Humans Evolved to Enjoy Alcohol?

Humans Evolved to Enjoy Alcohol? Creation and use of alcohol can be traced back to some of our earliest civilizations. Fermentation occurs naturally and attracts the interest of many different animals. Could it be that we humans evolved in a way that makes attraction to alcohol natural to us? In fact the effects of alcohol are easier to explain through natural evolution than they are through religious ideas about special creation.

According to Wine Spectator:

Humans may be hardwired with an instinctual attraction to alcohol, theorizes Robert Dudley, a biomechanics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. ... Ethanol is found widely in ripe wild fruit, Dudley explained. When wild yeast lands on the fruit and feeds on the sugars, fermentation occurs. The riper the fruit, the more alcohol it produces. Many birds and mammals, including our primate ancestors, depend heavily on fruit, Dudley said, and they may have learned to find this food source quickly by following the scent of ethanol.

"Dudley's hypothesis helps us understand why, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans are so attracted to ethanol," said Doug Levey, an ecologist at the University of Florida and a speaker at the symposium. "There is often a big nutritional reward associated with being attracted to ethanol," Levey said, adding that this may help account for why "there are health benefits associated with low-to-moderate levels of ethanol consumption."

There are still gaps in the hypothesis, said Levey, such as how one makes the leap from low-level consumption of ethanol in wild fruits to the drinking habits of modern society to full-fledged alcoholism.

This doesn’t sound like such a large gap to me — after all, we all need to eat to survive but we are also very capable of overeating. Just because a certain behavior is attractive or necessary in small amounts doesn’t mean that we will only participate in that behavior to the exact amount that is appropriate. Let’s face it, we humans are great when it comes to excess.

That, too, seems to be hard wired if we consider experiments showing how rats will keep pushing buttons to get the pleasure centers of the brain stimulated, even if it means not eating and dying of thirst or starvation in the process. In fact, it makes sense that we would eat or drink to excess if we are wired to eat or drink as much as possible while we can as hedge against starvation down the line.

A more serious objection, though, is: [Katharine] Milton was set to publish a contradiction of Dudley's ideas ...in a paper (titled "Ferment in the Family Tree") in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. She believes that inebriation is a human luxury in which other primates can't indulge. "You can't afford to have even a mild sense of euphoria when you are a primate," Milton said, "because you will get eaten or fall out of a tree and onto your head."

I think that what I write above address this point as well. Animals attracted to the pleasing effects of a low dosage won’t necessarily turn away from the strong effects of a high dosage if there was no evolutionary pressure to avoid the high dosages. Do high dosages of alcohol exist in nature — high enough that we'd need to evolve a mechanism to avoid them? Probably not — at least, they probably don't exist often enough to create the necessary pressure.

Therefore, an attraction to alcohol could evolve without animals needing any brakes on indulging too much. Once we humans developed the ability to create high dosages and indulge too much... well, there is nothing to stop us except our own will power. How's that been working out for us?

None of this requires any supernatural beings or gods to explain; on the contrary, why would any creator god set up a situation where small amounts of alcohol are useful and large amounts dangerous, yet our desire to consume small amounts comes with no natural barrier against consuming large amounts as well? This situation is harder to explain for people who both believe in a creator god and who believe that drinking alcohol is sinful, but even those who believe that some alcohol is acceptable have trouble here.