The Cocktail and The Cormorant

J Bostock
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:07:08 GMT

There’s a cocktail called an old fashioned. It’s almost as simple as one can make a cocktail. Like anything there’s a million “recipes” but the one I’ll focus on today goes like this:

Put two sugar cubes in a glass

Douse them with a few drops of bitters (a very strong infusion of herbs)

Crush up the sugar cubes into little bits

Add your bourbon and ice

Stir

Garnish with lemon

The end result is rather tasty and a little gritty, from the sugar. Of course it’s gritty! You put smashed up sugar cubes into an icy solution which doesn’t dissolve them! What did you expect?

Nowadays, bartenders use a thick sugar syrup which is pre-dissolved. Cocktails today often have many more ingredients, they’re prepared in one vessel, possibly shaken, and poured into the drinking vessel.

From the name and the preparation, you might think this is one of the first mixed drinks to be developed. And you’d be wrong! The giveaway here is the ice. Ice only reached American bars (bourbon is American) in the 1800s. Before that, people had unchilled drinks. People have been drinking rum punches since the 1600s. Secondly, when ice reached America, bartenders immediately switched from using sugar cubes to using simple syrup, a kind of sugar water, because ice-cold water doesn’t dissolve sugar cubes.

The weird crunchy old fashioned that you (sometimes) see today is an anachronism, invented by modern barkeeps in a “you know, this is how they used to have cocktails, see” marketing ploy.

II

This is a cormorant:

By Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren - Brandt’s Cormorant, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67311261

They live by bodies of water: ponds, rivers, and oceans. Most water birds (and most birds in general) have oiled feathers, which keep them dry when they come into contact with water. Cormorants don’t. When cormorants dive into water to hunt for prey their feathers get wet. You’ll often see them standing around after a few dives, sunning their wings to dry them back out again so they can fly

Must be pretty old right? Some early-diverging lineage of birds from before the oils evolved. Their prehistoric appearance certainly adds to the effect. This is what early bird-book authors thought: cormorants would always be put at the start of the book, in their own section.

And they were wrong! Comorants are part of the same order as gannets and pelicans, both of which have perfectly normal feathers. Cormorants lost the oils as a specific adaptation to going underwater. While other birds float aggressively as their feathers hold on to air, cormorants have a much easier time swimming down and staying down to hunt their prey.

This pattern is extremely common in evolution. We don’t even need to look beyond birds to see it again: the paleognaths (ostritches and friends) have a fixed upper beak, while the neognaths (basically every bird you’ve ever heard of) have a mobile upper beak. The “paleo” in paleognaths refers to the fact that the fixed upper beak was thought to be ancestral, but modern analysis (source: my friend who works in bird paleontology) actually suggests that they lost the ability to move it. Perhaps it lets you peck extra hard if your upper beak is welded to your skull.

III

What’s the lesson here? Is this just me writing up a catchy title? I don’t think so. In most cases, it’s much easier to lose a function than to gain one, especially in a noisy, random search process like biological or cultural evolution. It’s much easier to turn off the oil than to evolve the oil; it’s trivial to just stop making syrup from your sugar cubes. If you see something that looks simple, or basic, there’s a decent chance it’s actually descended from much more complex ancestors, and just lost parts along the way.

As a corollary: the easiest way to achieve something might be to lose a function. This even seems to extend to policy: most of the biggest “free wins” available to America and the UK consist of removing policies (the Jones act, the Town and County Planning Act).

I also see this in the personal lives of people around me. How many people around you have an immense free win in their lives by getting rid of something?

Humans tend to have a blind spot against solutions which involve removing things, instead of adding them. I don’t know whether we extend this to our intuitive models of evolution and culture, but it’s possible. Either way, you are probably underestimating the effects of removing things.

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