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  3. Suppose Charles Darwin had been swept overboard and drowned during the voyage of the Beagle. What would the world be like withou

Suppose Charles Darwin had been swept overboard and drowned during the voyage of the Beagle. What would the world be like withou

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问题     Suppose Charles Darwin had been swept overboard and drowned during the voyage of the Beagle. What would the world be like without him? That is the question Peter Bowler sets out to answer in Darwin Deleted. He uses the notion of a world without Darwin to explore the context of evolutionary thought in the 19th century, and examine exactly what Darwin’s contributions were.
    In many ways, says Bowler, Darwin played less of a role than you might suppose. The concept of evolution was already around before Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859. Geologists were beginning to realise that Earth was much more than a few thousand years old, and palaeontologists were piecing together a fossil record that testified to vast changes in life forms over a long period of time. Darwin’s big idea was that evolution proceeded by natural selection; better-adapted individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce, and thus pass on adaptive traits to their offspring, while less well-adapted individuals die taking their failed traits with them. Others, notably Alfred Russel Wallace, came up a similar idea at about the same time, but only Darwin’s book attracted wide attention.
    That concept, with its emphasis on struggle, competition and the relentless elimination out of failures, was a bombshell. How could a merciful God permit such violence, such wastefulness? Darwin’s theory instantly polarised the public, with conservative Christians rejecting it outright and anti-religionists using it as an argument against the established church. Without Darwin, Bowler says, anti-religionists might have seized another sword, perhaps using geological evidence for an ancient Earth as their weapon.
    Modern opponents may argue that Darwinism laid the foundation for societal amorality, resulting in two world wars and the Nazi atrocities. So would a world without Darwin have been a kinder, gentler place? Not likely, says Bowler, who shows that the factors underlying the horrors of the past century or so, such as racism or imperialism, existed long before Darwin. True, the notion of Darwinism provided a useful rhetorical framework, as when Nazis spoke of "racial purification" as a step toward the evolution of better humans. But without Darwin they could easily have turned to another metaphor, says Bowler, such as the need to excise a cancer from society.
    All this is fascinating and should have made a lively book. But Bowler is so elaborate on his historical detail, so careful to explore every angle of each point he makes, that he often leaves the reader unsure where he is going. Even so, the book is worth the effort. Bowler concludes that where Darwin really mattered was in timing. Here, ironically, the shock of his book, and the polarisation it caused, may have delayed the acceptance of evolution. The great man was ahead of his time, and science may have paid a price for that.
We learn from Paragraph 2 that the idea of evolution through natural selection ______.
选项 A、had arisen long before the publication of Origin
B、was less influential than generally supposed
C、was shared by some of Darwin’s contemporaries
D、originated from geological evidences and fossil records
答案C
解析 第二段涉及“进化”和“自然选择推动进化”两种思想，这是两个概念，要加以区分：“进化”思想在达尔文《物种起源》出版之前早已出现(第二句)，而对于生物的具体进化方式，不同学者又提出了不同观点。达尔文的主要观点是“自然选择推动进化”(第四句)。第五句接着指出，其他人(如华莱士)在同一时期也提出了相似观点。这表明“自然选择推动进化”并非达尔文独家观点，在其同时代学者中广泛存在。因此，[C]选项正确。
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