Does Evolution Want Us To Drink? (wsj.com) 184
Alcohol is terrible for the human body, yet we've developed a strong taste for it, suggesting that it may bring other kinds of benefits. From a report: Alcoholic intoxication is an abnormal mental state characterized by reduced self-control and various degrees of euphoria or depression, brought about by the temporary impairment of a pretty big chunk of the brain. As the term suggests, it involves the ingestion of a chemical toxin, ethanol, which in small doses makes us happy, more sociable and better at thinking creatively and defusing conflicts. In progressively higher doses, it can lead to degraded motor coordination, slurred speech, violent arguments, maudlin expressions of love, inappropriate touching, injuries, blackouts, property damage and even karaoke. Why do we do it? Historically, scientists have written off our affinity for intoxication as an evolutionary mistake, a method that we've developed for tricking our biological reward system into releasing little shots of pleasure for no good reason. But this is not a satisfying explanation. It should puzzle us more than it does that humans have devoted so much ingenuity and effort to getting drunk.
[...] If alcohol were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, evolution should have figured it out by now and put a firm end to this nonsense. Other vices can plausibly be seen as necessary appetites gone wrong, such as our taste for pornography or junk food. But alcohol is mind-bogglingly dangerous, both physiologically and socially. The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits. Evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature and genetics suggests what some of these benefits might be. For instance, the ancient and cross-cultural view of alcohol as a muse is supported by modern psychology: Our ability to think outside the box is enhanced by one or two drinks. This is why artists, poets and writers have long turned to drink. The name of the Anglo-Saxon god of artistic inspiration, Kvasir, literally means "strong ale." This is also why some modern companies that rely upon innovation, like Google, judiciously mix work with alcohol -- by, for instance, providing whiskey rooms where frustrated coders can relax and expand their minds when struggling with a challenging problem.
[...] If alcohol were merely hijacking pleasure centers in the brain, evolution should have figured it out by now and put a firm end to this nonsense. Other vices can plausibly be seen as necessary appetites gone wrong, such as our taste for pornography or junk food. But alcohol is mind-bogglingly dangerous, both physiologically and socially. The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits. Evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature and genetics suggests what some of these benefits might be. For instance, the ancient and cross-cultural view of alcohol as a muse is supported by modern psychology: Our ability to think outside the box is enhanced by one or two drinks. This is why artists, poets and writers have long turned to drink. The name of the Anglo-Saxon god of artistic inspiration, Kvasir, literally means "strong ale." This is also why some modern companies that rely upon innovation, like Google, judiciously mix work with alcohol -- by, for instance, providing whiskey rooms where frustrated coders can relax and expand their minds when struggling with a challenging problem.
Sex (Score:5, Insightful)
Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
Re:Sex (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sex (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sex (Score:5, Interesting)
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Another obvious explanation for why (some) humans like to drink is that ethanol contains energy (calories). In the ancestral environment, an adaptation that allows digesting alcohol from overripe fruit would be valuable even if there are some side effects.
This doesn't explain cravings for alcohol over any other food, but interestingly only some people have this craving (I don't; I find most alcoholic drinks disgusting). I wonder, then, if this craving is a trait that developed recently and requires speci
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Our livers evolved to get rid of alchohol just as fast as they can, taking into account that evolution was based upon eating overripe fruit from the ground already starting to rot and ferment. Lots of animals do it, who eat fruit, the ability to get rid of alchohol is essential.
How fucking stupid can they get, running around out in the wild amongst prey and predator, what benefit drunk, well for the predators, that makes you the easy target for the rest of the prey, they just have to be more sober than you
Re:Sex (Score:5, Interesting)
Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
What in the world is the evolutionary benefit of having inhibition of the reproduction of the species in the first place?
