Read Online The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction by Wendy Northcutt - Free Book Online

necessary things to help him medically, of course. As it turned out, it wasn’t the expense of the leather trousers with which he was so preoccupied . . . It was our imminent discovery of the large cucumber in his underwear! Mom always warned us, “Wear clean underwear in case you get hit by a car.” Here’s a new one for Mom to worry about. This gambit is far from unusual. In the rougher parts of outer Sydney no one would want to be reincarnated as a cucumber because . . . well...!

At-Risk Survivor: Fishing Tackle
    SEPTEMBER 2008 | Daily Telegraph reported that a small fish had found its way into the urethra of a fourteen-year-old boy. The patient was admitted to the hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling, and urinary retention. Floundering for a rationale for his predicament, the boy’s dubious account was that he was cleaning the fish tank in his house and was holding a fish in his hand when he needed to use the toilet. While he was passing urine, the two-cm fish supposedly slipped from his hand and entered his urethra, say Drs. Vezhaventhan and Jeyaraman, who wrote a paper on the unfortunate fish and boy.

At-Risk Survivor: A Bit Potty
    1960S | My father, also a doctor, treated a man who rode his bicycle six miles one rainy evening to seek advice at the local English hospital. He wore a large, dark raincoat which he refused to remove for the nursing staff. In privacy, he did so for my father, who was most surprised. This surprise did not emanate from the fact that the man had got himself stuck in an old-fashioned clay urinal, but that he had cycled six miles with it hanging from the end of his penis! Needless to say Dad didn’t buy the story of being caught while having a wee. This ended rather badly, I am afraid. Dad claims there was no other way but to break it out with a hammer.

    Could this man thus be a historic Darwin Awardee?
     
    Reference: Dr. Davida Kiernan

SCIENCE INTERLUDE WHY BOTHER WITH SEX?
    By Alice Cascorbi

    Not the complaint of a tired housewife or the sour grapes of a frustrated “playah,” but rather a real dilemma for evolutionary biologists. If an organism’s purpose is to propagate its own DNA, why waste time and energy searching for a mate? If its unique genetic code lets it survive and flourish, why dilute that code with another creature’s genes?
    “But don’t we need sex to make babies?”
    Sure, we do. But step outside our species to recognize the big difference between sex (exchanging genes) and reproduction (making offspring). The entire kingdom Prokaryota would consider us perverts if we could explain to them how sex and reproduction coincide within our multicellular selves. Any proper prokaryote would tell you that sex—sharing genes—is something one does with multiple partners, trading bits of DNA via cell-connecting tubes or viral vectors. Reproduction, OTOH, means privately splitting your single-celled self into two identical organisms.

    Strawberries, Sharks, and Komodo Dragons
    Asexual reproduction is actually so common that we barely think about it. Every time you pull a strawberry sucker from your garden or trim a spider plant’s spiders, you’re dealing with asexual reproduction. Bananas, the notoriously phallic fruit, are seedless and propagate by rooting cuttings. And even garlic, that spicy aphrodisiac, reproduces without sex via bulbs.
    All-female clones can continue to reproduce indefinitely, but all-male clones are extinct after one generation. Asexuality can be a dead end!
    And it’s not just plants. Many worms and insects, a boatload of coelenterates (pronounced see LEN’ ter ates’ —sea anemones and jellyfish), and even some fish and lizards reproduce asexually. Female sharks raised in captivity have given birth to all-female young whose DNA comes only from their virgin mothers. Ditto for Komodo dragons, except that through a genetic twist, their offspring are all male. Parthenogenesis has been reported as far up the evolutionary ladder as the