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A new study shows that men do more reckless things than women. Eighty-eight percent of the death-by-stupidity cases involved men all ages and races. The Darwin Awards site recorded many of these unfortunate events and even awarded post-mortem their authors for keeping humanity’s gene pool clean by removing themselves from it.
The study was published December 11 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). One of its authors, Ben Alexander Daniel Lendrem, 15, is the youngest individual to have a paper published in the prestigious medical journal.
The authors came to the conclusions that men do stupid things and are more likely to adopt an idiotic behavior by analyzing more than 300 stupid death cases recorded by the Darwin Awards over the past two decades.
The winners of the unfortunate awards were mostly men. One of them shot himself dead while trying to convince a friend that the “spy pen” weapon was real. Also, two men played a fatal chicken game by lying on a train track. Both of them were smashed by a train running at 80 miles per hour through the station. Other two men, this time in Kenya, wanted to take a selfie with an enraged elephant that trampled them to death. Additionally, a terrorist sent a package containing a bomb by post, but when his package was returned for inadequate postage, he opened it.
Ben Lendrem came up with the idea of the study while telling his father the macabre stories he was reading on the Darwin Awards site. Dennis Lendrem, expert in statistics and decision making at the Institute of Cellular Medicine, noticed that all were men. So the two started analyzing all the data and found that it was true – more than 88 percent of the cases had male protagonists.
“The size of the difference between men and women is what really surprised us. It was much bigger than we expected,”
Dennis Lendrem said.
A previous research revealed that men also drive more recklessly than women and they get into Emergency Rooms more often. Also, they usually commit more crimes, like extreme sports, use drugs and act out of an impulse.
The researchers say that they do not know the reasons behind this pattern of behavior.
“Presumably, idiotic behavior confers some, as yet unidentified, selective advantage on those who do not become its casualties. Until our study gives us a full and satisfactory explanation of idiotic male behavior, hospital emergency departments will continue to pick up the pieces, often literally,”
Dennis Lendrem added.
Andy Gray, co-author of the study and a consultant trauma surgeon, said that ERs are literally picking up the pieces of careless men usually every Friday or Saturday night.
