Darwin Awards, The: Next Evolution by Wendy Northcutt, Patrick Lawlor, and Julie Schaller

About
Reviews

About

From the Publisher

The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution commemorates those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it, showing us just how uncommon common sense can be! Meet the absentminded terrorist who opens a mail bomb returned to him for insufficient postage. Marvel at the thief who steals electrical wires before shutting off the current. Gape at the would-be pilot who flies his lawn chair suspended from helium balloons into air-traffic lanes. These tales of trial and awe-inspiring error illustrate the ongoing saga of survival of the fittest in all its selective glory! The author has appeared in USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, The (NY) Daily News, Boston Herald, Publisher Weekly, BookPage and CNN.com.

Published: Listen & Live Audio on Jan 1, 2008

Scribd

Darwin Awards, The: Next Evolution

Related Interests

Rating and Stats

Share This Book

About

From the Publisher

Reviews

Related Articles

Can Life Ever Be Perfectly Adapted to Its Environment?

If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know It Exist?: Experiments in evolution are exploring what would happen if we rewound the tape of life.

Suck It, Sponges: Marine Jellies Were the First Animals to Evolve

Related Articles

Can Life Ever Be Perfectly Adapted to Its Environment?
Can an organism ever become perfectly evolved? In Richard Lenski’s lab at Michigan State University, scientists are trying to see if that’s possible. The idea grew out of the lab’s Long-Term Evolution Experiment, started in 1988, with Escherichia coli; in 2010, they celebrated 50,000 generations (500 occur every 75 days). The lab has 12 populations of the bacteria inhabiting their own climate-controlled flasks of swirling nutrient solution, each like a finch-less Galapagos—an experiment in evolution by natural selection, but one that has been stripped to its bare essentials. For the past 28 y

If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know It Exist?: Experiments in evolution are exploring what would happen if we rewound the tape of life.
In less than five milliseconds, a Hydromantes salamander can launch its tongue—including the muscles, cartilage, and part of its skeleton—out of its mouth to snag a hapless insect mid-flight. Among amphibians, it is the quick draw champ. Frogs and chameleons are comparative slowpokes when it comes to their ballistic anatomies. “I’ve spent maybe 50 years studying the evolution of tongues in salamanders,” says David Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “this is a particularly interesting case because salamanders, who don’t do anything fast, have the fastest

Suck It, Sponges: Marine Jellies Were the First Animals to Evolve
Wikimedia Commons This ctenophora was evolved and kickin' long before you were a glimmer in Homo erectus' eye Crunchy or smooth peanut butter. Toilet paper tucked over or under. Clicky top or cap pens. Jellies or sponges. No, not the kitchen items—the animals. Maybe you haven’t been debating that last issue with the same passion as the eternal toilet paper question, but evolutionary biologists have. Now one group says they've got an answer: it’s the jellies. The question isn’t whether jellies or sponges are better (it’s obviously sponges, because they have no real circulatory, digestive, excre