報告題目：The Drunken Monkey: Is Alcohol Consumption in Modern Humans An Evolutionary Hangover?

主講人：Prof. Robert Dudley

報告時間：2025年6月27日15：20

報告地點：西華大學招就處報告廳401

主辦單位：西華大學食品與生物工程學院、西華大學航空航天學院

主講人簡介：

Robert Dudley is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California–Berkeley, and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He received a B.S. in Zoology in 1983 from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Zoology in 1987 from the University of Cambridge where he was a Marshall Scholar. From 1987–1992, Robert was a postdoctoral fellow with the Smithsonian Institution, working in Panama at the Barro Colorado Island field station. Following appointments at the University of Texas at Austin from 1992–2002, he moved to Berkeley in 2003 where he has held multiple endowed chairs, and also served from 2016–2021 as Chair of the Department of Integrative Biology. Robert's research is primarily concerned with the evolution, physiology, and biomechanics of flight in insects and hummingbirds. To date, he has published more than 160 research articles and two books in the general fields of biomechanics and comparative physiology.  His current research projects focus on the origins of flight in both birds and insects, and on the amazing flight performance of hummingbirds, a species-rich avian group which exemplifies up-regulated aerodynamic and physiological capacity.  Both his study of animal flight origins and of hummingbirds have involved engineering approaches (e.g., robotic designs, particle-imaging velocimetry, and highspeed 3D kinematic reconstructions), and have provided new insights into potential design of microair vehicles. These laboratory studies of flight biomechanics have been complemented by fieldwork to evaluate high-altitude adaptations of volant taxa (e.g., extreme flight performance of bumblebees in the mountains of western Sichuan), comparisons of hummingbirds with the Old World nectarivorous sunbirds, the ecophysiology of long-distance migration in butterflies, and controlled flight behavior in wingless hexapods of the tropical rainforest canopy.

內容簡介：

Ethanol derives from the fermentation of simple sugars, and fermentative yeasts are ubiquitous within terrestrial ecosystems. Animals that consume sugar-rich fruits and nectar thus routinely ingest low-level ethanol; the positive psychoactive responses to ethanol among vertebrate fruit-eaters (and modern humans) act to increase net caloric gain during feeding via the aperitif effect. Early primates (and more recently the great apes) predominantly consumed ripe fruit, suggesting chronic exposure to fermented carbohydrates along with natural selection for the rapid localization and consumption of these calorically rich substrates. Patterns of alcohol use by modern humans may thus reflect ancestral sensory biases associating ethanol consumption with nutritional reward (i.e., the drunken monkey hypothesis).