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「媒库文选」进化并不像你以为的那样进行

Evolution Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does

进化并不像你以为的那样进行

You've certainly seen the pictures of a chimpanzee gradually straightening up and progressing through various hominids all the way to a modern human being. Yes, they can be humorous. But these kinds of popular representations about evolution get it all wrong.

This misunderstanding is a holdover from before 1859, the year Charles Darwin first published his scientific theory of evolution via natural selection.

Until then, the traditional view of how the world was organized was through a “progression in perfection.” This concept is explicit in the idea of the “great chain of being,” or “scala naturae” in Latin: All beings on Earth, animate and inanimate, could be organized according to an increasing scale of perfection from, say, mushrooms at the bottom, up through lobsters and rabbits, all the way to human beings at the top.

At least since Darwin, though, scientists' idea of the world is organized through transitions—from inanimate molecules to life, from earlier organisms to different kinds of plants and animals, and so on. All life on Earth is the product of gradual transformations, which diversified and gave rise to the exuberance of organisms that we know today.

Two transitions are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists. There's the jump from the inanimate to the animate: the origin of life. And there's the appearance of the human species from a monkey ancestor.

The most popular way to represent the emergence of human beings is as linear and progressive. You've probably seen images, logos, and political and social propaganda that draw on this representation.

But none of these representations capture the dynamics of Darwin's theory. The one image he included in his book “On the Origin of Species” is a tree diagram, the branching of which is a metaphor for the way species originate—by splitting. The absence of an absolute time scale in the image is an acknowledgment that gradual change happens at a rate that vary from organism to organism based on the length of a generation.

According to Darwin, all current organisms are equally evolved and are all still affected by natural selection. So, a starfish and a person, for example, are both at the forefront of the evolution of their particular building plans. And they happen to share a common ancestor that lived about 580 million years ago.

Darwin's theory doesn't presuppose any special direction in evolution. It assumes gradual change and diversification. And, as evolution is still operating today, all present organisms are the most evolved of their kind.

Having been around nearly 2,000 years, the idea of the scala naturae did not disappear during Darwin's time. It might actually have been reinforced by something so unexpected as a cartoon. Illustrator Edward Linley Sambourne's immensely popular caricature of evolution “Man Is But a Worm,” published in Punch's Almanack for 1882, combined two concepts that were never linked in Darwin's mind: gradualism and linearity.

Given centuries of religious belief in a “great chain of being,” the idea of linearity was an easy sell. The iconic version of this concept is, of course, the depiction of a supposed ape-to-human “progression.”

A linear depiction of evolution may, consciously or not, confirm false preconceptions about evolution, such as intelligent design—the idea that life has an intelligent creator behind it. Historians can work to unravel how such a simple caricature could have helped distort Darwin's theory. Meanwhile, science writers and educators face the challenge of explaining the gradual branching processes that explain the diversity of life.

Contrary to the Sambourne picture, evolution is better represented as a process producing continuous branching and divergence of populations of organisms.

你肯定见过这样的图片:黑猩猩逐渐挺直身体,经过各种原始人类,一直发展为现代人类。是的,这些图片可能很幽默。但这些关于进化的常见描绘完全弄错了。

这种误解始于1859年查尔斯·达尔文首次发表物竞天择进化论之前。

在那之前,人们传统上认为世界是通过“渐趋完美”组织起来的。这一概念明确体现于“伟大的存在之链”或拉丁文中称之为“自然阶梯”的观念:无论有没有生命,地球上的所有存在都可以根据越来越高的完美程度组织起来,比如最底层是蘑菇,再往上是龙虾和兔子,最顶层是人类。

不过,至少自达尔文以来,科学家们形成对世界的看法依据的是过渡——从无生命的分子到生命、从早期生物体到不同种类的动植物等等。地球上的所有生命都是渐进转变的产物,它日渐多样化,最终产生我们今天所看到的生物体繁盛景象。

有两项过渡尤其令进化生物学家关注。从无生命体到生命体的飞跃:生命的起源。还有由猴子祖先到人类物种的转变。

关于人类的出现,最常见的描绘是线性的、渐进的。你可能见到过基于这种描绘的图片、标识以及政治和社会宣传。

但这些描绘都没有领会达尔文理论的动态性。他的《物种起源》一书中有一幅树形图,图中的树枝喻指物种起源的方式——分化。该图没有明确的时间尺度,这承认了不同生物体根据世代长短的不同而有不同的渐变进度。

达尔文认为,当前的所有生物体都有着相同的进化程度,并且都仍受自然选择影响。例如,海星和人在各自的发展规划中都处于进化的最前沿。他们碰巧拥有生活在约5.8亿年前的共同祖先。

达尔文的理论不预先假定任何特定的进化方向。它假定的是渐进变化和多样化。因为进化如今仍在进行,当前所有生物体都是同类中进化程度最高的。

已经存在近2000年的“自然阶梯”思想在达尔文时代并未消失。事实上,它可能因为一些像漫画这样出人意料的东西而得到了加强。插画家爱德华·林利·桑伯恩在1882年《潘趣周刊年鉴》上发表了深受喜爱的关于进化的漫画《人不过是条蠕虫》,这幅画将两个从未在达尔文脑海中建立关联的概念——渐进主义和线性结合在了一起。

鉴于数百年来对于“伟大的存在之链”的宗教信仰,线性概念很容易为人们所接受。当然,这一概念的标志性版本就是对所谓由猿到人的“渐进”过程的描绘。

对进化的线性描绘可能有意或无意地强化关于进化的错误先入之见,比如智慧设计论,这种观点认为生命背后有一个具有智慧的创造者。历史学家可以致力于搞清楚这样一幅简单的漫画是如何歪曲达尔文理论的。与此同时,科普作家和教育工作者面对的挑战是讲明白能解释生命多样性的渐进分化过程。

与桑伯恩的画相反,进化更应被描绘为一个令生物种群不断出现分支和差异的过程。(李莎译自美国《大众科学》月刊网站9月4日文章)