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  3. When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongs

When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongs

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问题     When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52.
    Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behavior that decreases an individual’s fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such kindness is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin’s theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature.
    In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favor the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers provide the "fittest" service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favor the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure.
    Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population. By slightly changing the variables, he was able to describe populations in which  kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out.
    Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. In 1967 he moved to London, where he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty cabin where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. Price ultimately became one of the homeless he had set out to save.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is mentioned in Paragraph 2 to
选项 A、explain why altruism exists.
B、show its inability to explain altruism.
C、show survival of the fittest.
D、show altruism also exists in insect societies.
答案B
解析 根据题干可直接定位到第二段。该段谈到科学家们对进化论能否解释利他主义的疑惑，然后以蜜蜂为例，按照达尔文的理论，工蜂由于没有繁殖能力，应该会消失，然而事实不是这样，所以达尔文的进化论并不能解释利他主义为什么能存在，B项的inability to explain与此对应，故B项为答案。A项与文意正好相反，从蜜蜂的例子可以看出，若按进化论来看，有利他行为的工蜂应该会消失，但事实并非如此，故进化论并不能解释利他主义存在的原因。C项利用常识干扰，虽然“适者生存”是达尔文进化论中非常重要的论点，但在文中并没有谈到。D项描述的是事实，并非提到达尔文理论的目的。
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