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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.
【F1】
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答案但有些科学家和历史学家只是揣测反事实的后果，比如假设达尔文溺水身亡会怎么样，这些人往往被指责在做猜谜游戏。
解析 ①本句是复合句。主句主干是scientists and historians are often accused of playing parlor games，谓语be accused of doing sth．是被动语态，即“被指控做某事”，这里是指科学家和历史学家被指责做猜谜游戏。②who引导的定语从句who try to estimate what…修饰主句主语scientists and historians，指“猜测……的科学家和历史学家”。③定语从句还包含一个宾语从句what might have happened，作estimate的宾语。指科学家和历史学家猜测的内容。④宾语从句包含if引导的条件状语从句，had drowned是对过去的虚拟假设，say是插入语，用于举例说明某种情况。
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