How to celebrate Darwin
Rob Price

Last week, I wrote a bit about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the fact that 2008 is the 150th anniversary year of the crucial meeting of the Linnaean Society in London, where scientists including Darwin formally proposed an evolutionary theory to explain the existence of species.

What I neglected to note was the fact that, even though I accept Darwinian evolution as a credible scientific theory, I've never actually read the entire "Origin of Species." Not to put too fine a point on it, I always found "The Origin of Species" a bit of a yawn in the entertainment department.

My daughter agrees with me. She had to read "The Origin of Species" in a freshman class called "First Year Seminar."

"What did you think of Darwin?" I asked her when she got home

She rolled her eyes and told me "The Origin of Species" was one of the more painful reading experiences of her life. Apparently, the only thing that would have been more painful was an introductory class in ancient Latin.

I admitted I never actually had read the great man in his entirety. For that matter, I've never read Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx's "Das Kapital," books that can be said to have changed the course of history, along with "Origin of Species."

On the other hand, I am an avid follower of the annual Darwin Awards. Newsrooms are hectic places, but I can generally find solace and humor even on the busiest days by googling "Darwin Awards" and reading about the latest honors.

What are the Darwin Awards, I hear some of you ask. The Darwin Awards are presented to deceased individuals whose deaths can be celebrated with snide humor for removing bad genes from the human gene pool, thereby improving the overall intelligence of the human species.

Who wins Darwin Awards? Well, there was the fellow in Margate, County Kent of the United Kingdom, who lost a large poplar tree in his front yard due to a massive wind storm. The wind had actually bent the tree under the soffit of his roof. The guy took matters into his own hands and climbed up the trunk of the tree with a saw. He started sawing through the tree, straddling the trunk just where it was jammed under the eave.

Experts later estimated the bent tree had contained enough kinetic force to match a World War II cannon. At a certain moment of sawing, the tree trunk snapped in half and sprang upright, hurling the man more than a mile. His body was found in somebody's garden, and police speculated his neck probably broke at the moment of whiplash. But we can always imagine him flying through space, like a catapulted boulder in one of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, wondering when he was going to land.

Other Darwin Awards are given for more mundane disasters. In 2007, a group of thieves broke into an abandoned factory with the idea of stealing scrap metal. As luck the metal supports holding up the roof, which eventually fell in on them and killed two members of the group. The good news: They would never pass their genes on to posterity.

And then there was the man who decided he had had enough of the moles infesting his property. Electrocution seemed the only way of dealing with them efficiently, so he pounded metal rods into the ground, then connected the rods to a highvoltage power line. It turned out that moist dirt is an excellent electricity conductor; police had to shut off electricity to a large area of the town before they would even step into his yard to remove the body.

In the aftermath of my daughter's immersion in Darwinian theory, I plan to share these and other stories with her in an effort to let a little air into our conversations about Darwin. I figure she can instruct me on some of the subtler points of "Origin," and I can share actual stories of natural selection culling the weaker genetic links from humankind.

Like the man named Sharky, the skipper of a pearling ship whose propeller got tangled in a rope trailing in the water. Sharky donned a diving suit, clipped on a diving hose connected to an air compressor and dove over the stern of his boat…neglecting to take the boat engine out of gear. The spinning propeller grabbed his hose and reeled him in.