About
Beginning in the earliest days of Usenet, the Darwin awards seek to, in the words of creator Wendy Northcutt, ‘commemorate those individuals who ensure the long term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion’. In other words, they represent an online record people who have lost the ability to reproduce in a particularly stupid fashion, so preventing their idiocy from spreading. Example below.
The site divides notable events into four seperate categories, the eponymous Darwin Awards; Honourable Mentions, in which the featured individual does not win an award, but draws close to doing so; Urban Legends, popular stories whih are in fact fabrIcated or unverifiable and unverifiable Personal Accounts of Darwins or near-Darwins by eyewitnesses.
Origin
On December 27 1831, zoologist Charles Robert Darwin set out aboard the HMS Beagle on a five year voyage that would see him reach the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of South America. Here he encountered numerous distinct species of tortoise and finch and, so the story goes, noted the adaptations of each species to its own island, before returning to England after a total of some five years of travel. His exploration piqued his curiosity and, following sixteen years of research into the nature of marine invertebrates, his theory of Evolution was published.
Considerably later, in 1985, five years after the establishment of Usenet, a group discussion on one early internet forum about a person being crushed to death beneath a vending machine he was trying to break into led to a certain Wendy Northcutt noting the continuing evolution of the human species, and deciding to set up a website to commemorate those who honourably remove the dangers caused by their own idiocy from the human gene pool, so accelerating the process. thus, darwinawards.com was born.
Spread
Due to the technology of the time, the awards spread almost exclusively via email, with fabrications abounding and Northcutt trying her utmost to sort fact from fiction. The notorious tale of the JATO rocket powered Chevrolet Impala, for example, was confirmed a mere Urban Legend.
In 1993, Northcutt published her first book compiling the most notable awards (there have been nine Darwin Award books to date). Later, in 2006, a comic film based upon the awards starring Jospeh Fiennes and Winona Ryder, and directed by Finn Taylor, was released.
Today, the awards have a small but seemingly deicated following, with entries regularly receiving over 1000 upvotes on Reddit and the awards’ most popular facebook group retaining around 50,000 likes.