Free The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction by Wendy Northcutt Page B

Survivor: Pill Pusher
    Confirmed by Reliable Eyewitness
    Featuring a woman, teen, and medicine
     
     
    Darwin says, “We asked for medical submissions and have greatly enjoyed the responses! ”
     
    PENNSYLVANIA | My husband worked at a small, busy rural pharmacy. His customers were hard-working, simple people. Early one morning he dispensed a prescription to the mother of a teenager for anti-nausea tablets and suppositories, labeled with what he thought were clear directions.
    Early that evening he received a phone call from the child’s mother, asking when the medications would take effect. Knowing that the suppository should have taken effect within an hour, he asked which form of the medicine she had given the child. The mother said she had tried both tablets and suppositories, but the patient was still experiencing severe nausea.
    Since the child was evidently sicker than originally diagnosed, my husband told her that she needed to call the doctor and ask for further instructions. Then the mother asked the key question: Should she have unwrapped the suppository before her child swallowed it? That winner was quickly followed by her inquiry as to how far she should have inserted the tablet rectally, or rather should it have been inserted vaginally?
    To this day, he includes directions for unwrapping suppositories before use, as well as stating that tablets should be taken by mouth!
     
    Reference: Ann Boncal

    Reader Comments
     
    “Do we really need suppository instructions?”
    “I used to think people had some brains.”
    “. . . and they say a pharmacy is dull?”

SCIENCE INTERLUDE SEX ON THE BRAIN
    By Robert Adler
     
     
    Suppose our big brains didn’t evolve for practical reasons such as better hunting, gathering, or fighting—things that our less-endowed primate cousins do quite well. What if the explosive growth in brain power that made us what we are today had nothing to do with fitness, but everything to do with sex?
    That ’s what evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller thinks, and presents in convincing detail in his book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. (New York: Vintage, 2001)
    What counted wasn’t the ability to pitch a spear more accurately, but the ability to pitch a good pickup line.
    Our brains ballooned over the last two million years not to make us more fit on the savannah, but to make us more marketable in the Pleistocene equivalent of pickup bars, Miller says. Sexual selection—the individual mating choices of thousands of generations of our ancestors—is driving the growth of our big brains.

    Art, Music, Language, and Creativity
    Sexual selection’s fingerprints are all over a bouquet of complex and colorful human capacities, valued and attractive talents that have little to no survival value. Miller’s list includes expressive arts such as music, poetry, painting, dance, personal decoration, and universally admired qualities—such as generosity and heroism—that are tough to explain based on survival of the fittest.
    “Theories of human mental evolution just weren’t accounting for (these) aspects of human behavior,” says Miller. Sexual selection, which accounts for many of the most surprising features of plants and animals, does a much better job of explaining a range of useless human talents. His ideas may even shed light on the evolutionary history that lurks behind the fatal displays of risk-taking and derring-do that garner Darwin Awards.
     
    Survival of the Sexiest
    The idea started with Darwin. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin argued that evolution winnows every generation through two sieves: fitness, which selects adaptations that help us survive; and sexiness (sexual selection) , which selects adaptations that help us mate. Fitness selection might lead to warm fur, and the ability to communicate. Sexual selection might lead to long hair and a pleasant voice.
    Fitness selection has enjoyed