Darwin Awards

The Darwin Awards are a series of hoaxes and urban legends which are then claimed to be spun into an annual collection of "people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race". There are also those who failed to die but rendered themselves incapable of procreation, as well as at-risk survivors who receive an honorable mention. The awards have an overall pro-social darwinism and borderline eugenicist tone, promoting the deaths of "stupid" people as something that improves the human race.

This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved.

Darwin Awards could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

Someone is wrong on
The Internet
Log in:
v - t - e

The awards allegedly began in 1993 as a Stanford student's newsletter to friends with stories culled from newspapers. Since then the purported awards have grown to become an international institution. There is little attempt to distinguish between "urban legend," "rumor" and "confirmed" occurrences as many of the stories have been met with incredulity.

There are only two categories of listings: "Nominees" and "At-Risk Survivors," the latter of whom are people who survived (or otherwise were not injured beyond procreative capability) but may still not have learned their lesson and may yet repeat their actions. There are no Darwin Award "winners," because... well, really, if any of them were real life winners, they wouldn't be on the site. A "Double Darwin" nominee is a story of two people who off/handicap each other due to mutual stupidity.

Hoaxes

A large number of the "awards" are in respect of hoaxes and urban legends. Mythbusting site Snopes maintains that there is no group of people assiduously assessing candidates and that they are just lists created by anonymous people on the internet.

The Spike TV show 1000 Ways to Die seems to be heavily inspired by the Darwin Awards, save that it sorts out interesting deaths rather than stupid ones, although there is indeed quite a bit of overlap. It has essentially the same concept, but adds that many of the alleged deaths occurred to people who deserved it as an act of karma.

gollark: It may have accidentally been due to apiomemetic #91904.
gollark: This *must* be ironic.
gollark: I'm sure you'd like to think so.
gollark: ?tag skateboard
gollark: ?tag lyricly projects
This evolution-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.