h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Beautifully presented, utterly (grimly) fascinating!

(And now the complaint):--

There seems to be a trace of self-contradiction not in your entry but in the Darwin site itself. You set out the criterion for a full Darwin award:

"A person who manages to sire offspring before he removes his genes for incompetence from the human gene pool, or one who manages to survive his stupidity, is of no use to human evolution."

But the man who gave his ten-year-old son a knife and told him (repeatedly) to stab him if he hated him that much obviously . . . had a ren-year-old son.

The Darwin site says:--

"This is a classic Darwin. The man will no longer reproduce, and his son obviously had better genes for survival than his father-his mother's contribution, plus the more robust half of his father's genes."

Do they know nothing of genetics? Recessive genes are still carried in "robust" offspring.

OK OK they're not serious. And stupid behaviour is entirely culturally induced, not genetically inherited. Bad behaviour towards others is in many forms 'selected' for propagation in the gene pool, self-destructive behaviour certainly not; that means there are no stupid genes. Nasty ones, yes, plenty.

I've got the Darwin Awards books - it says that you can still win a Darwin if you had kids before 'removing yourself from the gene pool', because it would be totally impractical for Wendy to have to determine the reproductive status of each Darwin candidate.