SSS 2009-02-12
时间：2019-01-08 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(二)月
This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky . Got a minute ?
February 12th is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. But they’re linked by something else, too. Before Darwin, natural philosophers held to a point of view called typology, or essentialism. Members of a particular class were all the same. For example, all triangles have the same fundamental characteristic: three sides.
This way of thinking, however, extended to the biological world, including humans. As the great evolutionary 1 biologist Ernst Mayr wrote in an essay in the July, 2000, issue of Scientific American, “For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously 2 differ from other human ethnic 3 groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism 4.” But Darwin replaced typology with the new concept of populations. Groupings of organisms are populations of unique individuals—who vary.
Typology offered a philosophical 5 justification 6 for a slave being worth three-fifths of a white person in the Constitution. But now science insisted that all people, regardless of race, were fully 7 human. A viewpoint that finally began to be put in practice in the US by Lincoln.
Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky .
- Life has its own evolutionary process.生命有其自身的进化过程。
- These are fascinating questions to be resolved by the evolutionary studies of plants.这些十分吸引人的问题将在研究植物进化过程中得以解决。
- France remained a conspicuously uneasy country. 法国依然是个明显不太平的国家。
- She figured conspicuously in the public debate on the issue. 她在该问题的公开辩论中很引人注目。
- This music would sound more ethnic if you played it in steel drums.如果你用钢鼓演奏，这首乐曲将更具民族特色。
- The plan is likely only to aggravate ethnic frictions.这一方案很有可能只会加剧种族冲突。
- He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
- Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。
- The teacher couldn't answer the philosophical problem.老师不能解答这个哲学问题。
- She is very philosophical about her bad luck.她对自己的不幸看得很开。
- There's no justification for dividing the company into smaller units. 没有理由把公司划分成小单位。
- In the young there is a justification for this feeling. 在年轻人中有这种感觉是有理由的。