21 Life Goes On 第二十一章 生命在前进 It isn't easy to become a fossil. 要变成化石可不容易。 The fate of nearly all living organismsover 99.9 percent of themis to compost down to nothingness. 几乎所有的生物其中的99.9%以上

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Between the autumn of 1918 and spring of the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. 1918年秋天到次年春天,美国有54842人死于流感。 The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers dead in France and Germany. 英

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In the early days, this was an exceedingly painstaking process. 早年,这是个极费力气的过程。 Work on a single bacterium could easily consume a year. 研究一个细菌就可能一下子花掉一年时间。 At that time, according to Wo

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It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, 人们自然会不由自主地想到,进化是个不断完善的漫长过程, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexityin a word, toward us. 一个

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Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito's own metabolism. 蚊子在叮咬过程中吸入的人体免疫缺陷病毒被蚊子自身的代谢作用分解了。 When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around t

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Precisely the same thing happens with meningitis. 脑膜炎的情况完全一样。 At least 10 percent of young adults, and perhaps 30 percent of teenagers, carry the deadly meningococcal bacterium, 至少有10%的年轻人和也许30%的少年携带着

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Soon one of these new strains, called Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, began to show up in hospitals. 过不多久,一种名叫抗甲氧苯青霉素葡萄球菌的新品种葡萄球菌开始在医院里出现。 Only one type of antibio

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Viruses prosper by hijacking the genetic material of a living cell and using it to produce more virus. 病毒掠夺活细胞的基因材料,用来制造更多的病毒,从而大量生长。 They reproduce in a fanatical manner, then burst out in

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Anyway, getting sick is a sensible response to infection. 生病正是对感染的一种能感觉到的反应。 Sick people retire to their beds and thus are less of a threat to the wider community. 病人躺在病床上,因此减少了对更多人的

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With this ability to evolve rapidly goes another, even scarier advantage. 有了这种能力,另一种更加吓人的优势会很快产生。 Bacteria share information. Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other. 细菌能共享信

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Many organisms in the visible world were also poorly served by the traditional division. 传统的分类法也不大适用于可见世界里的许多微生物。 Fungi, the group that includes mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, were ne

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In 1997 scientists successfully activated some anthrax spores that had lain dormant for eighty years in a museum display in Trondheim, Norway. 1997年,科学家们成功地激活了已经在挪威特隆赫姆博物馆休眠了80年之久的一些炭疽

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Compared with the new eukaryotes the old prokaryotes were little more than bags of chemicals, in the words of the geologist Stephen Drury. 地球已经朝着真正有意思的行星迈出了第一步。与新的真核细胞相比,旧的原核细胞借

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It has been suggested that the cyanobacteria at Shark Bay are perhaps the slowest-evolving organisms on Earth, and certainly now they are among the rarest. 据认为,沙克湾里的叠层石也许是地球上进化最慢的生物,也肯定是现在

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This was most unexpectedso unexpected, in fact, that it was some years before scientists realized quite what they had found. 这完全是出乎意料的事太出乎意料了,因此科学家们实际上过了几年才充分意识到自己的发现。

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Yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, 然而,我们在讨论的蛋白质有几十万种,也许是100万种, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy

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Bob told me that it takes about seventeen minutes to read one zircon and it is necessary to read dozens from each rock to make the data reliable. 鲍勃对我说,识读一块锆石的数据大约要花17分钟;这了取得可靠的数据,每块锆

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Compston's machine allowed such rocks to be dated with unparalleled precision. 康普斯森的仪器能以无与伦比的精确度测定这些岩石的年代。 The prototype SHRIMP was built and machined in the Earth Science department's own worksho

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We are all the result of a single genetic trick handed down from generation to generation nearly four billion years, 我们都是同一遗传戏法的结果。那种戏法一代一代地传下来,经历了差不多40亿年, to such an extent that

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The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, 人们发现,默奇森陨石的年代已达45亿年, and it was studded with amino acidsseventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins. 上面

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