Unca Cecil, hands-down, would destroy the moron. But, I should hope that Unca Cecil wouldn’t demean himself by taking her on. It’d be like watching someone shoot fish in a barrel…not much of a sport and the results would be ugly.
What disturbs me about MVS is the real possibility that alot of human sheep out there take her words as gospel, just because they appear every Sunday in their newspapers. My life as a teacher is difficult enough with my students coming in with their own preconceived misunderstandings of how the natural world works; I don’t need some “genius” feeding them wrong information and personal opinions disguised as facts.
I think we should petition Parade to ditch MVS and start running Straight Dope columns. Ehhh…maybe not, being in Parade certainly won’t boost Cecil’s intellectual standing.
Unca Cecil would win hands down in the swim suit, formal wear, Q&A session, and talent competition. MVS would just end up a bridesmaid. She probably would be a baton twirler…whoopdedoo.
“You know, he had a normal IQ. When I was a kid, I sneaked off and got into the files and looked up our IQ’s. Mine was 124, and his was 123. So I was actually smarter than he was!” — No Ordinary Genius, Christopher Sykes (quoting Joan Feynman, his sister)
Not to quibble with your overall point, but my understanding (and that of some papers I’ve looked at) is that the free radicals are not what get you jacked up; they’re just a damaging side-product of breaking down alcohol.
Secondly, the fact that we have antioxidants to deal with free radicals has nothing to do with alcohol; radicals come from all sorts of places (oxygen, for example), and do lots of damage. Antioxidants soak up pretty much any free radical–the fact that it came from alcohol as opposed to panda urine is irrelevant; they’re a sort of “all-purpose defense”.
Like I said, your point is still right, but I think you’re off on those details.
Not that this is GD, but before slagging her, can we see some cites? Alcohol hasn’t been drunk by humans for more than a few thousand years: not particularly long enough to develop major new traits, though perhaps long enough to change minor ones that could have something to do with particular drug-specific addiction.
However, the mere fact that our bodies metabolize alcohol is not particually relevant. Our bodies metabolize anything they can, and one of the reasons we get drunk in the first place is that our bodies AREN’T able to fully or properly deal with alcohol. It is, after all, a mild poison, at least as far as our liver is concerned.
Further, there is a LOT of myth and poorly supported “everybody knows” surrounding the study of alcoholism, and indeed the very concept that it’s a disease. In part this is because some of the biggest and most influential voices in this area are not researchers or scientists, but 12-step movements with very dogmatic and “recieved” ideas about what addiction is and how it works. So I would caution anyone about jumping into the fray of ridiculing someone just because they don’t buy the disease theory of alcoholism with a genetic component.
Perhaps not drunk in purposely-distilled liquid form, but as other posters have pointed out, humans and other animals have most assuredly been exposed to it via fermenting fruit for a much longer time period.
This is very obviously not relevant to developing reactions or heavy desire for imbibing massive quanities of alcohol. A few fermented fruits doesn’t quite cut it when the issue is a genetic component for alcoholism.
First, partly because alcohol occurs in nature, I don’t think you can categorically state how long humans (or their ancestors, for that matter) have been drinking it. Second, you can’t pin natural selection down to an arbitrary time frame. Granted, most allele frequencies take a long time to become significant, but it isn’t necessary that they do.
Look, even if you don’t buy into the naturally-occurring theory, consider that alcoholism isn’t usually something that prevents genes from being passed on (I mean, if you drink enough young enough it will, but that’s pretty rare). So basically, it’s evolutionarily benign. Which means it can spread without any real hindrance. All it takes is a few alcoholic mutants in the B.C. era who like to sleep around, and we’ve had thousands of years for those genes to propagate. So her argument is dumb. D-U-M dumb.