Re:Sex (Score:5, Interesting)
Think in terms of "mating strategies." It may pay off to be promiscuous and sleep around, or you could end up with an STD that takes you out of the gene pool altogether. Picking one partner and sticking with them could confer other advantages as well. After all, from an evolutionary point of view, it isn't how many kids you have. it's how many grandkids you have. For example, if all your children are infertile, you may as well not have had them, from your gene's point of view. Sticking with one partner may make it easier to share knowledge and resources with your grandchildren.
As there are trade offs to any approach, in a healthy population you will see a mix of strategies, including some folks who are very inhibited and need a lot of cajoling to get in the mood to breed.
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Yeah, as I mentioned in the post you are responding to, it's not even how many survive the first few years, it is how many are able to reach breeding age AND successfully breed. A horse and donkey can have as many foals as they want, but mules and hinnies will never be their own breed because they are always sterile. So simply counting the number of offspring is no determinant of genetic success.
Long Childhood (Score:5, Insightful)
What in the world is the evolutionary benefit of having inhibition of the reproduction of the species in the first place?
Humans have one of the longest childhoods in the animal kingdom with offspring having to be cared for and looked after for a decade or more. Inhibition is there to ensure that there is more likely to be a strong bond between parents before children arrive to ensure that they will stick together for years to raise the children.
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Selecting the right mate, so your children are successful, human babies are very costly to raise.
Re: Sex (Score:2)
What a silly question.
Do you understand that the bulk of human history has been a struggle to get enough to eat? Hell, it's a significant chunk of the world TODAY.
If you barely have enough food for your 2 adults and the kid or three you have, will having more children make your lives better or worse?
Hint: also realize that the vast history of the human species had no birth control.
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Depends on where you live. Places like along the ocean are teaming with food and people learned along time ago how to encourage their favorites and also how to preserve. Hardest part was defending your area from outsiders.
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Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
As comedian Rita Rudner [wikipedia.org] noted in 1984 [youtube.com] :
This is true. They're trying to put warning labels on liquor now that say. "Caution: Alcohol can be dangerous to pregnant women." I think that's ironic. If it wasn't for alcohol, most women wouldn't even be that way.
Re:Sex (Score:5, Insightful)
Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
Yep.
You don't get the same attitudes towards drinking in other parts of the world, e.g. Europe, that you get in north America. It's as if those countries were colonised by a bunch of puritanical killjoys who wanted to ban Christmas & other celebrations & that the rest of the Europeans couldn't wait to get rid of. (Yes, the European settlers did actually ban celebrations, including Christmas. They were also highly prone to sectarian violence, no alcohol necessary.)
Re:Sex (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't get the same attitudes towards drinking in other parts of the world, e.g. Europe, that you get in north America. It's as if those countries were colonised by a bunch of puritanical killjoys who wanted to ban Christmas & other celebrations & that the rest of the Europeans couldn't wait to get rid of. (Yes, the European settlers did actually ban celebrations, including Christmas. They were also highly prone to sectarian violence, no alcohol necessary.)
The US First Amendment was radically more important than most people realize. It saved the North American continent from two centuries of warfare between the Puritans and the Lutherans and between the Baptists and the Congregationalists.
A little historical note: French Protestants, the Calvinist Huguenots, set up a reportedly successful colony near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. Spanish Catholics landed nearby a year later, in 1565. The French promptly set sail down the coast with the intent of attacking the Spanish. They sailed into a tropical storm, which destroyed their fleet and drowned most of them. The Spanish massacred all of the survivors they could get their hands on, suckering some 200 men into surrendering then cutting their heads off, and sacked the French settlement, killing every adult man and taking all the women and children captive (for exactly the uses you can imagine). If not for the tropical storm, it undoubtedly would have gone the other way, as the French started out with nearly 1000 men.
That is the sort of happy bullshit the European settlers of North America got up to, and it went on for centuries before the First Amendment was passed in 1791.
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French Protestants, Calvinist Huguenots, Spanish Catholics, Puritans, Lutherans, Baptists & Congregationalists fighting and killing each other.
