評論
打印
Y: Hey, Don. I bet you think you're pretty smart.
耶爾：你好，唐。我敢打賭，你肯定認為自己特別聰明。
D: Well, Yael, I guess so. I mean I've no genius or anything.
唐：是的，耶爾。我認為自己是挺聰明的，但可不是什么天才人物。
Y: Relax. I just meant that you have a big brain compared to most other animals.
耶爾：別緊張。我的意思是，和其它動物相比，你擁有一個更大的大腦。
D: OK. I guess in that sense I am pretty smart, at least compared to a chimp or something.
唐：是的。從這種意義上講，我確實挺聰明的——至少比黑猩猩要聰明。
Y: But guess what? About 10,000 years ago, there was a race of people who may have been even smarter than we modern humans.
耶爾：但你知道嗎？大約一萬年前，有一個人種可能比我們現代人更聰明。
D: Really? Who were they?
唐：真的嗎？他們是誰？
Y: They are known as the Boscups because that's the region in South Africa where their fossils were first found. And the cool thing is that the Boscups appear to have skulls that were a lot bigger than ours.
耶爾：這個人種叫做Boscups，因為他們的化石首次發現于南非的Boscups地區。最奇妙的是，他們的頭骨比我們這些現代人還要大很多。
D: Which would mean that their brains would probably bigger than ours too? But does that mean they were necessarily smarter?
唐：他們的大腦更大？這意味著什么？難道這就說明他們一定更聰明嗎？
Y: Well, that's impossible for us to know for sure. But consider that our bigger brains allow to imagine possibilities and alternate realities in ways that smaller-brained animals can't as far as we know. Now if you imagine a person with a brain significantly larger than normal, it stands to reason that they'd be able to process more information at once and see imagined things in ways that are beyond us.
耶爾：嗯，這一點我們倒無法確認。但是，我們應考慮到腦部較小的動物在想象力和思考力上遠遠不及我們人類這一事實。如果一個人的大腦明顯大于常人大腦，按理說，他們一次能夠處理的信息和想象力會遠遠超出我們普通人。
D: That's interesting. But if the Boscups were so smart, where are they now?
唐：真有意思。但是，既然 Boscups人這么聰明，他們現在在哪？
Y: They died out obviously. And that may be simply because their heads were so big that babies' heads had hard time feeding through the birth canal. Maybe too many Boscups babies died in childbirth.
Y：他們顯然早已滅絕了。一個簡單的原因可能就是因為Boscups人的頭部太大了，因此他們的嬰兒很難順利從產道分娩。也許太多的Boscups嬰兒都是在分娩時死亡的。
D: So I guess it doesn't always pay to have a big brain.
唐：由此看來，腦部太發達并非都是好事啊。
Y: Maybe not.
耶爾：也許是這樣的。
