Each Christmas, the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) gets a little bit festive, releasing a special edition filled with goofy research papers. The science is real, but the topics are ridiculous. Last year, papers covered topics such as the origins of magic, how much James Bond really drank, and the physical responses to a public unicycler.
This year, the highlight comes in the form of a paper led by a 15-year-old student Ben Alexander Daniel Lendrem, from the King Edward VI School in the UK, and his dad Dennis Lendrem, a statistician from the UK's Institute of Cellular Medicine, who studies the behaviour of human decision-making.
The premise of their paper is their 'Male Idiot Theory' (MIT), and with this in mind, they examined all past winners of the infamous Darwin Awards. Launched in 1993, the awards draw attention to the dumbest causes of death around the world - such as inserting oneself, naked, into the exhaust chute of a pancake house, and doing some DIY electrical work while sitting on a prison toilet - in order that "their action ensures the long-term survival of the species, by selectively allowing one less idiot to survive".
Interestingly, the Lendrems found that of the 318 cases reported to the Darwin Awards, 282 of them - so 88.7 percent - were performed by men.
According to Krishnadev Calamur at NPR, examples cited by the researchers include, "the terrorist who mailed a letter bomb with insufficient postage and who, upon its return, opened it."
While the authors admit that selection bias could have skewed the results - perhaps women are more likely to nominate men for the award - and perhaps men are more likely to take risks of an outlandish physical nature that make their failures more newsworthy, they insist that something must be going on with the intelligence levels of such individuals.
"Despite these limitations, there can be little doubt that Darwin Award winners seem to make little or no real assessment of the risk or attempt at risk management. They just do it anyway. In some cases, the intelligence of the award winner may be questioned.
For example, the office workers watching a construction worker demolishing a car park in the adjacent lot must have wondered about the man's intelligence. After two days of office speculation - how does he plan to remove the final support to crash the car park down safely? - they discovered, on the third day, that he didn't have a plan. The concrete platform collapsed, crushing him to death and flattening his mini-excavator."
If we're being serious, there's not much more you can really do with the Darwin Awards statistic other than to speculate why there's such a difference between male and female presence. Perhaps physical risk-taking is more common in men, because it's some sort of rite-of-passage, the researchers suggest.
According to theories into why more boys are born around the world than girls, it could have to do with the fact that, statistically, boys suffer more fatal diseases, take more mortal risks, and fall prey to more violence than girls. Psychologist Anne Campbell from Durham University in the UK told Brigid Schulte from The Washington Post that, "Males (of many species) engage in far more risk-taking behaviour as a result of their greater fitness variance - bigger difference between male winners and losers in terms of reproduction compared to females - and the fact that their investment in offspring is not obligate." She adds, "Female mammals need to stay alive to ensure their infants survival, and thus their own reproductive success."
What's odd is that the risk-taking male trying to impress females with his physical strength is easy to imagine in a time when, you know, a sabre-toothed tiger could attack them, but it's unclear why risk-taking is still so prevalent in males in the 21st century. The Washington Post reports that men get into more car crashes than women; they're admitted to emergency rooms for accidents and injuries more often because they're more likely to skydive, use drugs, and climb mountains; and they're more physically and verbally aggressive. Old habits die hard?
"Until MIT gives us a full and satisfactory explanation of idiotic male behavior, hospital emergency departments will continue to pick up the pieces, often literally," they write. "[W]ith the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study - males and females, with and without alcohol - in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting."
Thanks to his great sense of humour, teenager Ben Alexander Daniel Lendrem is now the youngest person ever to have a paper published by the BMJ.
Head to io9 for their top ten list of this year's best Christmas BMJ articles, including the survival time of chocolates in emergency wards and how fast does the Grim Reaper walk anyway?
Sources: NPR, The BMJ, The Washington Post