Say it ain't so.
Re: Sex (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, religion - the cause of pretty much 99% of life's misery.
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Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
Ugly people need to get laid too.
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Alcohol loosens inhibition which promotes reproduction of the species.
Indeed. That was pretty much my first thought. Nicely ties in with those producing more offspring....producing more offspring. Kind of obvious, I would say.
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Even that came about recently, with most primitive people not able to make that much alcohol until farming became a thing.
Seems there are quite a few animals and birds that love getting drunk as well
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More than one meme can increase reproduction independently.
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Well, they don't have any fun vices...so, all they HAVE left to to do that feels good is fuck.
Re: Sex (Score:2)
Kids are a tremendous amount of work, and yet integral for economic growth. You gotta give them credit... the tradeoff must be pretty great for people when they're not habitually dulling their senses.
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This does not explain why a lot of very religious right-wing families have 6, 7, up to 12 children.
It also does not need to.
Drunk AI. (Score:3)
Now apply this to AI.
From the WSJ by a Professor of Philosophy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Human consumption of alcohol probably has more to do with having something safer to drink than plain water since modern sanitation methods didn't exist through
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Even stone age people worked like hell to make enough alcohol to get drunk every month or so. We seem to have liked alcohol before learning to make enough, through farming, to replace water.
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If he were, or if he were a naturalist or biologist, I'd expect he would point out that evolution doesn't want anything from us or for us. It is pretty indifferent to us.
Proof (Score:2)
Oh, wait, we were talking about evolution? Not God? Well damn, there's my witty banter shot to hell.
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Drinking problem (Score:2)
- Ted Striker
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Don't call me Shirley!
Procreation (Score:2)
Alcohol is conducive to procreation, which directly affects the number of offsprings.
Only in moderation (Score:2)
Only in moderation. As Shakespeare said, " It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance."
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If that was beneficial, people's natural inhibitions would already have a different balance.
The more obvious answer that the moron philosopher didn't consider in his editorial is that the harms of alcohol largely impact you after your reproductive years. And old men are less useful than old women, for example they're rarely good caretakers for children. And it is most often the men that drink enough to harm their health.
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"the harms of alcohol largely impact you after your reproductive years"
Only if it hasn't killed you already.
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If that was beneficial, people's natural inhibitions would already have a different balance.
The more obvious answer that the moron philosopher didn't consider in his editorial is that the harms of alcohol largely impact you after your reproductive years. And old men are less useful than old women, for example they're rarely good caretakers for children. And it is most often the men that drink enough to harm their health.
I listened to him on NPR, and couldn't read the article since it's paywalled. He was much more nuanced in the discussion, talking about how alcohol was treated historically as a medically issue, the serious health and other problems it brings, and asked "Why do we still have such an affinity?" He never claimed to know the answer, said there were a number of ideas why, and explained pros and cons of each. Interestingly, he pointed out the switch to distilled spirits intoduced a much more dangerous form of
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Asking lots of questions is great, as an internal process, but it doesn't sound like he was contributing anything at all.
Nope, evolution doesn't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits.
You rarely encounter alcohol in nature. Pretty much the only source are naturally fermented fruits, and they don't taste that great. Humanity learned to brew alcohol on purpose fairly recently, so there hasn't been much time to evolve aversion to it.
It's a preservative (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was a suggestion, years back, that for a lot of history the only safe way to drink water was to have a chemical in it toxic to pathogens.
On the other hand, animals who did not evolve with alcohol will enjoy it. There was a grain spill that fermented and was eagerly sampled by the local bears.
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And multiple human cultures have settled disputes between tribes with a night of drinking instead of war fighting. Alcohol may be bad for you, but a club to the skull is much worse for you. Sadly none of this evolution stuff is simple or even has a single cause (or result).
