Darwine and Chips: A Toast to Evolutionary Storytelling

This, dear reader, was the very first
faculty meeting. I’ve been at a few.
Their quality has markedly declined.

 

 

by John D. Wise, PhD

When I was growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970’s, our neighbor had a small apple orchard from which each year he would make a large barrel of fresh, sweet apple cider. He always invited us to share the wealth, and free sweets were irresistible. Of course, as time passed the cider became slightly less sweet, but had a very interesting, even pleasant “tang” to it. This was my first introduction to alcohol, though I never knew it as “alcohol” – a forbidden and evil substance my mother always spoke of in hushed and angry tones – but only as “hard cider.” We enjoyed it every year.

Little did I know how evolutionarily momentous my innocent tippling could be.

Monkey See, Monkey Brew

Fast forward. A twinset of articles, one from BioScience (“Fermented fruits: scrumping, sharing, and the origin of feasting,” 31 July, 2025) , and the other from The Guardian (“Wild chimpanzees filmed by scientists bonding over alcoholic fruit: Footage of apes consuming fermented breadfruit leads researchers to ask if it may shed light on origins of human feasting,” earlier this same year).

Mounting evidence points to the importance of fermented fruits in the diets of tropical frugivores, especially African apes. But how has this fundamental aspect of ape ecology escaped scientific attention over the past six decades?

Basically, it didn’t, at least in theory. It’s been with us at least since 2000 and Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley.

Scene: A humid clearing in West Africa, where a troop of wild chimpanzees gathers around a fallen African breadfruit. It smells… ripe. A few brave souls munch. One passes a piece of tangy fruit to a neighbor. It’s a moment of proto-camaraderie, and that pesky problem of the origin of altruistic behavior is potentially solved – it’s gears oiled with ethanol.

Ethics is born.

At least, that’s the drift of these headlines as they echo through the jungle of evolutionary storytelling.

Scientists recently captured wild chimpanzees sharing mildly alcoholic fruit on motion-triggered cameras in Guinea-Bissau (see The Guardian link above to watch them). The fermented breadfruit registered a heady 0.6% alcohol by volume—significantly less than even my youthful “hard cider” libations (1-5%), and way less than beer or wine. Yet according to researchers, these apes may be showing us the first stirrings of human civilization: bonding, feasting, and, presumably, belching in harmony.

But the fermented feast footage is just the latest sip in a growing stream of ideas pouring from the “drunken monkey hypothesis.” Popularized about two decades ago, it proposes that our distant primate ancestors developed a taste – and a tolerance – for ethanol long before the advent of microbreweries. Now, the literature review in BioScience goes further: it proposes that this natural “Evo-libation” may have shaped social bonds and even triggered the emergence of feasting rituals. So … the next time you have to sit next to your annoying uncle on Thanksgiving, you’ll know who to thank.

It’s a classic Darwinian story. The evidence for this evolutionary cocktail?

• A few observed incidents of chimps nibbling fermented fruit
• A low-grade buzz (maybe)
• An enzyme mutation (ADH4) dated to about 10 million years ago
• A lot of imagination

The Root Cause of Evolution

Still, it gets better. At Dartmouth, (reporting on Science, 31 July 2025) paleoanthropologists have been chewing on a different angle: what happens when diet changes ahead of anatomy? Their story: early hominins started eating hard, starchy roots about 3.8 million years ago—before their teeth were ready. Evolution, it turns out, sometimes lets you order dinner before your molars catch up.

“We propose that this shift to underground foods was a signal moment in our evolution,” Fannin says. “It created a glut of carbs that were perennial—our ancestors could access them at any time of year to feed themselves and other people.”

They call this “behavioral drive,” and it’s now being championed as a mechanism for physical evolution. Our ancestors decided tasty tubers were worth the jaw pain. Three quarters of a million years later evolution delivered our new and improved molars and we could now eat like we were designed to what we’d already been eating … for 700,000 years.

And we get upset when our Amazon order takes two days. Piece of fermented fruit, anyone?

So let’s piece together the evolutionary storyline:

1. Primates develop a taste for overripe jungle juice.
2. They share it – sparking proto-feasting, proto-bonding, and proto-party games.
3. They get the munchies (marijuana dispensaries are bound to spring up under these conditions) and dig up tubers their teeth can’t handle.
4. Millions of years pass.
5. Et voilà: culture, cuisine, and craft beer.

Who needs logic and evidence when you’ve got fermented fruit?

To their credit, the researchers are hypothesizing, not claiming definitive proof. But that never stops the science press. Headlines pop with glee: “Chimpanzees sharing boozy fruit may point to the origins of pub culture.” (The Times, April 20, 2025) Naturally! Ten episodes of food-sharing are all it takes to draw a straight line from this to Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

One might ask – quietly, between bites of root vegetable chips – how we get from a few drunk chimps to Shakespeare, Milton and T. S. Eliot. But the great thing about evolutionary narratives is that they come with built-in time and evidence buffers: a million years here, a gene mutation there, and before long, it all makes sense … with a glass or two of Darwine.

A Theory, Tipsy and Tumbling

And so, we’ve arrived. Long ago, ten million years (give or take a few million – we can revise as needed), a hungry proto-ape plucked a windfallen, overripe fruit. He munched.

He buzzed.

Soon, a merry band of bipedal bonobos was giggling in the underbrush, arguing over whose fruit had more “punch.”

This, dear reader, was the very first faculty meeting. Many more followed. I’ve been at a few of them… their quality has markedly declined.

From this glorious, inebriated origin, a certain strain of scientistic myth-making blossomed, asserting that fermented fruit sparked ethics, altruism, and eventually, civilization. It’s an inventive tale, strung together by the flimsiest of observations and the most robust of imaginations. Darwin and his acolytes, it seems, inherited a bit of their ancestors’ tippling tendency for tall tales, confidently stumbling from just-so … to certainty with barely a sober thought in between.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.