Is this Darwinism? Or just Texas? Man ignores "No Swimming - Dangerous Alligators"sign, jumps into bayou, gets eaten?

I can’t even…

That is why I like crocodilians.
I can only hope this idiot did not pollute the gene pool with any offspring.

The problem is the Texan belief that signs like this are typical of government overreach.
Well, and that Texans are dumb as a bag of bricks.

At least he had a twin. Folks may not miss him too much.

@cookieman – if I were the twin, I’d be worried about what shared genes I might have

if you are an identical twin, all of them.

Well, it isn’t Darwinism. It’s stupidity. Hopefully he hasn’t passed stupid genes on at this point.

To paraphrase Mr. Shakespeare, The fault, dear @what a fool, is not in a state, but in ourselves.”

The kind of stupidity this guy has exhibited can be found anywhere, and these days it seems, anywhere—in government, in social media, in international relations, you name it.

It always bothers me when people talk about killing themselves doing stupid things as “Darwinism”. Yes, I know the Darwin Awards are all about this, but that’s tongue in cheek.

It is NOT Darwinism, and has nothing to do with it. @Dutchess_III Is right. It’s stupidity.

Could be that his parents taught him to buck the rules. Buck the rules in school, buck the driving laws, buck your boss….oh. Yeah. It’s Texas.

^ Are you being sarcastic? Is Texas known for being home to people who break rules?

they did commit treason over the abolition of slavery

Maybe he was depressed and just wanted to commit suicide?
Or maybe just being stupid and no one or sign is going to tell him what to do, Well way to go Baba betcha can’t do that again. You should em, huh?
And as for the part of your question, maybe others will learn from this, I highly doubt it,there seems to be no shortage of idiots out there.

I am being semi-serious, @longgone. Texas has long been known for rebellion. At 28, surely he knew by then that there are consequences of breaking rules? How could he have not known? And who taught him it’s OK to break rules if you want to?

PS. I think this question would be better phrased, ”...is this nature, or nurture?”

Could be an interesting question!

I don’t look at it quite that way. To me it seems inevitable that all of us must wind up doing something stupid eventually, some of us a great deal more than others. It’s merely a question of whether or not we beat the odds, and live to contemplate our stupidity.

To a certain extent, @stanleybmanly, that’s true. I mean, his idiot girlfriend went in too. But alligator warnings? Seriously?

Perfect summation, @filmfann.

Of course we could also look on the bright side: at least he won’t surface in a few years as yet another Texas politician (he certainly had the brains for it.)

Nor vote for the idiot politician who WILL surface.

Sadly, stupidity is everywhere, so I’m going to say Darwinism.

I wonder if this is also the result of over-protecting people, like putting warnings on hair dryers to not use them in the shower…

Just like the poor, fools are always with us.

@Dutchess_III Warnings are rarely put into place unless someone has actually done what is warned against though. That makes me think that there must be an interesting story behind this warning.

Oh yeah @jerv that is what ya want stoned Alligators, there seems to be no lack of stupid people.
Imagine them getting the munchies??!!

Obviously, stupidity doesn’t stop at the Texas border. This guy from Maine has the Texan beat by a mile.

Maine Man Dies Instantly After Setting Off A Firework From His Head

@Pachy – you’re right. The guy from Maine definitely was not a shining light of brilliance.

If generations practiced the ritual of throwing town fools into the Croc pit then it might be called eugenics. But this isn’t Darwin ism.

Even the most of the stupidest humans are smarter than dogs. Not saying they have common sense, but as far as IQ goes, they’re still smarter than dogs.

I doubt a dumb dog would have willing jumped into that lagoon if it knew there were crocs there.

The difference is a person can read and a dog can’t.
Also, it is our very intelligence, and perhaps lack of consequences throughout our lives, that can cause us to disregard what we choose to. A dog may disregard an order, if he senses danger that we can’t, but not because there was a sign telling him of danger that he wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.

@longgone I don’t really know if Texans are any more rebellious than other US citizens but they are very stubborn, bull headed and don’t take kindly to being told what to do or how to do it.

^^^^ Does the fact that my Dad was raised in Texas and I was born in Texas clear any thing up?... :(

@Dutchess_III “Even the most of the stupidest humans are smarter than dogs. Not saying they have common sense, but as far as IQ goes, they’re still smarter than dogs.”

It may be possible to use IQ tests as a valid way of comparing individuals of the same species… (I doubt it.)…I am completely sure they cannot be used to compare a dog and a human. If dogs made the tests, they would look very different.