There are many different pressures that compete and drive our evolution. And we're almost certainly been drinking alcohol for long then we've been drinking animal milk and making yogurt and cheese. Yet there is already some genetic adapta
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And multiple human cultures have settled disputes between tribes with a night of drinking instead of war fighting
Really? Is that true?
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That's a theory behind ceremonial and ritualistic alcohol. But that may be as much of a cultural bias rather than a plausible theory. In our more recent history it's well documented how that alcohol played an important social role in ancient Roman and Chinese culture. But it's probably too recent to have lead to any measurable genetic adaptation. It's more like the other way around, we're adapted to drinking modest amounts of alcohol and social behavior pops up around this ability.
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Animals love eating fermented fruit, I guess evolution failed them as well.
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Brewing, perhaps. Consuming: try 10 million years ago:
https://www.livescience.com/48... [livescience.com]
Note that this article discusses genetic changes that allow humans to consume alcohol happening 10 million.
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Wikipedia says beer has been traced back 13,000 years. I would expect over six hundred generations to be enough for evolutionary selection to pick people less vulnerable to alcohol damage.
Especially since there's a direct impact on childrearing success. Alcoholic parents are not the best start for a child.
Aboriginals and alcohol (Score:2)
I know that this is politically incorrect, but there are major issues with alcohol and Australian Aboriginals, and I suspect other pre-agricultural groups. I do not think that traditional aboriginals had any way to make alcohol. So maybe they have not had genetic time to adapt to it?
OTOH Cocaine has been used by South Americans for many centuries. And they seemed to use it effectively. Yet we don't. I wonder if we just have not adapted to it in a similar way.
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Most primitive stone age tribes seem to have some way to make alcohol, usually inefficiently, like the women chewing a starchy root and spitting it out to ferment.
People like mind altering stuff, not just alcohol but lots of drugs from plants. And even fasting or dancing into a trance.
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Ah its a drug? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lack of Potable Water (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea if this has anything to do with anything or even if I accept the premise that we "evolved" to drink alcohol. However, if we are searching for an evolutionary benefit, potable water has been so hard to come by throughout human history that at times consuming alcoholic beverages was the safer option.
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It would still be a social/cultural benefit, not an evolutionary one. In the past, people could have drank animal blood, or just boiled water, as an alternative to alcohol. In fact, you have to boil water to make alcohol anyway, so if it was really just for potable water, they could have skipped the labor-intensive and resource-intensive steps of beer-making or wine-making. The fact is that people just liked to drink alcohol. We also don't currently drink alcohol in massive quantities just because we can't
Re:Lack of Potable Water (Score:5, Insightful)
potable water has been so hard to come by throughout human history that at times consuming alcoholic beverages was the safer option
Significant alcohol production requires agriculture which came long after our hunter-gathered phase. Early settlements were generally sited where there was ready access to clean, potable water it's only when we developed larger settlements like towns and cities that clean water became more of an issue.
Because it has not had time. (Score:2)
Assuming there even is a negative selective pressure against drinking on evolutionary time scales there has not been much time for it to do its work.
Outside of a few odd accidents, certainly not enough to create evolutionary pressure, drinking has only existed as long as agriculture.
I don't know what 'cultural evolution' but it sounds like the kind of thing that gets people stood against the wall. Temperance and prohibition have been tried, the former is was good the latter well if you dig into statistics a
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Incidentally, why does your signature call for repeal of the 17th Amendment? That one seems pretty good (popular election of Senators). Article V though, that's a pain (no Constitutional Amendment can undo the two-senators-per-state rule).
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I don't know what 'cultural evolution' but it sounds like the kind of thing that gets people stood against the wall.
You're thinking of cultural revolution. Cultural evolution is just that: slow changes to culture that result in large changes over time. Remember that "memes" originally came from the idea of essentially "idea genes" - like genes that cause certain traits in DNA, except as ideas that exist within a culture. Certain memes may "mutate" over time and a given culture can change. Like in genetic evolution, memes that provide an advantage to procreation are more likely to be selected over those that don't, as the
Motivations of systems (Score:2)
Non sequitur (Score:5, Interesting)
"The fact that our supposedly accidental taste for it has not been eradicated by genetic or cultural evolution means that the cost of indulging in alcohol must be offset by benefits."
