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  3. The thought experiment has a noble place in research, but some thoughts are deemed nobler than others. Darwin and Einstein could

The thought experiment has a noble place in research, but some thoughts are deemed nobler than others. Darwin and Einstein could

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问题    The thought experiment has a noble place in research, but some thoughts are deemed nobler than others. Darwin and Einstein could let their minds wander and imagine the consequences of certain actions or natural laws. 【F1】But scientists and historians who try to estimate what might have happened if, say, Darwin had drowned, are often accused of playing parlor games.
   Most of these counterfactual thought experiments tend to focus on changes to the lives of historical figures—what would have happened had Hitler never been born, for instance. Dismissed as silly and speculative, such exercises are considered of little academic value.
   【F2】The course of history is surely dependent on the roles of influential individuals, which is why counterfactual tales of frustrated plots succeeding and dictators killed as infants seem so poorly anchored to reality. An individual really can steer events, so a world without that individual is unknowable. But what about the course of science, and the ideas that push it along? Is scientific and technical progress equally dependent on circumstance and personality? Or are discoveries inevitable, and independent of the people who happen to be around to make them?
   What if Darwin had toppled overboard before he joined the evolutionary dots? 【F3】That discussion seems useful, because it raises interesting questions about the state of knowledge, then and now, and how it is communicated and portrayed. 【F4】In his 2013 book—in which the young Charles is, indeed, lost in a storm—the historian Peter Bowler argued that the theory of evolution would have emerged just so, but with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order, and therefore less opposed to religious society.
   This week, another historian offers an alternative pathway for science: what if the ideas of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of traits had been challenged more robustly and more successfully by a rival interpretation by the scientist W. F. R. Weldon? Gregory Radick argues that a twentieth-century genetics driven more by Weldon’s emphasis on environmental context would have weakened the dominance of the current misleading impression that nature always outdoes nurture.
   A well-informed interest in alternative scientific pasts can help us to take the actual past more seriously as a source of present-day insight. It can also help us to stay self-critical as we make choices in the present. Science without consensus would be chaos. 【F5】But the price of consensus is eternal watchfulness of self-satisfaction, and a willingness to contemplate the road otherwise not travelled.
【F3】
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答案这个讨论似乎值得一谈，因为它提出了有关知识的更替(过去与现在的知识)以及如何传承和描述知识等有趣的问题。
解析 ①本句是复合句。主句是主系表结构，系动词seem表示推测；because引导的原因状语从句解释discussion有意义的原因。②原因状语从句采用了raise questions about sth.结构，意为“提出有关……的问题”。sth．由名词词组the state of knowledge和宾语从句how it is communicated and portrayed充当。③then and now是后置定语，修饰前面的knowledge，意为“过去和现在的知识”。
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