@rojo That is interesting, to me. When I think of Texas, I think of religion and raising children to be obedient. I know those are stereotypes, but I’ve never been to Texas, so haven’t had the chance to learn more. I’d love to go one day.

“Even the most of the stupidest humans are smarter than dogs…” that hardly made sense. I apologize for the editing brain freeze.”

“If the dogs made the tests, they would look very different.” But the dogs can’t make the test. That’s my point.

Here is, arguably, the smartest dog in the world.

From this link ”Chaser is now world famous as the dog who knows more than 1,000 words, the largest known vocabulary of any animal except humans. Besides proper nouns, she knows verbs, adverbs and prepositions. She’s learned that common nouns can identify different things. Ball could mean any round or bouncy object, Frisbee any spinning disk or ring. And she can make inferences. If asked to fetch a new toy with a word she’s never heard, she’ll pick the toy out from a pile of familiar ones.”

I watched a 60 minutes segment on the dog, and she is truly amazing. However, she is also owned by John Pilley, who is a retired Wofford College psychology professor. He has worked with her 5 hours a day, 5 days a week., for the last 9 years.

Can you imagine what you could accomplish working that intensively with a human, starting at one year of age and continue working with them for years and years?

^ We tend to equate “smart” with “human”. Your link is a good example of that. We deem one dog the smartest – coincidentally, that’s the dog we have taught a bit of language. I think it’s illogical to take a creature who communicates via smell and body language, then teach him words to see how smart he is. It sets them at a huge disadvantage.

Yeah.
Imagine a dog trying to teach a human his dog-vocabulary of smells.
The dog will think the human is a retard.

Maybe a little bit of both, pride makes man ignore all sorts of dangers, real and imagined; “I don’t have to listen, it will never happen to me, or it is not really real”.

@Dutchess lll

“Can you imagine what you could accomplish working that intensively with a human starting at one year of age…and continue for years and years. ”

There’s a quite remarkable book that you might find interesting. It’s written by Barry Neil Kaufman, the father of a child diagnosed with Autism at age 2.

He and his wife developed an intensive daily methodology for working with their son which involved hours of direct eye contact teaching (accompanied by lots of praise and rewards also) every single day.

I don’t know that the average set of parents could do this but he was their only child and they were determined to not allow him to slip away from them into the prison of his own world.

As a result of these hours upon hours of intensive work, he eventually developed into an average non-autistic child.

This was in the seventies and we now know that there is an entire spectrum of Autism ranging from mild to quite severe so I’m guessing he was likely on the less severe end.

Nonetheless he was still Autistic and his parents’ intensive methodology worked.

Anyhow, the title of the book is : “Son, Rise” by Barry Neil Kaufman

OK, I give up. I’m on iPhone, not computer, so I don’t get the drop down to click on the name so it will outline in red.

Usually, I can remedy this by typing @ plus the name manually. But I have tried every which way with yours and nothing works. I’m guessing it’s got something to do with the 3 after your name or the underscore, but 3 ones doesn’t work and neither does 3 ells. So I just give up.

WTF ??

Ah @Buttonstc! I yelled “Son Rising!” before I even got through half the post! That book affected my life, and how I view different children, tremendously. They wrote another, which I haven’t read , called “The Son Also Rises.”

I was doing daycare in the late 80’s, before autism was hardly known. Because of the that book I, myself, diagnosed one of my daycare kids as autistic. He was classic, so much like the boy in Son Rising. I had that chance to work with him for over a two years (without saying anything to his parents about my suspicions, because they were fanatic Christians and would not have believed God would give them a less than perfect son) and there was a HUGE difference in him at the end of those two years.
Mom even commented on the fact that out of all the day care providers he’d gone through (they kept getting rid of him :(, I was the only one who was able to stop him from scratching other children.
The difference was, I knew he wasn’t doing it to be mean. He was doing it because he liked how it felt. I was able to replace that desire by gently scratching his bare back, tickly-style for about 15 minutes a day, a couple times a day.

So many stories I could tell about Matthew.

Or maybe it’s cynicism?

Well, if he was cynical about there actually be alligators in the water, that was a stupid way to find out.

I don’t know if cynical is the word, @Dutchess_III , but perhaps skeptical.

Come on even the people there were warning him about the alligators, and he seemed to not give a shit or care.

As I said, I wonder if he was raised to think that he would never have to be held accountable. I wonder if he was bailed out of every bit of trouble, and never had to suffer the consequences.