[BurningFrog]

Alcoholism is always rampant when a population is first introduced to the drug.

Over centuries, evolution acts to produce a population less prone to it, since people who drink themselves to death don't tend to reproduce.

The population that has had access to alcohol for the longest (8000 years, according to a guess I saw somewhere) is the Chinese, where the "asian red flush" gene has developed as a protection against alcoholism.

[jvanderbot]

Well, I'm confused. Something seems off.

Evolutionary pressures / adaptations over 8000 years would just as likely make a population less likely to suffer adverse effects from, for example, alcohol. (see sickle cell tradeoffs in malaria-risky areas). This genetic syndrome you reference makes damage from alcohol 4x more likely over time.

We'd expect long-time drinking societies to have higher alcohol tolerance to better avoid adverse effects of drinking.

[BurningFrog]

To me, an adaptation that makes you avoid something damaging is a great way to make a population less likely to suffer adverse effects from it.

That said, the surviving populations probably also have a higher alcohol tolerance than their sober ancestors. That seems hard to measure though.

[andyjohnson0]

> Over centuries, evolution acts to produce a population less prone to it

Is this a supposition? Or is there any evidence for this effect being real and/or it being significant over such evolutionarily short timescales?

[rjf72]

All evolution ultimately is, is the result of factors favorable to reproduction staying the gene pool, since those with them quite tautologically tend to reproduce more, while factors unfavorable to reproduction get culled vice versa.

For a recent example of evolution on a practically real time scale see this [1]. Scientists released millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes into the wild. The genetically engineered mosquitoes were all male and engineered to produce infertile offspring. However, rare abnormalities allowed some mosquitoes to end up producing fertile offspring. The entire target population (in the wild) then began to adopt these characteristics and ended up rebounding from near extermination to near pre-release numbers.

That is evolution in fast forward due to a rapid reproduction rate, but even on a generational level this would have been an extremely rapid evolutionary adaptation.

And the same applies to humans. A seemingly ever larger number of things have major genetic factors -- alcoholism being one we've known about for quite some time. Alcoholics are less likely to live to successfully reproduce, and even when producing may produce defective offspring as a result of their alcoholism. So it creates an evolutionary imperative against susceptibility to alcoholism.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49660-6

[SamReidHughes]

The actual difference in susceptibility to alcoholism is big evidence. And the idea that alcoholism might make you have 3% less kids per generation or whatever small difference would suffice when multiplied over a few centuries is very plausible.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Evolution can occur quickly! See e.g. the Peppered Moth.

[autoexec]

True, but it helps that moths can lay thousands of eggs one or more times a year. Evolution can be quick but people reproduce very slowly.

[cwkoss]

Indigenous Americans made alcoholic fermented beverages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#P...

[BurningFrog]

Sure, but I think it was expensive and complicated enough with their technology that becoming an alcoholic was very hard, compared to the modern world with unlimited supply of cheap bottles of hard liquor.

[cwkoss]

I agree, was curious so did some digging and found the results interesting.

In addition to lower concentration, I'd imagine the mollusk and tobacco wine wouldn't have been as palatable as contemporaneous whiskey, but I'm not a fan of seafood in general so YMMV. Sounds like indigenous peoples in temperate climates tended to only use alcoholic beverages ceremonially rather than multiple-times-daily of colonists.

[okmokmz]

I don't believe this is the case, do you have any sources to back it up?

[BurningFrog]

I've seen it discussed several times, and believe it's at least a respected hypothesis. To what extent it's "established science" I don't know.

I don't have any source links handy. Do you have any sources for your disbelief? :)

[okmokmz]

It's the onus of the one making the claim to back it up. My 30 second google search didn't turn up much one way or the other so I can't say for sure. I was curious if you had read any articles studies to make you believe that, or whether it was just your personal hypothesis. To me, it doesn't seem like that would be true, but I have nothing to back that up

[BurningFrog]

> It's the onus of the one making the claim to back it up

Agreed. I don't have the time/energy to look up any sources, and I support anyone being skeptical about exotic claims made by anonymous forum posters :)