Transcript Born to Binge - Unhooked Thinking

Born To Binge
Trevor McCarthy
Alcohol its proper uses and purpose
Unhooked Thinking 11th May 2007
Ineffective Motivational Approaches
Elleman-Jensen, P. (1991)
The social costs of smoking revisited,
Addiction, 86, 957-966
“Dr Elleman-Jensen’s paper … should in
future not be cited or quoted.”
Edwards, G. (2001) A paper which must be
withdrawn from publication, Addiction, 96, 1099
(Be honest – you want to read it now don’t you?)
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Explaining the proper uses and
purpose of alcohol: Step 1
‘Why mess about with a cunning
plan when a simple one will do?’
Terry Pratchett: THUD!
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Alcohol: simple plan
– why it exists
 How we have evolved a relationship
with drink as a species
 How our species has evolved a
relationship with it
 And what does it all mean?
 Consider alcohol
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Alcohol
 Our species
has a ‘deep-time’
relationship with alcohol
 Our genes have a relationship with
alcohol that pre-dates our species
 Thus we need evolutionary
perspectives: evolution and social
evolution
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Alcohol
 Ethanol,
ethyl alcohol sometimes
called grain alcohol, is a flammable,
colourless chemical compound
 It is usually referred to simply as
alcohol
 Its chemical formula is written as
C2H5OH or C2H6O
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Yeast …
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Yeast
 Single
celled monoploid organisms
 Eukaryote – membrane nucleus
 Eukaryota – Superdomain
comprising animals, plants, fungi
 Eukaryotes share common origin
 We are related …
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Yeast & Alcohol:
in the beginning
 Most
wild fruits colonised by yeasts
 My fruit and I’m protecting it
 Yeasts metabolise fruit sugars producing ethanol
 Rot prevents fruit being eaten
 Ethanol inhibits growth of other
competitor microbes
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Ethanol plumes
 Advertise
the presence of yeast
 And the presence of alcohol
 Which signals: Ripe Fruit’s *
 Hot climates – fruit goes off quickly
 Smell it – find it – eat if before
somebody else does
 Thus: ingestion of alcohol
* early prehistoric example of the grocer’s apostrophe
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Alcohol advantages
– protects my dinner
 Animals – advertises my dinner and
there are bonus calories to be had
 Plants – gets my seeds dispersed
 So – everybody is happy
 Yeast
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Drosophila
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Drosophila
“ … fruit flies actually use the
ethanol plume to find the fruit on
which they’re going to lay their eggs
… early in animal evolution … these
sensory uses … can potentially be
utilised to find ripe fruit.”
Doug Levy: University of Florida. Gainsville .
Booze and the Beast. BBC Radio 4. 2005
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Jumbo boozers
Dian Fossey noted Rwandan
elephants travelled miles for ripe
mtanga-tanga fruit – which
continues to ferment in their gut
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More Jumbo boozers
 1985 West
Bengal:
a herd of 150 wild elephants broke
into an illegal still and drank the
spirits then went on a drunken
rampage demolishing seven concrete
buildings, trampling 20 huts injuring
12 people and killing five
Cindy Engel: Wild Health (2002)
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Waxwings (boozers)
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Baboons, Vervet Monkeys,
Bumble Bees, other birds …
all these animals - and many more are fellow boozers and for the same
reasons as us … because they can
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We’re only human and we’re
free to drink if we want to…
‘ … Freedom may be mankind’s
natural state, but so is sitting in a
tree eating your dinner while it is
still wriggling … ’
Terry Pratchett: GOING POSTAL
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When did we start drinking?
 Well,
when we say “we” we mean …
 Ethanol in the diet through eating
fermenting fruit for 24 - 40 M years
 Ethanol plumes to find food;
appetite stimulant; exploit the
calorific benefits
 These adaptations remain even when
diet has broadened
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When “we” started “drinking”
 Intermittent
availability of
fermenting fruit
 All extant primates (except montane
gorillas) still primarily fruit eaters
 Developing capacity to metabolise
alcohol had advantages
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Just like fruit flies …
 Drosophila
exposed to low level
concentrations of alcohol live longer
than ‘abstinent’ fruit flies
 Seems to be true for our species too
 So some alcohol is beneficial
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As I was saying …
“Epidemiologically demonstrated
health benefits of low-level alcohol
consumption are consistent with an
ancient and potentially adaptive
exposure of primate frugivores to
this most common of psychoactive
substances.”
