SCT: Give Darwin an Ig Nobel Prize

This annual celebration
of humorous science is
made to order for evolution

What’s More Deserving of Ig Nobel Prizes than Evolutionary Just-So Stories? 
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, 25 Sept, 2025

The 2025 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced. This tradition, begun in 1991 by Improbable Research, celebrates “achievements so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”

Ig Nobel is, of course, a pun — it sounds like “Ignoble.” This year’s winners included a man who watched one of his fingernails grow for 35 years, a study on “the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza,” and “experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies”….

Darwinians generally escape this notoriety, but when you think about it, what’s more deserving of Igs than evolutionary just-so stories? What is more unusual, imaginative, and downright funny? Here are just a few I have encountered in my years of reporting, published in all seriousness by mainstream science news websites and scientific journals….

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