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Mark Newgent
Baltimore History ExaminerMark Newgent is a writer and editor with a talent for breathing history into everyday happenings.
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How Beer Saved Civilization and Answered a Nagging Question
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by Mark Newgent, Baltimore History Examiner
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.”
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Topics: Beer Saves the World
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