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  3. Human beings have never before had such a bad press. By all reports, we are unable to get anything right these days, and there s

Human beings have never before had such a bad press. By all reports, we are unable to get anything right these days, and there s

admin2012-06-13  53
问题     Human beings have never before had such a bad press. By all reports, we are unable to get anything right these days, and there seems to be almost nothing good to say for ourselves. In just the past century we have increased our population threefold and will double it before the next has run out We have swarmed over the open face of the earth, occupies every available acre of livable space, displaced numberless other creatures from their accustomed niches, caused one extinction after another------with ore to come------and polluted all our waterway and even parts of the oceans. Now, in our efforts to make energy and keep warm, we appear to be witlessly altering the earth’s climate by inserting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; if we do not pull up short, we will produce a new greenhouse around the planet, melting the Antarctic ice shelf and swamping all coastlines.
    Not to mention what we are doing to each other, and what we are thinking seriously of doing in the years just ahead with the most remarkable toy ever made by man, the thermonuclear bomb.
Our capacity for folly has never been matched by any other species. The long record of evolution instructs us that the way other creatures get along in nature is to accommodate, to fit in, to give a little whenever they take a little. The rest of life does this all the time, setting up symbiotic arrangement whenever the possibility comes into view. Except for us, the life an intricate system, even, all see it, organism. An embryo may be conceived, as each one of us was first brought to life, as a single successful cell.
    I have no memory of ever having been a single cell, 70years age. But I was, and whenever I think of it, at the sheer luck. But the thought that the whole biosphere------all that conjoining life, all 10 million or whatever the number is (a still incalculable number) of what we call species of living things------had its collective beginning as a single, solitary cell, 3.5 or so billion years ago, sweep me off my feet
    Our deepest folly is the notion that we are in charge of the place, that we own it and can somehow run it We are beginning to treat the earth as a sort of domesticated household pet, living in an environment invented by us, part kitchen garden, part park, household pet, living in an environment invented by us, part kitchen garden, part park, part zoo. It is an idea we must rid ourselves of soon, for it is not so. It is the other way around. We are not separate beings. We are a living part of the earth’s life, owned and operated by the earth, probably specialized for functions on its behalf that we have not yet glimpsed. Conceivably, and this is the best thought I have about us, we might turn out to be a sort of sense-organ for the whole creature, a set of eyes, even a storage place for thought Perhaps, if we continue our own embryo-logic development as a species, it will be our privilege to carry seeds of life to other parts of the galaxy.
    But right now, we have a lot to learn. One of our troubles may be that we still so new and so young. In the way evolution clocks time, we arrived on the scene only a moment age, down from the trees and puzzling over our appeasing thumbs, wondering what we are supposed to do with the flabbergasting gift of language and metaphor. Our very juvenility could account for the ways in which we fumble, drop things, get thing wrong.
    I like this thought, even though the historians might prefer to put it otherwise. They might say, some of them do say, that we have been at it thousands of years, trying out one failed culture after another, folly after folly, and now we are about to run out our string. As a biologist, I do not agree. I say that a few thousand years is hardly enough time for a brand-new species to draw breath.
    Now, with that thought, for the moment anyway, I feel better about us. We have the making of exceedingly useful working parts. We are just new to the task, that’s our trouble. Indeed, we are not yet clear in our minds what the task is, beyond the imperative to learn.
    We have all the habits of a social species, more compulsively social than any other, even bees and ants. Our nest, or hive, is language; we are held together by speech, at each other all day long. Our great advantage over all other social animals is that we possess the kind of brain that permits us to change our minds. We are not obliged, as the ants are, to follow genetic blueprints for every last detail of our behavior. Our genes are more cryptic and ambiguous in their instructions: get along, says our DNA, talk to each other, figure out the world, be useful, and above all keep an eye out for affection.
    Sometimes around a billion year ago, the bacterial cells that had been the sole occupants of the earth for the preceding two-and-a-half-billion years began joining up to form much larger cells, with nuclei like ours. Certain line of bacteria had learned earlier on to make use of oxygen for getting their energy. Somehow or other, these swarm into the new cells and turned into the mitochondria of "higher" nucleated cells. The creatures are still presence and hard work, we could never make a move or even a song.
    The chemical messages exchanged among all the cells in our bodies, regulating us, are also antique legacies. Sophisticated hormones like insulin, growth hormones and the sex steroids, a multitude of peptides, including the endorphins, which modulate the functions of our brains, were invented long ago by the bacteria and their immediate progeny, the protozoan. They still make them, for purposes entirely obscure. We almost certainly inherited the genes needed for things like these from our ancestors in the mud.
    One important thing we have already learned. We are a novel species, but we are constructed out of the living parts of very ancient organisms. We go back a long way. We may be the greatest and brainiest of all biological opportunities on the planet, but we owe debts of long standing to the beings that came before us, and to those that now surround us and will help us along into the future.
Like some other creatures, man also has______.
选项 A、the gift of language.
B、the variety to change his mind.
C、the variety of individual behavior pattern.
D、the habit of socializing with each other.
答案D
解析 根据第八段首句“We have all the habits of a social species，more compulsive than any other even bees and ants．Our nest，or hive is language．”可知，与某些其他生物一样，人类也有彼此交际的习惯，因此D选项正确；其他三项提到的技能只有人类才具有。
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