Dudley, R. (2002) Fermenting fruit and the historical ecology of ethanol ingestion: is
alcoholism in modern humans an evolutionary hangover? Addiction, 97 381-388
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Evolution is a consequence
of three things:
The ability of living creatures to
pass on attributes to offspring
2. This ability is a bit hit-and-miss –
not quite perfect copies
3. Natural selection – better survivors
manage to breed passing on survival
attributes (natural selection is slow)
1.
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld III.
Darwin’s Watch.
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Evolutionary biologists
 Tend
to view animals’ alcohol use as
programmed and on automatic pilot
 No clear view that animals seek out
alcohol for its psychoactive effects
 Stress models with elephants – may
just be calorie seeking
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Social Evolution
 Relatively
small and homogenous
societies (Drunken Comportment)
 Because natural selection &
evolution are slow, thus
 Modern industrial societies are too
recent in evolutionary time to have
affected our fundamentals
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Fermentation
 Fermentation
of food proved to be
an excellent preserving technology
 Milk – yoghurt
 Bread making
 Beer is just runny bread
(same ingredients same processes)
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Drunken Comportment
a social explanation 1969
 Craig
MacAndrew &
Robert B Edgerton
 Cited by Ron McKechnie and others:
1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981,
1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987,
1988 and so on until the present day
 … and there’s a reason for that
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Drunken Comportment
 Remains,
37 years on, the only global
analysis of drunken conduct collating
and commenting on the empirical
evidence from ethnographic studies
 Species response to drink vs societal
adaptations
 There is no alternative
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Drunken Comportment:
meticulous accounts of societies
 Where
drunkenness does not result in
‘disinhibited’ behaviour
 Where behaviours accompanying
drunkenness have changed over time
 Where drunken conduct varies
according to context and occasion
 Where seemingly ‘disinhibited’
conduct stays within well defined,
culturally appropriate boundaries
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Papago
tohono au’ autam the Desert People
cactus wine – annual festival
- ♂ only – to make the rains come
 Whiskey. It was not a thing that you
must drink only once a year – You
could drink it any time with no
singing and no speeches and it did
not bring rain. Men grew crazy
when they drank that whiskey
 Saguaro
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Deadly Medicine
Mancall 1995 – historian
 Analysing Native American drinking
 Cultural context - examples
 There was only “one degree of
drunkeness worthwhile … the sort …
they call ‘Gannontiouaratonseri,’
complete insobriety.
 Peter C
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Deadly Medicine
 Examples
where Native Americans
chose people to have the drunken
experience on behalf of the group
 They will always drink to excess if
they can possibly get spirits, but do
not much care for them unless they
can have enough to make them drunk
 Respecting alcohol - doing it properly
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Evolution
evolved to co-exist with alcohol –
long-term relationship
 Intermittent availability of alcohol we didn’t need a stop mechanism
 Adapted to the extent that alcohol
seems to make us live longer
 In evolutionary time-scales it hasn’t
been available to us on a daily basis
 We
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Social Evolution
 Different
societies develop their own
acceptable drunken comportment
 This too is adaptive & confers benefits
 My mate Doug and a bloke in the pub
 “These safe alcohol limits – they are
for non-drinkers aren’t they?”
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Traditional societies’
response to drinkers
They were treated like royalty
– not the sort who get dragged
off to be beheaded or have
something nasty done with
a red-hot poker, but the other
sort.
Terry Pratchett: A HATFUL OF SKY
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Changing our thinking …
Shouting at monkeys in
the next tree. That’s what
brains evolved to do. Not
mathematics and physics.
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld III. Darwin’s Watch.
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Changing what we do
‘Learnin’ how not to
do
things is as hard as
learning how to do them.
Harder maybe. …’
Terry Pratchett: A HATFUL OF SKY
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Moral Majority
 Drinking
is supposed to be fun
 This should still be true – especially
true – if you have made a mess of
your drinking
 Treatment should not aim to prevent
the proper use of alcohol
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Changing Treatment
‘ … And if you’re too
afraid of goin’ astray, you
won’t go anywhere. …’
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld III. Darwin’s Watch.
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Controlled Drinking
 Control
duration (fizzy fruit)
 Curtail unpleasing aspects of
drunken comportment
 Control the aftermath of drinking
 Controlled Bingeing
 Born (evolved) to Binge Drink
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A logical conclusion
If I had all the money
I’ve spent on drink…..
I’d spend it on drink.
Vivian Stanshall: Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.
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1978 Charisma Records
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