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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.
【F4】
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答案历史学家彼特-鲍勒在他2013年出版的一本书(此书假设达尔文年轻时在一场暴风雨中丧生)中说到，进化论还是会面世，但它可能由于调换了各个分论的顺序，因而没有与宗教社会形成太激烈的对抗。
解析 ①本句是复合句。主句主干是the historian Peter Bowler argued that…。that引导宾语从句指出彼特-鲍勒的观点。②破折号中间的部分是插入语，解释2013年的这本书中出现的内容。③with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order是原因状语，介词with相当于because of，指出认为进化论与宗教社会的冲突不那么激烈的原因。placed in a different order是后置定语，修饰前面的pieces，即“放在不同位置上的各个分论”。④opposed to sth.意为“与……相对立”。
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