That doesn't follow, for example:
Vestigiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Maladaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The bilk about "APPETITE, DOESN'T COUNT" is irrelevant. There's no "appetite" for morphine and it's gonna do what it does.
If you really want to force evolution in, we're more likely to metabolize it than develop disgust ala feces/corpses.
WSJ getting clicks with intellectual posturing. If anyone wants to speculate personal/faction agenda motives, knock yourself out.
Re:Non sequitur (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do we eat really spicy food? There's no obvious benefit. Technically there is a benefit in that it can cause you to sweat which can cool you down in hot weather, but we don't all eat spicy food just to cool down.
It follows that there is a benefit to both spicy food, and alcohol: We Like It. It gives us an enjoyable experience, and the positive experience is a benefit. It's also a cultural benefit (socialization) and a personal benefit (pain killer/emotion number/courage giver).
Clean water (Score:5, Informative)
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As to your point about people not figuring out how to boil their water you have to think not only about boiling it but then storing it after you boiled it. For most of history people had to store their water in stone/ceramic vessels, water skins made from animal
Re:Clean water (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an often-repeated myth, but think about it critically for a few minutes and it falls apart.
1. They had clean water, and they knew how to get it. We use the same methods today to get and consume clean water without ever processing it (wells, mountain streams, etc). Not only did they know how to get it, they transported it over hundreds of miles, and built gigantic aquifers and reservoirs to keep it.
2. Fermented beverages are just as "safe to store" in an uncontaminated container as water. If you brew beer or wine in contaminated vessels it's not gonna turn out great.
3. They did know that boiling water made it safe to drink. There are whole treatises written by the ancient greeks on not only how to find and select drinking water, but how to make it safer to drink.
4. Think about it. Boiling water is part of the process of making alcohol. All they had to do was *not continue the process*, drink the water *one time*, and go... oh, wait, this is fine. I guess we don't need to make alcohol. So, why didn't they do that? *They just liked drinking alcohol.* In fact, they thought alcohol had tons of health properties that made it *healthier* to drink than water, to say nothing of the calories it gave them. Ancient people's diets consisted almost completely of bread, beer, and butter. Beer was a significant source of calories; you drank it all day, in liters.
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Well, all true, but there were cholera epidemics as recently as the 19th century in places as developed as London.
Probably not (Score:3)
The answer is "YES" (Score:2)
Evolution definitely wants me to drink. It just told me so. It also just told me that I'd hold the roman candle in my teeth when I light it if I wasn't such a wee ballbag. I'm wondering why evolution has a Scottish accent.
Actual survival (Score:2)
For humans to go from hunter gathers always moving to farmers and to a lesser degree herders alcohol was a must. Hunter gathers are always moving to follow food sources and this gets them away from their own waste. Once we went agrarian many people started living in close quarters and never moving. The rivers they lived next to would become polluted, infected and be fatal to drink, but convert that through the brewing and fermentation process and you create something you can drink without a high probability
Completely wrong (Score:2)
Evolution doesn't select for or against anything that doesn't confer a survival/reproduction advantage or disadvantage. Clearly, drinking alcohol does not result in any significant, species-wide effect in that area, so evolution is not a factor here at all.
- Necron69
Has evolution had time to notice alcohol? (Score:5, Interesting)
Evolution works on long(er) timescales. Has alcohol been part of the human diet long enough for there to be any evolutionary impact?
We know beer has been a worker's beverage for at least 7 millennia, due to the calories it provides, with the alcohol being a preservative. Early beers were brewed as food for workers (such as for the builders of the Egyptian pyramids), with only enough alcohol to permit them to be stored. As a more recent example, "Porter" was created by British industry as a lunch for dockworkers (called "porters").
