Males trump females in ‘idiotic’ deaths
A lot smarter. A study of the Darwin Awards — the annual review of the most stupid and idiotic ways people have died — revealed that 90% of the winners were male.
The only criteria for being the unlucky soul to receive a Darwin Award is that you managed to die in “an extraordinarily idiotic manner”, thereby protecting the human gene pool and improving the chances that us humans stay around for a long time to come.
According to the study, of the 318 confirmed by the Darwin Awards to be true incidents, just 36 were women. The remaining 282 winners were all men.
The results, which were revealed in a lighthearted Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, looked at whether the higher propensity for risk taking among men led them to taking “idiotic” risks.
Some of the ‘winners’ over the 20 years of the awards, which are named after the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, make for sobering reading for the male species.
For example, spare a thought for these ‘winners’, who shuffled off this mortal coil by being as stupid as is possible:
n The hapless terrorist who opened his own letter bomb after it was returned to him for having insufficient stamps.
n A man attempting to rob a steel cable from a lift shaft and unbolted it while standing in the lift. The man was killed after the lift plummeted to the ground.
n The man who decided the best way to hitch a lift home was to attach a shopping trolley to the back of a train. He was dragged two miles to his death.
n A construction worker who was crushed by a car park by tearing down all its supports. Office workers working nearby had been taking bets on what plan the man had for removing the last support. He didn’t have one.
n Three men who played a variation on Russian roulette alternately taking shots of alcohol and then stamping on an unexploded Cambodian land mine. The mine eventually exploded, demolishing the bar and killing all three men.
However, not every idiot could be included in the analysis. The study gave an “honourable mention” to the man who slipped when using a belt sander as an auto-erotic device and lost a testicle. Repairing his scrotum with a staple gun, he was able to salvage his remaining testicle thus failing to eliminate himself completely from the gene pool.
