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bogdanb comments on A Much Better Life? - Less Wrong
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Comments (173)
PlatypusNinja's point is confirmed by the fact that addiction happens with regards to things that weren't readily available during the vast majority of the time humans evolved.
Opium is the oldest in use I know of (after only a short search), but it was in very restricted use because of expense at that time. (I use “very restricted” in an evolutionary sense.)
Even things like sugar and fatty food, which might arguably be considered addictive, were not available during most of humans' evolution.
Addiction propensities for things that weren't around during evolution can't have been “debugged” via reproductive failure.
Alcohol is quite old and some people believe that it has exerted selection on some groups of humans.
I agree that alcohol is old. However:
1) I can't tell if it's much older than others. The estimates I can gather (Wikipedia, mostly) for their length of time mostly points to “at least Neolithic”, so it's not clear if any is much older than the others. In particular, the “since Neolithic” interval is quite short in relation to human evolution. (Though I don't deny some evolution happened since then (we know some evolution happen even in centuries), it's short enough to make it unsurprising that not all its influences had time to propagate to the species.)
2) On a stronger point, alcohol was only available after the humanity evolved. Thus, as something that an addiction-protection–trait should evolve for, it hasn't had a lot of time compared to traits that protect us from addiction to everything else we consume.
3) That said, I consciously ignored alcohol in my original post because it seems to me it's not very addictive. (At the least, it's freely available, at much lower cost than even ten kiloyears ago, lots of people drink it and most of those aren't obviously addicted to it.) I also partly ignored cannabis because as far as I can tell it's addictive propensity is close to alcohol's. I also ignored tobacco because, although it's very addictive, it's negative effects appear after quite a long time, which in most of humanity's evolution was longer than the life expectancy; it was mostly hidden from causing selective pressure until the last century.
Um, alcohol was the most common method of water purification in Europe for a long time, and Europeans evolved to have higher alcohol tolerances.
Not sure if this helps your point or undermines it, but it seems relevant.
What sort of selection?
Selection against susceptibility to alcohol addiction. I don't think anyone has seriously proposed more specific mechanisms.