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  3. Robert Trivers’s new book the Folly of Fools is a curious document — a book about deception and self-deception that is itself de

Robert Trivers’s new book the Folly of Fools is a curious document — a book about deception and self-deception that is itself de

admin2014-06-25  17
问题     Robert Trivers’s new book the Folly of Fools is a curious document — a book about deception and self-deception that is itself deceptive, in structure, voice and argument.
    A celebrated evolutionary biologist, Trivers uses the tools of his trade to answer a basic question: Why are deception and self-deception so prevalent? Our eyes, noses, tongues, ears and skin tell us so much about the world, why is it that our brains then deny some of this information, hide it from ourselves and others? Natural selection should have rooted out such tendencies—unless they offer some evolutionary advantage.
    Trivers thinks they do. Lying can obviously be helpful, keeping us out of trouble, making us seem better than we are. But our bodies are not so good at fibbing. We have "tells" an uptick in our voices, sweating palms — and as lies multiply, it becomes difficult to keep track of them. Much better, then, to first deceive ourselves, to believe the lie, so that when we present it to the world all those giveaways are gone.
    Trivers offers this bit of reasoning as the basis of a "science of self-deception. " But in making his arguments, he turns away from the algebraic logic of modern evolutionary biology and opts, instead, for the approach of 19th-century romantic natural history. "The Folly of Fools" assumes the unity of all nature and seeks to comprehend it not merely by observation and reason, but also by subjective impressions, intuition and imagination. And thus Trivers ranges across biology, anthropology, history and politics to find examples of deception and self-deception in action.
    Two problems arise from this arrangement. First, it is unclear for whom this book is meant. Scientists are unlikely to find the argument rigorous enough to be persuasive. But the book may not appeal to lay readers, either. Many of Trivers’s examples feel underdeveloped, and the quick jumps from one to another may give the uninitiated reader vertigo. Fewer examples, more fully developed, could have better drawn in the interested non-scientist. The second problem with his method is its breadth. The examples never gel into a coherent argument. Rather, deception comes to mean so many things that it means nothing at all: The deception that plays out between a cuckoo and the bird in whose nest it has left its eggs is not the deception that explains Japan’s refusal to come to terms with the Rape of Nanking and neither seems related to the use of misleading metaphors, another form of deception Trivers discusses.
    Whatever the case, to fully understand these — and much of human life — one must turn to history, sociology, psychology and political science. Yet Trivers derides these disciplines. They are rife with self-deception, he argues, their theories not based on the robust methods of physics — where self-deception is minimized, he insists — but on a preference for poorly defined variables and a tendency to cherry-pick examples. The irony, of course, is that these are the very problems that undermine Trivers’s own book.
According to the author, the argumentation of The Folly of Fools is______.
选项 A、rigorous
B、comprehensive
C、inconsistent
D、inadequate
答案C
解析 第四段指出，《傻瓜的愚蠢》一书从现代进化生物学的代数逻辑转到了浪漫主义博物学，既使用观察和推理的论证方法，又使用主观印象、直觉和想象来认识自然，并且横跨诸多学科来搜罗相关实例。这些都说明特里弗斯的论证方法不一致，不科学，[C]选项正确。
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