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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3190 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 31, 2023

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Your evolutionary argument is nonsensical. Western civilization evolved alongside alcohol from the very first semblance of high-level social order. So much so, that myths were created around the development of alcohol. Civilizations which used other naturally-derived pharmaceuticals, like saffron, had myths develop around that drug. (We evolved, additionally, alongside the unnatural acts of eating grains and collecting salt from distant places.) If teetotalism were evolutionarily beneficial, then the societies which never spent the enormous resources on alcohol would have triumphed. In fact, they were utterly dominated by the alcoholists. History grants us a sample of thousands of tribes and organizations of human society, and continually the ones who imbibed bubbled to the top of the chain.

Among the reasons why this may be, is that alcohol is a very inexpensive form of pleasure. Instead of having men fight other men or try to fuck all the women or jump off cliffs or whatever, you just give them alcohol and the enjoyment will be proximal. This is especially important when the labor is boring, like “non-evolutionary” farming, versus hunting which is more fun.

There are two ways to look at “evolving”. The one is we should only do what we evolved to do, in which case we just ditch farming. The other is that we evolved to dominate and spread our genes any way we can, in which case we must lay claim to farming and slcohol. Now, maybe it’s the case that the West has new forms of cheap pleasure that replace alcohol. But this doesn’t mean that alcohol wasn’t our reliable help for many thousands of years.

Western civilization evolved alongside alcohol from the very first semblance of high-level social order. So much so, that myths were created around the development of alcohol.

Ancient western civilizations varied a lot in their alcohol consumption. Myths about everything in day-to-day life existed, whether new or old.

If teetotalism were evolutionarily beneficial, then the societies which never spent the enormous resources on alcohol would have triumphed

? Evolution often preserves maladaptive traits, either because selection was too weak, it competed with another effect (for instance: alcohol is a source of calories and a way of preserving them), or some detail of the selection process (individual/genetic and society level selection is a lot slower than culture-spreading selection)

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