulls are shrinking. Take the mammoth skull of Robert the Bruce, the fourteenth-century king who freed Scotland from the grip of the English. Nearly twenty centimeters long, sixteen centimeters wide across the forehead, Bruce’s sturdy skull was designed to take a bash or two—which it most likely got from the vengeful English.

Robert the Bruce is not alone in his massive brain box.
¹¹
Our predecessors have us beaten when it comes to skull size. Five thousand years ago our skulls were approximately 150 cubic centimeters larger than they are now—the size of a large bag of M&M’s—able to house 10 percent more brains!

A dwindling brain is just one of a plethora of changes taking place in our species in recent history. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new traits and talents to deal with an equally fast-changing environment. This gives birth to the concept of rapid evolution—
rapid
and
evolution
being two words you never expected to see in the same sentence.

Human evolution, anthropologists say, accelerated a hundred-fold in the past ten thousand years. Ironically even evolution has to keep up with the pace of life.

Shrinking brains were a big surprise. But a hundred-fold increase in the speed of evolution is almost inconceivable! To come to this startling conclusion, anthropologists themselves had to evolve from a group obsessed with skeletons, to one that also fully embraces molecular technology. Today the skeleton geeks are sifting through not only dirt, but also DNA sequences to find point mutations (affecting a single nucleotide) that show just when various evolutionary changes took place.

How can scientists tell how old a particular mutation is? One hundred years old—or older than before our genome diverged from the ape or the lobe-finned-fish? Luckily there’s a giveaway.

 

Each mutation has “hitchhiking neighbors” nearby—in science jargon, juxtaposed genes—that, like our own neighbors, simply happen to live close to one another. When our diploid chromosomes recombine into haploid eggs or sperm, any given piece of DNA usually sorts out with its nearby neighbors. In each generation, the probability of two neighbors being shuffled apart is low. Only over time do the neighboring DNA sequences separate.

Scientists observe how many hitchhiking neighbors are associated with a mutation, and compare results from different samples. If many common neighbors are founds, the mutation is recent. If not, then the mutation is older and its neighborhood has changed over a period of time. This is the so-called
molecular clock.
We share
most
of our juxtaposed genes with other humans,
many
of our juxtaposed genes with apes, and
some
of our juxtaposed genes with the lobefinned fish that lived 400 million years ago, By cross-referencing this information with data obtained from the fossil record, we can date when each mutation, point by point, changed us from fish to amphibian, monkey to man.

Now let’s turn the molecular clock forward, and shed some light on the modern day. When this phenomenally informative tool was applied to a large collection of human DNA, the HapMap Database
¹²
, we discovered that hundreds of genes have changed in the last ten thousand years. In fact, small or large changes occurred in approximately 7 percent of all human genes. That’s a lot!

If evolution had been ticking steadily at the current rate for the last six million years—since humans and chimpanzees separated—there would be 160 times more differences between us and the chimps than we actually observe. Pretty weird, huh? Evolution used to be slower, and it’s speeding up!

 

It turns out that behind the accelerated rate of evolution are two familiar forces: civilization and a population explosion.

Nobody farmed, milked animals, or lived in cities thirteen thousand years ago. Vast changes in cultures and ecological niches have resulted in new opportunities for adaptation. Our genes had to hustle to enable us to survive and thrive in all that chaos called “civilization.”

Add to that an unrelenting drive to reproduce that has increased our population from millions to billions in the last ten thousand years. More people means more mutation opportunities.

Peek inside the human body and check out some recent mutations. Some we can explain, others are still mysteries.

In Africa, India, and Pakistan, where inhabitants face the longstanding and pervasive threat of malaria, 10-15 percent of the population has evolved resistance to the disease. This resistance developed within the last four thousand years, in the unlikely form of the gene for sickle cell anemia. The same gene that damages red blood cells, resulting in life-threatening tissue damage, also prevents the malaria parasite from turning innocent blood cells into malaria factories. Our new genetic defense is a double-edged sword.

Eight thousand years ago, the gene that enabled adults to digest milk first made its appearance in Europe. This mutation is a simple regulatory change that allows lifelong production of the infant enzyme lactase. The ability to digest milk from cradle to grave suddenly made dairy a rich source of food for adults. Dairy farming became such a wildly successful means of feeding your family that the “dairy gene” quickly spread. How quick is quick? After eight thousand years, approximately 95 percent of the German population has the gene, as well as the Masai in Africa and the Lapps in Finland.