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  3. "Why are humans so smart?" is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the Universit

"Why are humans so smart?" is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the Universit

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问题     "Why are humans so smart?" is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question. "If it’s so great to be smart," Dr. Kawecki asks, "why have most animals remained dumb?"
    Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health. Learning is remarkably widespread in the animal kingdom. The worms are not born with an innate aversion to the dangerous bacteria. They need time to learn to tell the difference and avoid becoming sick.
    Dr. Dukas hypothesizes that any animal with a nervous system can learn. Even in cases where scientists have failed to document learning in a species, he thinks they should not be too quick to rule it out. "Is it because I’m not a good teacher or because the animal doesn’t learn?" Dr. Dukas asked.
    Although learning may be widespread among animals, Dr. Dukas wonders why they bothered to evolve it in the first place. "You cannot just say that learning is an adaptation to a changing environment," he said. It is possible to adapt to a changing environment without using a nervous system to learn. Bacteria can alter behavior to help their survival. If a microbe senses a toxin, it can swim away. If it senses a new food, it can switch genes on and off to alter its metabolism.
    Learning also turns out to have dangerous side effects that make its evolution even more puzzling. Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues have produced striking evidence for these side effects by studying flies as they evolve into better learners in the lab.
    Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much.
    Dr. Kawecki also says it is worth investigating whether humans also pay hidden costs for extreme learning. "We could speculate that some diseases are a byproduct of intelligence," he said. The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues.
Some species are better learner than others partly because______.
选项 A、some animals prefer to remain dumb
B、some animals don’t have a nervous system
C、learning may endanger some animals’ health
D、they are better taught than others
答案C
解析 属逻辑关系题。通过题目内容可定位至文章第二段第一句。在第二段第二句中，作者就说明了导致这种学习能力差异的一个原因，那就是智慧可能危害到一些动物的健康，故可知选项C符合题意。选项A犯了移花接木的错误，是第一段最后一句的内容，故错误。选项B属于曲解文意，神经系统出现在第三段中，专家认为凡是有神经系统的物种都会学习，因此如果没有神经系统就根本不会学习，故错误。选项D犯了无中生有的错误，文中未提到谁教授动物学习的问题，故错误。
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