"Natural" alcoholic beverages are harder to find. Alcoholic beverages as an ongoing part of the human diet pretty much requires agriculture. There are theories claiming the early proliferation of farming may have been driven by alcohol consumption! "Johnny Appleseed" was all about apples for making applejack (much easier and more potent alcohol source than grain-based beverages), not as food.
Fire is not needed to intentionally produce alcohol: While it certainly accelerates fermentation, it is not a requirement. However, fire was a popular tool for clearing land for agriculture, so the two certainly are synergistic. Similarly, pottery/containers for brewing and dispensing such beverages would certainly be needed.
Has there been time for human evolution to notice alcohol? At this point, it seems a bit of a stretch. Alcohol, in quantity, is fairly recent.
Unless, of course, we discover that Australopithecus left the trees to work on brew kettles and stills...
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Curiously, you could argue the opposite.
All humans can digest alcohol because it's an environmental toxin that can be found in rotting food. Later as humans processed and stored food, consuming food that had been intentionally or unintentionally fermented would have been commonplace. Rice, for example, readily ferments to ethanol if it is wet, and every culture that traditionally cultivates rice has some form of rice wine.
Curiously, in the places that rice has been cultivated longest (perhaps longer than t
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This article [livescience.com] points to genetic changes in humans that happened 10 million years ago that allow us to consume alcohol.
What you seem to ignore is fallen fruit, which frequently ferments. I would probably not be too hard for even hunter-gatherers to encourage the fermentation with a small stock of fruit that carried the necessary yeast.
Sanitation (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept of access to large amounts of clean, sanitary drinking water is a very new concept. Like, new as of the last century or so. For most of human history, humanity has not had access to clean, safe drinking water.
And so humanity turned to alcohol instead. Alcohol sanitizes water and allows people to safely drink sufficient quantities of water without having to risk illness. It allows it to be safely stored. It provides a simple way to have something safe to drink kept on hand.
People often think of the Puritans in America as being hyper-strict. But even the Puritans believed beer was a gift from God [bbc.com]:
In fact Increase Mather, a prominent Puritan minister of the period, delivered a sermon in which he described alcohol as being "a good creature of God" - although the drunkard was "of the devil."
From the same article:
Early Americans even took a healthful dram for breakfast, whiskey was a typical lunchtime tipple, ale accompanied supper and the day ended with a nightcap. Continuous imbibing clearly built up a tolerance as most Americans in 1790 consumed an average 5.8 gallons of pure alcohol a year.
"We think of that as an astounding amount - you would think people would be staggering around drunk, but most people were able to handle their alcohol because it was integrated into daily life." says Bustard.
It was only when alternatives to alcohol became safe to drink that we started to turn away from alcohol as the primary form of hydration.
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Natural ingredient (Score:2)
Alcohol is a normal product of fermentation and has been present in food since the beginning of time. Evolution probably favored people who could tolerate alcohol since it provided more calories.
All carbohydrates are subject to natural fermentation. No need to let that mango go to waste just because it's a little old and fermented.
Improper question. (Score:2)
Does ingesting alcohol promote reproduction?
This is the correct question and considering it has resulted in sexual activity with partners that would otherwise not be selected, I would venture to say it does promote reproduction.
Drinking alcohol to solve CS problems?? (Score:3)
This is also why some modern companies that rely upon innovation, like Google, judiciously mix work with alcohol -- by, for instance, providing whiskey rooms where frustrated coders can relax and expand their minds when struggling with a challenging problem.
Does anyone here actually do that? I mean, really?
When I have a challenging programming problem, I go for a walk or I go to sleep for the night. I usually find a solution after a while of doing something else, or in the morning.
