Less Filling

In one of his less fascist moments...George Will once wrote a BRILLIANT column on how beer has been a darwinian aid to human survival. Unlike most of my plagiarism - I am officially giving attribution to George Will for the entire post below - EXCEPT for the [bracketed, ummmm...commentary] that I have added throughout. [which I think means I am sharing a by-line with George Will]

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. [Yeah...I can see where a good case of dysentery could slow down procreation just a bit.] For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. [the solution to this and many other issues...]

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol [Miller Lite?] -- in beer [see!] and, later, wine [wine being the late-bloomer of the alcohol family] -- which has antibacterial [and anti-intellectual] properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards [especially when the Kentucky State Police are around], but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." [amen brother, amen] Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison [ergh?], and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process. [who knew that Irish was a "species"?? ~My species is more selected than yours. nah, nah na nah~]

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people [apparently attending the same bars i did] who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle [unless we're still talking about the bars] and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer [yes...let's just say that, shall we? Large quantities of beer.]. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had [that's right - not a crutch, an advantage] -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases [aka "what hangover?"]. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome [MGD sixty-] four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, [ be named McConville] "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases. [ummm...We are the champions???]

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors [bring me a beer, bitch] -- by those genetically disposed [!] to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol." [SLAINTE!]