Darwin Award Study Only men are idiots

Study shows: Much more men than women do idiotic things

12/12/2014

"Men are idiots". Many a male contemporary may feel insulted by this claim. But for no reason, because a scientific study shows that many more men do idiotic things than women. The renowned trade magazine „British Medical Journal "has the investigation as well as more bizarre studies in the „Christmas Special“ released.

Many more men than women die from idiotic behavior
As part of their study, the research team centered around John Dudley Isaacs, director of the Institute of Cellular Medicine in Newcastle, UK, with the winners of the Darwin Award, most of which is posthumously awarded to people who have inadvertently caused their death in a stupid way , The price „honors those who improve the human gene pool by removing themselves from it, "quotes the news agency „dpa“ from the website of the award. As it turned out, most of the winners are male. Among them, for example, three men who drank liquor in a game variation of Russian roulette and then trampled on a landmine. A thief who wanted to steal a steel cable from an elevator but forgot that he was still in the elevator himself was also honored with the award. A clumsy terrorist, who did not sufficiently frank a letter bomb, turned it over, so that it was sent back to him. When he opened the package - for whatever reason - the bomb exploded and blew him to his death.

Darwin Award winners are mostly men
The researchers looked at the nominees from 1995 to 2014, of which 332 of the cases described were independently reviewed and confirmed, and found that 14 nominations were given to both men and women simultaneously. These were mostly couples who died in whimsical sexual adventures. These individuals were not considered by the researchers in their study. They focused on the remaining 318 cases, of which 282 were men and only 36 women. „Men accounted for 88.7 percent of the Darwin Award winners, this gender difference is statistically highly significant“, the researchers write in the journal.

The results of the evaluation coincided with the „The theory of the male idiots, "the scientists continue to report that the reason for the increased risk taking of men, their more frequent admission to emergency rooms and their higher mortality in accidents due to the fact that they are simply idiots, which made logical idiotic things.

However, the researchers point out that other factors may have influenced the outcome. For example, differences in the consumption of alcohol by men and women were very likely to play a role in many cases. In addition, it is possible that women more frequently nominated men for the award than the other way round.

Does idiotic behavior of men have an evolutionary advantage?
The researchers were also thinking about the idiotic behavior of men in terms of evolution. „Idiot behavior presumably gives some unidentified, selective benefits to those who do not become their victims“, write the scientists in the journal. „Until a complete and satisfying explanation has been found for the 'theory of the male idiots', hospital emergency departments will continue to pick up the pieces - often literally.“

The publishers of the „British Medical Journal "emphasize that all articles go through the usual peer review process and have been judged by peers to be truly scholarly works, as well as the quirky and witty contributions to the Christmas edition.