On Mon, 12 May 1997, Ward Nicholson wrote:

> If today's research on
> wine is like any other research, I would wager we will stand to see several
> reversals and about-faces for many years to come. To me this is the big
> problem with much case-by-case research that is still in a state of flux:
> You never know whether to really rely on it or not because of all the
> about-faces and reversals, so what good does it do and what certainty does
> it really give us until long after we have a need to act?

But we face much the same problem with respect to evolutionary
research.  Science is tentative, fallible, and subject to
reversals.  Although I doubt that we will see much change in the
estimated date of introduction of alcoholic beverages to the
human food supply, we could well see lots of reversals of opinion
on the question of how much time is needed for metabolic
adaptation to occur.

> Not to be too facetious here, but how about the fact alcohol kills brain
> cells when ingested in any amount? :-) (Or am I perhaps wrong about
> that--has that perhaps been shown invalid now by recent research?)

I can't seem to remember.

> To me, another problem with much disease/diet research of today is it only
> looks at isolated pieces of the puzzle picture. You never know if you have
> the whole story or not.

I agree completely.  The same caveat applies to evolutionary
reasoning, since we cannot assume that all populations are
equally adapted, or maladapted, to the same foods.

> To me, the most interesting question about wine and alcohol is, why would
> we want to drink it in the first place--aside from what I guess we could
> call a cultural/social pleasure principle--if it obviously was never a part
> of the human diet until just yesterday in evolutionary time (2,500 years
> ago.)?

That's easy.  It's a quality of life issue.  For many people, it
is enjoyable to drink wine, and that fact alone creates a
presumption in favor of doing so, unless there is good reason to
believe that it is harmful.  The fact that paleolithic people
almost certainly did not use wine creates a presumption *against*
drinking it.  The case is similar with respect to many other
foods, of course.  With these conflicting presummptions in place, we
are required to make a judgment.

> It seems we are taking two
> different approaches to the question here of whether to eat something--one
> that looks at something, like wine, on a
> "why-not-ingest-it-unless-specific-research-shows-a-problem" vs. the
> "guilty-until-proven-innocent-approach-based-on-the-unlikelihood-of-our-evolutio
> nary-adaptation-to-it" approach.

I think I am prepared to adopt the guilty-until-proven-innocent
principle, provided that I have some idea of what would count as
"proven innocent."  Is there any example of a food that, although
not available to paleolithic people, has been demonstrated to be
safe for us?  Do we have a sense of what would count as
sufficient evidence for such a conclusion?  If not, then the
principle is really "guilty-no-matter-what."

On the other hand, I still have to process the "chaos" argument
that Ray Audette presents in Neanderthin.  According to this
argument, even relatively minor deviations from the
evolutionarily safe diet could cause large and unpredictable
derangements of metabolism and health, which would be exceedingly
difficult to trace to their causes.  I would gladly learn more
about this.

Todd Moody
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