I love the Ig Nobel prizes. These are the annual awards that are announced a bit before the Nobel prizes, and recognise a wide spectrum of science, including both very bad science and science that is good, but on a topic that is on first appearance a bit whacky. This year‘s physiology prize went Wilkinson, Sebanz and Huber for their study of yawning in tortoises.

On reading this, you first thought may be: What would posses anyone to study yawning in tortoises? If you are a taxpayer you might even think: Those damn scientists, wasting taxpayer’s money on bored tortoises! Your prejudices might even be confirmed if you looked at the paper and saw that their result was negative.

They asked the question: Is yawning in tortoises contagious, i.e., if a tortoise sees another tortoise yawning, is it more likely to yawn itself? And the answer they got was that, no, yawning is not contagious in tortoises. Proving that tortoises don’t do something does not sound like world-changing research. You probably did not lose sleep last night worrying about whether yawning is or is not contagious in tortoises.

But I think that this initial reaction would be wrong. You see yawning is contagious in humans. But we do not really know why, indeed according to the yawning Wikipedia page we do not actually know why we and many other species yawn at all. Why do we yawn, what function does it serve? Why did animals evolve this tendency to yawn? We don’t know.