Life does not always find a way... (Score:2)
Despite what Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, the ability of life to adapt has limits. Antarctica may be covered with single celled organisms, but it's remarkably barren of alien "snow plants" that just somehow have "evolved" to the snow. Similarly, much of our internal cellular machinery is fixed at a deep molecular level. If it weren't, then the yeast that produce alcohol (and which undergo hundreds of thousands of generations for each single human one) wouldn't be killed by it. But evolution has no f
Other Science Says "Yes" (Score:3)
From 2014:
As we're sipping away on a glass of stout or Merlot, we probably take for granted our ability to digest the alcohol in the drink. Alcohol, or dietary ethanol (as scientists like to call it), is technically a toxin -- imbibing too much can lead to a hangover and even poisoning, of course.
But thanks to enzymes in our gut, and particularly one called ADH4, we can make use of the calories in alcohol. And, according to a new scientific paper, we gained that ability a very long time ago, at a critical moment in our evolution.
Matthew Carrigan is an evolutionary biologist at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla., and lead author on the paper. He discovered that the ADH4 enzyme started showing up in the ancestor we share with chimps and gorillas 10 million years ago, around the time when these ancestors started eating fallen, fermented fruit off the forest floor. The findings appear in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/12/03/368044880/our-ability-to-digest-alcohol-may-have-been-key-to-our-survival [npr.org]
Human Evolution No, Yeast Evolution Yes (Score:2)
Some Animals Drink Alcohol (Score:2)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com... [smithsonianmag.com]
The fruit bat part is potentially evolutionary:
" they had no more trouble navigating than did bats given sugar water alone. The researchers think that being able to tolerate alcohol lets the bats have access to a food sourceâ"fruitâ"for a longer period than only when itâ(TM)s ripe."
Given alcohol is poisonous/deadly to humans, there's nothing evolutionary going on here (except that our bodies react to alcohol as both a poison and an inebriant).
Has everyone forgotten the most beneficial aspect (Score:2)
In a period before sanitation of water, water with low levels of alcohol killed most bacteria and viruses that could make you ill! People who drank mildly fermented beverages tended to live longer in high population centers.
even in the wild (Score:2)
You confuse cause and effect (Score:2)
Obligatory XKCD (Score:3, Informative)
But alcohol is mind-bogglingly dangerous (Score:2)
They always forget to qualify this with "In excess".
Known effects of alcohol (Score:2)
Early alcoholic drinks contained a wide variety of fruit, although it's unclear how much of a health benefit that is. On the other hand, it would mean that any nutritional benefit from the fru
Are we completely ignoring brain + alcohol = dmg (Score:2)
As the previous article suggests:
Drinking Any Amount of Alcohol Causes Damage To the Brain, Study Finds
https://slashdot.org/story/21/... [slashdot.org]
Does that mean we're completely ignoring this and saying that the evolutionary benefits of drinking completely negate the tangible long term effects to the brain and organs of the body aren't as big an issue?
Imma say Hard Pass.
Poor reasoning (Score:2)
Why do people have eyes in the back of their head? Evolution gave us eyes in the back of our head so predators couldn't sneak up on us. (Isn't it pretty obvious?)
So, there is nothing to be learned from this type of reasoning, beyond generating testable hypotheses. I'm not seeing the tests here.
Yeasty beasties are controlling our brains (Score:2)
Yeast responsible for the fermentation has found a way to engineer human brains to create more yeast. Just like the flatworm that take command and control over ant brains and make them climb a stalk of grass in order to get eaten by an ungulate and complete the worm's lifecycle. Life is always looking for a way.
Brought you by the letter D, the number 6 (Score:2)
And somebody who has no clue how evolution works.
Parallel with smoking (Score:2)
50 years ago, exact same thing people would have said about smoking too. There is zero evidence of any benefit apart from far fetched day dreams like this. Google can might as well put sex toys in relax room and they will not see any difference.
Bull (Score:2)
That explains the large numbers of animals that consume fermented fruits on purpose.