From BigThink, October 15:
Getting drunk might be bad for you but good for us.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, philosopher Edward Slingerland argues that behaviors often dismissed as evolutionary “mistakes” — like masturbation, overeating, and drinking — actually serve deeper adaptive purposes. His “intoxication thesis” suggests that alcohol consumption fosters trust, creativity, and social cohesion, making it an essential part of human evolution. What looks like nature’s errors may, in fact, be evolution’s hidden strategies for survival, bonding, and innovation.
“The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a classic example.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his “intoxication thesis.” Slingerland argues it’s quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang bawdy songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. Alcohol is effectively a poison. Our bodies don’t like it — or so the argument goes.
The intoxication thesis says this is all wrong. For Slingerland, drinking alcohol and getting drunk are important to human well-being and complex societies. It might not be what evolution “intended,” but it’s certainly given us a reproductive and interspecies advantage.
So, how is getting drunk different from other “evolutionary mistakes”? And what possible benefits might getting drunk give us? Today, we find out.
The classic example
The reason that masturbation is the “classic example” of an evolutionary mistake is that there’s a very obvious and simple answer as to why an orgasm feels great — it is nature’s reward for doing what our genes really “want” us to do: copy themselves into the next generation. This is what evolutionary biologists call the “adaptive target” of the orgasm. Have sex, reproduce, copy your genes, and you’ll get this surge of dopamine, oxytocin, and lovely, lovely endorphins.“But humans and other animals have figured out you can get that reward in lots of wildly non-reproductive ways,” Slingerland tells me. “And once we figured that out, we did that all the time. So here’s the classic ‘mistake,’ right: There’s no relationship between an orgasm and reproduction. Evolution doesn’t want us to masturbate, but it doesn’t care because it’s a relatively non-costly behavior. Contrary to what you may have learned in school, it won’t make you go blind. It’s basically low-cost enough that evolution can kind of let it go.”
In other words, from an evolutionary point of view, the cost of masturbation and hijacking the pleasure surge of an orgasm is worth it, so long as humans do, at least a few times, still have an orgasm during reproductive sex.
The Twinkie problem
The other kind of evolutionary mistake is what Slingerland calls the “Twinkie problem,” which is when the body’s reward system was once connected to a certain evolutionarily beneficial behavior, but our environment has now changed so much that the reward system is actually detrimental to our well-being. This is how Slingerland describes it:
“We’re evolutionarily designed to enjoy fat and sugar. We’ll consume it in large quantities whenever we can get it. And that’s great because for almost all of our evolutionary history, and actually for a disturbing number of people still today, getting enough sugar and fat is a problem. And so, you should try to gorge on it whenever you get it. But it becomes a problem when you live in a modern industrialized society and you’re relatively wealthy. You can gorge on Twinkies and potato chips and ice cream.
So, this type of mistake is costly because it causes obesity, diabetes, and all these problems, but it’s very recent, evolutionarily, and it’s geographically still constrained. Again, there are places in the world where you still have trouble getting enough food.”
In other words, while the Twinkie problem is a problem for a growing portion of society, it’s not enough of a problem to fade away — not least because the time scale’s too short for any kind of adaptation. Maybe, in the future, diabetes and obesity will kill off those who really enjoy fat and sugar, and so change the reward system. But that’d be in the far distant future.The benefits of alcohol....
....MUCH MORE
The memory that this article was in the link-vault was triggered by the statement introducing the post immediately below, "Worst acquisition ever." Until Bayer bought Monsanto the worst-ever business combination (wealth-destruction-wise) was generally agreed to be AOL-Time Warner.
And then the Germans said "Hold my bier."