(and I’m not even going into the obvious point that if alcohol activates certain naturally-occurring mechanisms in the body, then maybe alcoholics are just genetically-predisposed to wanting to activate those mechanisms, which is–in effect–the same thing as being genetically predisposed to alcoholism)
A few fruits? Try trees and bushes filled with berries past their prime instead. I’ve got a tree of mulberries out back of my house that the neighborhood wildlife goes nuts over when the berries are past prime, and one of my ferrets was loopy from nibbling some berries he found on the ground. If one of our ancestors gathered up as many berries as he or she could carry - especially after they’ve fallen to the ground, making the previously out-of-reach ones accessible - and brought them back, they could probably get a mild buzz going.
That being said, her first point is invalid, as alcohol obviously does occur in nature. Secondly, Myrr21’s argument is very valid in that alcoholism would not seem to in any way prevent passing on one’s genetics, at least not to the extent that it was eliminated from the population.
To add to that, our early ancestors only had small time windows to get happy off wild fruit (i.e., the past-prime time before they were all eaten/rotten), so perhaps any early alcoholic ancestors just kind of jonesed for some overripe berries until it was that season again. This leaves a lot of more “productive” time in which to appear to be a healthy and fit member of your species, and thus a good one to reproduce with.
My gripe with MVS’s answer was the blatant mistake with regards to the natural origin of alcohol and also her statement that our genes don’t know about it. Well, of course our genes wouldn’t directly know about it (maybe you could say they do if ethanol directly binds to chromatin…I don’t know, does it?). MVS could very well be right in stating there is no direct link between genetics and alcoholism, but she’s wrong in stating that that’s because we have not been exposed to alcohol during our evolution.
This is why I posited in my OP that any inherited propensity towards alcoholism could just be an unhappy accident of genetics, an unintended consequence of a combination of genes that confer some other non-deleterious trait. Much of genetic adaptation is the result of stochastic processes (sorry, I had to find some way to use my SN here) at the basic molecular level…if genes A, B and C pick up some random mutation that enhances the ability of the organism to mate and pass on those mutations, then those mutations and the traits they create will stick around in the population as long as their benefits outweigh any effect upon reproductive success. If anything, I would say that moderate alcoholism may actually enhance the likelyhood that someone may mate (beer goggles, anyone?) (and on preview, I see that the last few posters just made the same point…)
And, of course, all of these ideas regarding genetics and addiction are still at the hypotheses-in-the-process-of-being-tested stage…more data is needed to say for sure.
Just to further beat this topic to death, I did some PubMed searches. There’s some controversy about whether this really exists, but there is a condition named “Auto-brewery syndrome” where-in a person’s intestinal flora gets out of hand and ferments carbohydrates into intoxicating levels of alcohols.
This abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10976182&dopt=Abstract
is from a study where-in the levels of endogenously-produced ethanol were measured in healthy individuals as well those with diabetes, cirrhosis and hepatitis. They did find detectable amounts of ethanol, although not in any amount of “any forensic or medical significance” and not enough to use this syndrome as a drunk-driving defense (the investigation of which was the inspiration for the research)
Bottom-line: if this research is correct, ethanol not only occurs in nature, but can also occur naturally in us in small amounts. Therefore it’s quite reasonable that our genes would “know” about ethanol and evolution would work out ways of dealing with it and preventing it from building to intoxicating levels. Although, a nit-picky bastard could claim that MVS wasn’t completely wrong; after-all, this endogenous ethanol is made inside a man, therefore it would be “man-made”.
Alcohol is obviously naturally-occurring, as several have said. Many tropical butterflies feed not on flowers, but on fallen fruit. By afternoon, the fruit has started to ferment, and the butterflies actually become intoxicated. A caretaker at a butterfly “farm” told me they often become so drunk that they fly into things and forget to put their feet down when they land. Finally, they just fall into a drunken stupor until morning.
Hey, give her some slack guys, she’s done some impressive work. After all, remember when she crushed Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem with her insghtful knowledge of mathematics?
Whether she’s right or not in this case, she doesn’t answer the questions all by herself. It’s not like she has or thinks she has infinite knowledge on every possible subject in her own head. She asks other people who are supposed to be experts for their thoughts and opinions.
The philosophical questions she answers on her own.
(and on preview, I see that the last few posters just made the same point…)