Imagine how fierce the Vikings would have been if their axe chops and spear thrusts were enhanced by the raw power of baby cries, and the need to protect the infant strapped to their backs.
That’s the “extreme infant distress vocalization” theory that won MIT grad Tomer Ullman the grand prize at last year’s Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses.
BAHFest gathers the most imaginative minds for a “celebration of well-researched, logically explained, and clearly wrong evolutionary theories”, and this gathering of like-minded thinkers owes its creation to this cartoon by SMBC's Zach Weiner:
BAHFest is about to return for not one but two times the backwards ideas about biological adaptation this October, with an east coast fest in Cambridge, MA on October 19th, followed by a west coast conference at San Francisco's Castro Theatre on October 25th.
What sort of crazed revelation will earn their conceiver the coveted Skeptically Shrugging Darwin statue, perhaps an updated theory about the joys of battling with a baby strapped to your back?
-Via io9