Who Invented the Darwin Awards

An article by Peter Pierce    Comments Off on Who Invented the Darwin Awards

The Darwin awards were invented by Wendy Northcutt in an attempt to mock people who unintentionally remove themselves from the gene pool by performing a single act of stupidity. The awards are based on Charles Darwin’s theory of the ‘Survival of the fittest’ and ironically honour those people who improve the human species by sacrificing their own lives. According to Northcutt, the Darwin awards commemorate people ‘who do a service to humanity by eliminating themselves from the gene pool’ i.e. lose their ability to contribute to the human race by either sterilization or death in an idiotic manner. There is a website dedicated to the Darwin awards which features compilations of the award winning accounts and collections.

There is no dearth of stories and anecdotes suitable enough to go into the Darwin awards collection. Northcutt started collecting such stories when he was doing Biology research at Stanford University in the year 1993.He went through newspapers from around the world looking for such articles and once their legitimacy was confirmed, he re-wrote and circulated them for a small mailing group of friends. Northcutt began to receive similar accounts from a lot of sources, as these emails passed around. Later, when the server got overloaded with responses, these pages were moved to the official website of the Darwin awards where people could submit nominations and vote for their favourites.