万物简史 第644期:神秘的两足动物(22)

（单词翻译）

Tattersall thinks the rise of a big brain may simply have been an evolutionary¹ accident. He believes with Stephen Jay Gould that if you replayed the tape of life—even if you ran it back only a relatively² short way to the dawn of hominids—the chances are "quite unlikely" that modern humans or anything like them would be here now.

塔特萨尔认为，脑量的增大也许仅仅是进化过程的一个偶然。他相信斯蒂芬·杰伊·古尔德的说法，如果你将生命的进化过程回放一遍即便你仅仅从人科动物出现的相对较短的时间开始，现代人类或任何和他们相似的生物，能够一直存在到今天的可能性“实在很小”。

"One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept," he says, "is that we are not the culmination³ of anything. There is nothing inevitable⁴ about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us. Even anthropologists tended to think this way right up until the 1970s" Indeed, as recently as 1991, in the popular textbook The Stages of Evolution, C. Loring Brace⁵ stuck doggedly⁶ to the linear concept, acknowledging just one evolutionary dead end, the robust⁷ australopithecines. Everything else represented a straightforward⁸ progression—each species of hominid carrying the baton⁹ of development so far, then handing it on to a younger, fresher runner. Now, however, it seems certain that many of these early forms followed side trails that didn't come to anything.

“人们最不易于接受的观点之一，”他说，“就是我们不是万物的顶点。我们生活在这儿，一切都并非必然。部分出于人类的自负，我们往往将进化理解为实际上是安排好来产生人类的一个过程。直到20世纪70年代以前，连人类学家都持这样的观点。事实上，直到1991年，在C.罗瑞·布里斯所著的流传很广的教科书《进化的阶段》里，他依然顽固坚持这样一种线性进化观念。他只承认一个进化的终点，那就是南方古猿粗壮种的灭绝。所有其他的种群代表了一个直线进化的过程——每一种群都接过了前辈的接力棒，再把它传给年轻的后来者。无论如何，现在似乎可以肯定的是，这些早期的种群许多走了小路叉道，已经灭绝了。