[I totally fell for this too. -egg]

I’ve heard — and repeated — the theory that addiction rates among indigenous people in the Americas was caused by genetics — specifically, that “new world” populations hadn’t gone through the European plague years’ genetic bottleneck that killed everyone who couldn’t survive on alcoholic beverages (these having been boiled during their production and thus less likely to carry infectious diseases).

But there’s no evidence to support that theory — it’s just a story without any falsifiable hypotheses. Our received scientific wisdom is full of well-known “facts” that are just fairy-tales made up to explain social problems through a biological lens (see, for example, virtually the entire field of Darwinian psychology). These science-tales serve a social purpose: they situate social problems as being innate and outside of the realm of human fault. Particularly, they excuse away any social inequality as being the (seemingly inevitable) result of our biology, and not the result of some people grabbing more than their fair share, at everyone else’s expense.

Source: Genocide, not genes: indigenous peoples’ genetic alcoholism is a racist myth / Boing Boing