可愛、性感、甜蜜、有趣：進化的奧秘（視頻）
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I'm going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I'm talking about is Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning. Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you.
我在世界各地與大家討論達爾文而最常提及的是他特殊的逆向推理這個詞出自一位早期評論家我把最愛的一段評論分享給各位。
"In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill."
「據(jù)此理論，『無知』為萬物之始此一基本原則，為系統(tǒng)之基石舉例而言，『要制造一臺完美的機器其實并不需要了解制造方法?！?達爾文經(jīng)由縝密思慮得此論點且以錘煉之字句表明其主旨簡單明了地傳達其意其逆向推理獨到之處在于肯定『無知』，視其為難得之物可取代『全知』，輔創(chuàng)新之念于大成」
Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? Yes No. Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? Yes No. Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? Yes No. If you answered "YES" for any of the above, give details."
的確這個理論確實背離一般常理神造世界論者的傳單上可能會問測驗二有建筑不出自建筑者之手嗎？有畫作不出自創(chuàng)作者之手嗎？有車子不出自制造者之手嗎？如果你都回答「有」，請舉例詳細說明。
A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. But Darwin shows that it's just false.
哈！這就是我所謂違常的逆向推理你可能一向認(rèn)為每個設(shè)計都需要厲害的設(shè)計師達爾文卻認(rèn)為這樣才不合理。
Today, though, I'm going to talk about Darwin's other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny.
不過今天解釋的是其他逆向推理乍聽時一樣難懂，不過同等重要我們喜歡蛋糕，因為它是甜的男人都愛辣妹，因為她們性感我們喜歡嬰兒，因為他們很可愛還有，笑話引人發(fā)噱是因為好笑。
This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. Let's start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it's just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that's why we like sugar. Honey is sweet because we like it, not "we like it because honey is sweet." There's nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn't see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they're sweet. So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you've got it backwards; that's just wrong. It's the other way round. Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved.
達爾文解釋這些推論都倒果為因喜愛甜食是因為人對糖分很敏感我們需要糖的高能量因此人腦才將糖設(shè)定為我們喜歡的物質(zhì)蜂蜜會甜是因為我們喜歡蜂蜜蜂蜜在本質(zhì)上沒有甜的成分即使你死盯著葡萄糖的分子結(jié)構(gòu)你還是不知道為什么它是甜的原因其實就藏在我們的大腦里如果你先假定，甜食中有甜的成分我們的大腦演化成喜歡這種成分那就錯了應(yīng)該要倒過來才對甜味是隨著大腦的演化而誕生。
And there's nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. And it's a good thing that there isn't, because of there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? Now you might think, ah, there's a solution: hallucinations. That would be one way of doing it, but there's a quicker way. Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. That's all there is to it. Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn't. If we hadn't, then probably this would be the height of sexiness.
這些女生其實跟性感毫無關(guān)系幸好沒有，因為如果有的話自然界會有大麻煩黑猩猩怎么愿意跟伴侶交配呢？你可能說解決之道是：幻想這是一個方法；但還有一個更快的就是改變黑猩猩的腦回路讓它們喜歡那種長相的伴侶奧秘說穿了就是這樣演化至今，人跟黑猩猩已大不相同我們?nèi)淼拿l(fā)退化但出于某些原因它們的卻沒有若我們也沒有，那或許這才是性感。
Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. It wasn't designed for chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull's beak -- if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it's a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness.
我們喜歡甜食，是因為它的高能量跟巧克力蛋糕本身無關(guān)巧克力蛋糕是種超乎尋常的刺激諾貝爾生物學(xué)獎得主丁柏格做過一個有名的海鷗實驗他發(fā)現(xiàn)海鷗嘴上那個橘色的點如果變大一點或顏色更鮮艷一點小海鷗啄食它時會更用力它對小海鷗而言是個強烈的刺激實驗的意義是超乎尋常的刺激像是巧克力蛋糕會改變天性還有很多東西是超乎尋常的刺激有些會引發(fā)性感的感覺。
And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here's a pretty good example. It's important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. So nature works on many levels here. But now, if babies didn't look the way they do, if babies looked like this, that's what we would find adorable, that's what we would find -- we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. This is the strange inversion.
有些會引發(fā)可愛的感覺舉個例子嬰兒必須討喜，所以即使弄臟尿布我們也不會因為這樣就不愛他們順道一提，最近一個研究指出媽媽喜歡聞自己寶寶的臟尿布看來大自然的影響無處不及呢但是如果嬰兒現(xiàn)在是長成這樣我們就會覺得這是可愛的你可能會想「天?。∥也挪灰?這就是逆向推里。
Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it's the same story, the same story. This is the hard one, the one that isn't obvious. That's why I leave it to the end. And I won't be able to say too much about it. But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done -- it's dirty work, somebody's got to do it -- is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. Now, I think we've found the answer, I and a few of my colleagues. It's a neural system that's wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. Now I'm not going to have time to spell it all out, but I'll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. And what we're doing is we're using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke -- now it's not funny ... oh, now it's funnier ... now we'll turn a little bit more ... now it's not funny -- in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain.
最后好笑的感覺其實原理一樣不過難解釋、也不明顯，所以放最后而且我所知有限，能說的也不多但從進化的角度思考，什么該先做打樁的工作一定最難但非做不可因為一旦成功貢獻是超乎想像的現(xiàn)在，我與幾個同事已經(jīng)有了答案腦部的神經(jīng)系統(tǒng)已經(jīng)預(yù)設(shè)完成麻煩工作后應(yīng)給予自己獎勵我們對于這種反應(yīng)的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)解釋是這是解決麻煩的快樂我在這里只簡單說明一下只有解決某些問題會覺得快樂我們把幽默感當(dāng)成神經(jīng)探測針用來衡量一個笑話好不好笑現(xiàn)在不好笑....噢！現(xiàn)在好笑多了！如果轉(zhuǎn)回來一點...現(xiàn)在又不好笑了透過這樣的解釋比較容易理解大腦的構(gòu)造就是能讓大腦發(fā)揮功用的構(gòu)造。
Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. He's a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we're putting this together into a book. Thank you very much.
赫利貢獻最大，研究成果以他命名另外還有心理學(xué)家亞當(dāng)斯和我我們正在整理研究成果準(zhǔn)備出版謝謝大家！