The second annual BAHFest (Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses) was held recently on the MIT campus, parodying absurd evolutionary explanations of any number of natural phenomena. A thousand attendees gathered in Kresge Auditorium, and you can get a sense of the atmosphere from the live stream archive video above. The Wall Street Journal was there:

At a recent scientific conference here, Justin Werfel, a Harvard University researcher who has studied termites in Africa, described to the crowd his theory on why bugs are so disgusting.

It is all about evolution, Dr. Werfel said. Increased competition among humans for food drove bugs to become ever more disgusting to keep people from eating them, he said.

Of Werfel’s hypothesis, a judge had this comment:

Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard and one of the BAHFest judges, was impressed by Dr. Werfel’s theory about why insects look the way they do. "If you had heard an idea like this at an evolution meeting, it could have passed as something that was a bit kooky, but maybe not wrong," Dr. Hoekstra said.

Insects featured in another mock-theory, this one on the origins of yawning:

The question of why we yawn is one of "the enduring mysteries of human physiology," says Emma Kowal of Harvard University. Her bogus theory attempted to provide the answer.

Flying insects are high in protein. They gather in dense swarms most frequently at dawn and dusk, not-so-coincidentally the times of day when we are most likely to yawn.

Therefore, she says, "these insects served as an alternative protein source for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with yawning as the primary gathering mechanism." In other words: We evolved to yawn to catch bugs to eat.

Do you notice anything about these joke hypotheses? Right, they’re not that funny. They are supposed to be, and the audience can be heard dutifully cracking up. Darwinian evolutionary scientists are not known for their sense of humor. But it’s more than that.

As judge Hopi Hoekstra says, "If you had heard an idea like this at an evolution meeting, it could have passed as something that was a bit kooky, but maybe not wrong." And that is the sad truth.

The whole field of evolutionary psychology, recognized as a farce even by many Darwinists, would offer an extreme illustration. Its doctrines almost all sound as if they could be cooked up in the shower somewhere between shampooing your hair and waiting to rinse out the conditioner.

But go back and read Casey’s post of this morning, on the latest "solution" to "Darwin’s dilemma," the enigma of how complex animal life suddenly arose in the Cambrian explosion.

On that subject, posing a very grave challenge to Darwinian theory, the bad ad hoc hypotheses are offered in all seriousness in the scientific literature. They claim among other things that the origin of biological information can be traced to increased oxygen in the early Earth, extra sediments in the ocean, or extra nitrogen, the Earth getting smacked by an errant space body, or whatever else you care to imagine.

Pity the poor science nerds, laboriously straining to amuse! Darwinism is hard to parody because the real thing so often seems intelligently designed to invite mockery.