CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—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.

Dr. Werfel used standard scientific methodology to develop his theory. His goal wasn’t to break new ground in entomology. It was to take top place at the Festival of Bad Ad-Hoc Hypotheses, or BAHFest, a satirical conference on evolutionary biology held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Six presenters, each armed with reams of research, vied to win over a panel of judges with a different bogus scientific theory. The winner got a statue of Darwin looking dubious—shoulders shrugging, hands turned upward.

“The lure of having that trophy on my desk at work is a very powerful one,” said Dr. Werfel. His research to develop tiny robots that can build complex systems was inspired in part by the mound-building termite colonies of Namibia and featured on the cover of the journal Science earlier this year.