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  3. 【F1】I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today. 2

【F1】I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today. 2

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问题     【F1】I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today. 200 years after his birth and 150 years after the publication of "On the Origin of Species" , the book that changed everything. His central idea evolution by means of natural selection—was in some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something wrong with the conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was hastened into print and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace half a world away.
    But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient observation.【F2】We love to believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is to rigorously test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to working hypotheses. Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for just such tests. He writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that it would take the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.
    I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea would have surprised him.【F3】The most important discoveries—Mendel’s genetics and the structure of DNA—would almost certainly have gratified him because they reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution. It would have gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so many of them confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.
    Perhaps one day we will not call evolution "Darwinism". After all, we do not call classical mechanics Newtonism .
    As for the other fate of so-called Darwinism—the reductionist controversy fostered by religious conservatives—well, Darwin knew plenty about that, too. The cultural opposition to evolution was then, as now, scientifically irrelevant.【F4】Perhaps the persistence of opposition to evolution is a reminder that culture is not biological, or else we might have evolved past such a gnashing of sensibilities.【F5】In a way, our peculiarly American failure to come to terms with Darwin’s theory and what it’s become since 1859 is a sign of something broader: our failure to come to terms with science and the leaching of science.
【F1】
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答案在查尔斯·达尔文诞辰200周年之时，在他那改变了一切的著作《物种起源》出版150周年之际，我忍不住想象，如果他能审视一下自己的成就在今天的地位，他会如何作想。
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