You are here: Los Angeles Education Baltimore History Examiner

Mark Newgent

Baltimore History Examiner
Mark Newgent is a writer and editor with a talent for breathing history into everyday happenings.

  

Examiner Feeds

These websites were picked by the Baltimore History Examiner as useful resources.
This Day in History - 9 hrs ago This Day in History - 1 day ago This Day in History - 2 days ago This Day in History - 3 days ago This Day in History - 4 days ago

History Links

Baltimore Examiners

Steve DeClue
Baltimore Football Examiner
Most Recent Article
Why do Ravens fans hate the Redskins so much?
Dining Dish
Baltimore Dining Examiner
Most Recent Article
2008's Best Christmas light and music video
Steve Christ
Baltimore Personal Finance Examiner
Most Recent Article
IBM's five future innovations
 
 

Examiner is growing in Los Angeles

We are seeking writers...
Ready to join us? Learn More »

How Beer Saved Civilization and Answered a Nagging Question

July 10, 11:45 AM
 
 
 As previously noted in this space, the history of ideas and the thinkers behind them fascinate me. Ideas matter.

 
One thinker who deserves more accolades is my Examiner colleague Mark Burlet, the “Drunken Intellectual.”   Mark’s thought is cogent and his writing is witty and oh yeah he has turned me on to some great new beers to drink.
 
However, a few things have bedeviled me. What wellspring of thought does he draw from? What is his intellectual lodestar? Does his intellectual verve drive his passion for the drink, or is it the drink, which fires the engine of this great mind? It really is a great chicken or the egg… uh well in this case, pint or the prose question.
 
Try as I might I could not glean an answer. Fortunately, George Will provides a historical answer that makes sense to this student of history:
 
 
 
The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:
 
"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. 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."
 
Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.
 
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 who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.
 
To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- 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. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.
 
The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- 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."…
 
So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.
 
 
So there you have it. The answer lies in the genes. 
 
However more importantly, we once again reaffirm the wisdom of Homer Simpson, "Beer: the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”


Topics: Beer Saves the World
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

More from Baltimore History Examiner

Congress' monument to self distorts the constitution

December 4, 7:33 AM
“In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true." That is what Senator Harry Reid had to say about the grand opening of the new... Read More
Topics: Congress , New Deal , Constitution
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

Spare us a new New Deal

November 25, 1:33 PM
George Mason economics professor Tyler Cowen offers a sage warning to all the New Deal cargo culters, hoping Barack Obama will bring about a new New Deal.MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems.... Read More
Topics: The New Deal , progressivism , Barack Obama
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

Are you smarter than a politician?

November 20, 12:03 PM
Well most citizens are smarter than politicians but not by much. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute released the findings of its 2008 Civics Literacy Report and the findings are UGLY. Out of the 2,500 randomly selected individuals 1,700 failed to... Read More
Topics: Civic illiteracy
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

Keith Olbermann and the uses and misuses of McCarthyism

November 10, 5:58 AM
Anyone who watches Countdown with Keith Olbermann, (those who don’t end up throwing a brick at the television anyway) knows that the execrable Olbermann fancies himself a contemporary Edward R. Murrow. Olbermann uses the legendary newsman’s... Read More
Topics: Espionage , McCarthyism , Keith Olbermann
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

The (not so) real life story that inspired The Exorcist

October 31, 12:43 AM
If you grew up in the Hyattsville/Mt. Rainier suburbs of Washington, DC, All Hallows Eve consisted of more than just trick-or-treating. No Halloween night was complete without a trip to the “Exorcist Lot” on Bunker Hill Road in Mt. Rainier... Read More
Topics: The Exorcist
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

The myth of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression

October 3, 2:35 PM
There is a lot of horse manure going around about how a lack of government regulation caused the current financial crisis, and that only massive government intervention into the markets is the answer to the problem.  Historical... Read More
Topics: The New Deal , FDR , Great Depression , Herbert Hoover
   Subscribe   Feed
 
 

Comments

Name:  
Email Address:  
Comments:  

Why we fight

September 11, 2:07 PM
.floatright { float:right}.floatleft { float:left}Insert photo caption or credit here On this seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 we rightly engage in acts of commemoration and remembrance, we mourn the fallen and... Read More
Topics: 9/11
   Subscribe   Feed