万物简史 第4期:引言(4)

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　　而且在自己的祖宗方面，你还极其--可以说是奇迹般地--好运气。

　　Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans,想一想啊，在38亿年的时间里，在这段比地球上的山脉、河流和海洋还要久远的时间里，every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate,你父母双方的哪个祖先都很有魅力，都能找到配偶，healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently⁴ blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

　　都健康得能生儿育女，都运气好得能活到生儿育女的年龄。

　　Not one of your pertinent⁵ ancestors was squashed, devoured⁶, drowned, starved, stranded⁷, stuck fast,这些跟你有关的祖先，一个都没有被压死，被吃掉，被淹死，被饿死，被卡住，untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected⁸ from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic⁹ material to the right partner at the right moment早年就受了伤，或者无法在其生命过程中在恰当的时刻把一小泡遗传物质释放给恰当的伴侣，in order to perpetuate¹⁰ the only possible sequence of hereditary¹¹ combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

　　以使这惟一可能的遗传组合过程持续下去，最终在极其短暂的时间里令人吃惊地--产生了你。

　　This is a book about how it happened, in particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something,本书要说一说这事儿是怎样发生的--尤其是我们怎样从根本不存在变成某种存在，and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since.

　　然后那种存在的一小点儿又怎样变成了我们。我还要说一说在此期间和在此以前的事。

　　That's a great deal to cover, of course, which is why the book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, even though it isn't really.

　　这当然要涉及好多事情，所以这本书就叫做《万物简史》，虽然实际上并非如此，也不可能如此。

　　It couldn't be. But with luck by the time we finish it will feel as if it is.",但是，要是运气好的话，等你读完本书的时候，你也许会在一定程度上有那种感觉。"

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