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Ability To Consume Alcohol May Have Shaped Human Evolution
sciencehabit writes Craving a stiff drink after the holiday weekend? Your desire to consume alcohol, as well as your body's ability to break down the ethanol that makes you tipsy, dates back about 10 million years, researchers have discovered. The new finding not only helps shed light on the behavior of our primate ancestors, but also might explain why alcoholism—or even the craving for a single drink—exists in the first place.
Anyone who has woken up next to someone they hooked up with while drunk can tell you that alcohol completely undermines selective breeding.
*consuming* alcohol simulates and increases human reproduction, and therefore, the evolution of humans continues.
I read the article and while interesting it doesn't fully explain a phenomenon I have observed first hand for many years. I have two wild cherry trees on my property and sometimes the cherries remain on the tree long enough to begin fermenting. When this happens every bird for miles fights over the boozy cherries! The squirrels also seem to prefer these somewhat fermented cherries. Humans may have evolved a better way to metabolize ethanol, but I don't think we were the first creatures to appreciate a wee dram every now and then.
I drink, therefore I am?
Why the Irish still can't cook to save their lives.
TFS and headline leaves out the interesting bits:
“If you were the ancestor without this new mutation in ADH4, the ethanol would quickly build up in your blood and you’d get inebriated much faster,” Carrigan says. “You’d be a cheap date.” ....
Carrigan says the discovery might explain why human brains evolved to link pleasure pathways with alcohol consumption—ethanol was associated with a key food source. “It’s not a whole lot different from the addictions some people have towards food,” he explains. “At the right dose, when you didn’t have alcohol and candy at every corner, it was hard to get too much of this sort of stuff, so when you found it, you wanted to be programmed to overconsume.”
Is getting wasted what sets humans apart from animals? What about party animals then?
Beer Goggles?
Nonsense. I've known way too many animals, from way too many phylums, that will go to great lengths to get a good stiff drink (Or lick toads, etc.) to give any credence to the idea that the appeal of consuming mind-altering substances is tied to some human evolutionary shift.
If anything an ability to efficiently metabolize alcohol efficiently drastically reduces the effects, probably indicating that at some point in the past overripe fruit became a large portion of our ancestors diet, and the ability to "hold our liquor" gave a survival advantage whenever predators discovered the drunken tribe. Or perhaps rather than overripe fruit it's indicative of the time period when our ancestors first began intentionally fermenting things on a regular basis.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And so they evolved. But did these ancestors possess the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot evolve; courage to change that which can evolve, and wisdom to know the difference?
Seinfeld had this figured out. Wow, was the laugh track always that obnoxious, or is it this just a problem with that video...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Alcohol has no effect on me aside from feeling like I'm wearing three overcoats. I had no friends who drank and didn't take my first drink until I was 30. That and it tastes nasty so no, none for me thanks.
(N/T)
Maybe that's how humans evolved: Drunken apes selected the goofiest and silliest partners, eventually leading to humans. No true ape would tolerate Justin Beiber.
Table-ized A.I.
“You’d be a cheap date.”
I understood it as a "cheap date for a predator", like a lion, a crocodile, or anything else ready to eat you
In fact, distilled beverages make me sick (their alcohol smell upsets my stomach, makes me want to puke).
But I can drink vodka, which doesn't smell (either because of purity or being too cold) and beer, which has high water content... it seems to be better as a coolant than water itself.
I theorize people who like to drink can digest alcohol better; for them it's a source of energy. No real proofs of these suspicions, though.
There are only two chemicals that can fuel neurones, one is glucose and the other is ethanol. glucose requires more stages of the Krebs cycle so the booze is more efficient.
Some Scandinavians seem to have the ability to process more ethanol due to a longer history of that being one of the easy ways to preserve calories through the winter.
The sad truth is I don't like alcohol. I can tolerate it quite well, but I don't find any pleasure in it and drinking too much just makes me feel like throwing up.
I wish I could be more evolved!
that if you never knew alcohol existed and hadn't been programmed by society to drink it, that you'd never want it or know it existed. it would not even be a craving. that is all programmed into you by hearing about it and seeing its use, and then after that point once you try it. it becomes a regular habit like masturbation or something.
also religion today wouldn't exist if we went back and took it out of the human language and got rid of the previous societies books and other non-sense with it. like alcohol, people are programmed to consume and believe it, not knowing anything but what society and their parents and books and media teach them about it.
yes, the true god believers weren't educated or convinced it was real, they had it programmed into them like everything else. they were told god made them, that Jesus was killed by the Jews, and that having sex out of web lock is sin. this became their world, like knowing what a tree was and that it was green, or that gravity exists and makes for quite the fall.
We could have a society where children begin masturbating and having fucking relationships and stuff, but instead all that is programmed in as sin at a young age and it delays or prevents sexual maturity as a result. I compare it to a task like brushing your teeth, you are programmed that it's either good or bad or exists or doesn't exist. it's an act you can take, sort of like abstaining and not learning about it, or even similar to making jokes and having a good old social time. it's the same as going out roller blading, only you're going to fuck either a boy or a girl or even an animal or inanimate object. people are totally programmed to have either negative, positive, or other reactions to it, everything we do today and all our beliefs were programmed in and we cannot change it easily because the mob will get you if you go against what they were programmed to feel so strongly for / against.
myronmaysflashdrive.com
Of course it shaped human. If Noah wasn't drunk, he wouldn't get pissed off when his son saw him naked, and cursed Ham for all generations.
A train carrying corn crashed and spilled it out on a very hot day. The authorities put out a warning to watch for inebriated bears!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They will kill you, rape you, then eat you. If you are lucky in that order.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Alcohol helped point the way for me to become an engineer.
There was a problem to solve, the exact temperature of beer and wine was important.
Guessing when a fresh batch of suds was cool enough to consume was just not good enough.
The fridge needed a temperature probe and it had to be connected to the net.
My phone needed an app to talk to the fridge over the net to let me know when the brew was ready.
Once everything was working my interest in engineering developed.
If it wasn't for the influence of alcohol I wouldn't have become an engineer!
Cheers !!