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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.
According to Paragraph 4, the Price Equation is ________.
选项 A、mathematically devised to show how altruism evolves
B、based on the mutual efforts of Price and Hamilton
C、a formula which has many disadvantages, but persists
D、used to describe the conditions where altruism endures
答案A
解析 根据题干定位到第四段。该段第一二句提到“普莱斯曾想用数学公式表现出利他主义的基因倾向是可进化的”，因而他设计了这个Price Equation，所以倒过来说这个方程式就是为了用数学的方式来表现利他主义是可进化的，A项正好与此相对应，故为答案。第四段只说了Price的努力，并未提及Hamilton与此等式相关，排除B项。C项是对第二句中的how characteristics call prove disadvantageous的错误理解，该方程式是用来解释“某些物种虽有不利进化的特点，但仍能存在的原因”，而非方程式本身有缺点。D项属于无中生有，文中并未提到该公式与利他主义存在的条件有关。
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