Darwin Awards for Freakish Fluke Deaths
The Darwin Awards is an organization that celebrates the deaths of people who die by doing something stupid. A recent inductee into their hall of extinction was a Biology teacher from Bulgaria who poured explosive chemicals down a sewer, which caused an explosion that knocked the manhole cover up, decapitating her.
The idea behind The Darwin Awards is that the gene pool is better off without these people who make mistakes that prove to be deadly. Presumably, they’d be happy if every mistake were fatal, since only super-cautious death-fearing people would survive, populating the world with more super-cautious death-fearing people.
But if I had my own Darwin Awards, I’d only give them to people who die in fluke accidents that had nothing to do with stupidity, and everything to do with chaos. For instance, the woman killed when an eagle ray jumped out of the water and collided with her, knocking her head against the boat deck. She had no time to react, nor did she have any reason to protect herself in advance from such an unthinkable occurrence. Warren Buffett would have died if he’d been standing in that spot on the boat.
In a world speckled by the thumb prints of randomness, such deaths are just as vital to evolution as people who die in stupid accidents of their own devise, and perhaps more deserving of an award from the man who coined evolution.
Plus, this would be more absurd and less mean-spirited than the current jerk Darwin Awards.
3 years ago