site banner

Friday Fun Thread for March 31, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

According to an askhistorians post, just going off of volume consumed significantly overestimates their alcohol consumption -

Most ancient wines probably had an alcohol content around 15% ... In most cases, however, the wine consumed at social gatherings was probably between two-thirds and three-fourths water, which would have reduced the alcoholic content to about that of modern beer.

Your study is probably cherrypicked / poorly conducted / something, just because it's a cool-sounding popular study about human psychology.

Any amount of alcohol temporarily reduces intelligence and precision in your physical movements - a tiny bit if buzzed, a lot if drunk. Having that all the time seems dumb.

Natural selection has tuned our ability to be glad and bond with others over millenia - it'd be weird if the baseline value was simply too low, and constant intake of fermented grain was ideal. Whatever effect alcohol has on various neurotransmitters would be quite 'easy' to evolve ... but it didn't, and you're going to knock all sorts of useful and functional relationships out of balance by being constantly buzzed.

(OP was a good post though!)

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)