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[N.flora]

The first to see selection

It turns out, though, that even Darwin and Wallace were not the first to put the pieces together. In 1813 William Charles Wells, a Scottish doctor, had presented a paper on race to the Royal Society, in which he introduced the idea of natural selection to explain why people might vary in skin colour in different climates. And in 1831 Patrick Matthew, a Scottish landowner, provided a description of natural selection in an appendix to a book about growing the best trees to make warships.

(자연)선택을 처음본 사람들

비록, 다윈과 월레스가 그런 조각들을 함께 모은 처음이 아니라는 것이 밝혀졌지만, 1813년 윌리엄 찰스 웰스라는 스코틀랜드 의사는 왕립위원회에 제출한 논문에서 다른 기후속에서 피부색이 다양한 이유를 자연 선택이 설명해줄지도 모른다는 그의 견해를 소개하였다. 그리고 1831년 스코틀랜드 지주인 패트릭 매튜는 군함용 목재을 재배하는 책의 별지에 자연선택에 대하여 기술하였다.

Nevertheless Darwin and Wallace are remembered, whereas Wells and Matthew are not, because they made the idea explicit and both wrote papers devoted to it. These they presented to the Linnean Society in London in 1858. Darwin, moreover, is more famous than Wallace because he had devoted the previous two decades to the painstaking accumulation of evidence in support of the theory from areas as diverse as embryology, artificial breeding, geography, economics and geology, and so was able to go into print the following year with “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, to give the book’s full title.

그럼에도 불구하고, 웰스와 매튜는 그렇지않은 반면, 다윈과 월레스는 기억되는데 그들이 명확한 견해를 제시하고 그것에 관한 논문을 썼기 때문이다. 1858년에 런던의 린네안 소사이어티에 이 논문들을 제출하였다. 게다가 다윈은 월레스보다 더 유명한 것은 그가 이론을 뒷받침하기 위해 태생학, 인공사육, 지리학, 경제학, 지질학 같은 다양한 분야로 부터 고통스러운 증거들의 축적에 앞선 수십년을 바쳤기 때문인데, 그렇게 함으로써 다음해 완전한 서명을 말하자면 " 생존경쟁에서 선호되는 종의 보존 또는 자연선택에 의한 종의 기원에 대하여"라는 책을 출판할수 있었다.

Darwin’s theory explained why species were so well adapted to their environment and how new species would form. It suggested that all living things were related, from the beetle to the lotus, and that everything descended ultimately from a single common ancestor. Evolution thus removed the need for divine explanations of diversity and, along with evidence emerging at that time of the extreme age of the Earth, it further suggested that the wider universe might also owe nothing to divine intervention and everything to natural laws. Darwin understood all of this and was greatly troubled.

다윈의 이론은 왜 종들이 그들의 환경에 잘 적응하고 어떻게 새로운 종들이 생겨날수 있는지에 대하여 설명하였다. 풍뎅이부터 연까지 모든 생물들이 연관되어있으며 모든것은 한가지 공통 조상으로 부터 유래한다고 주장되었다. 따라서 진화는 다양성에 대한 신성화된 설명의 필요성을 제거 하였고 아울러 당시 지구의 오래된 나이에 대한 새로운 증거들과 더불어 드넓은 우주가 신적인 설명에 아무것도 기댈것이 없을지도 모르며 모든것은 자연의 법칙에 따른다고 주장하였다. 다윈은 이 모든것을 이해하였고 크게 곤경에 처했다.  

That trouble continues today. In the United States a Gallup poll conducted last year found that only 14% of people agreed with the proposition that “humans developed over millions of years”, up from 9% in 1982. Acceptance of evolution varies around the world, with the most ardent believers being in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden (see chart). In general, as you might expect, a country’s belief in evolution is inversely correlated with its belief in God. But there is an interesting twist.

 그런 문제는 오늘날도 계속되고 있다. 미국에서 작년에 시행된 갤럽조사에서 "인간은 수백만년에 걸쳐 발달하였다" 라는 진술에 1982년의 9%에 비해 증가하였으나 단지 14%의 사람들만이 동의하였다. 아이슬란드, 덴마크, 스웨덴에서 가장 긍정적 지지작가 있는 진화에 대한 수용은 세계도처에서 다르다. 일반적으로, 당신이 예측하듯이, 진화에 대한 국가적 믿음은 신의 존재를 믿는 것과 역상관 관계에 있다. 하지만 다른 견해도 있다.

Gregory Paul, an independent researcher on evolution, and Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in California, have argued controversially that a belief in God is inversely correlated with the level of what might be described as the intensity of the struggle for existence. In countries where food is plentiful, health care is universal and housing is accessible, people believe less in God than in those countries where their lives are insecure. A belief in God, and rejection of evolution, they suggest, is most valuable in those societies that are most subject to Darwinian pressures.

독립적인 진화 연구자 그레고리 폴과 캘리포니아 피쳐대학의 사회학자 필 주커만은 신의 존재에 대한 믿음과 생존경쟁의 강도로 표현될수있는 것의 강도와 역상관 관계가 있다는 것에 대해 논쟁해왔다. 음식이 풍부하고 의료가 일반적이며 주택공급이 용이한 나라에서는 사람들은 삶이 불안정한 나라의 사람들보다 덜 신의 존재를 믿는다. 신에대한 믿음, 진화에 대한 거부는 다윈의 압렵에 가장 취약한 사회의 사람들에게 가장 중요하다고 그들은 주장하였다.

Making science work

Be that as it may, many aspects of modern science could not work without accepting evolution. Darwin’s ideas touch every corner of biology and medicine. They have also had an impact farther afield, in areas from art to politics. And their impact has been practical as well as theoretical. Both software engineers and drug developers, for example, often make use of evolutionary thinking when designing their products.

과학적 업적 만들기

어찌 됐건, 현대 과학의 많은 부분이 진화론을 받아들이지 않고서는 작동하지 않을수 있다. 다윈의 생각은 생물학과 의학의 구석구석을 건드렸다. 사람들은 예술에서 정치에 이르는 더 넓은 공간으로 영향을 받았다. 그런 충격들은 이론적일 뿐만 아니라 실제적인 것이었다. 예를 들어 소프트웨어 기술자나 약개발자들은 둘다 제품을 디자인할대 진화론적인 생각을 사용한다.  

Economics, too, may be helped by Darwin. Ideas about “rational” economic man are being overturned by new ones from a discipline called behavioural economics. Rather than assuming that individuals faced with economic decisions will comport themselves in what “classical” economists regard as a rational manner—ie, to maximise their future wealth—behavioural economics tries to study how real people actually behave.

경제학 역시 다윈에게 도움을 받고 있을것이다.  "합리적인" 경제인이라는 생각은 행동 경제학이라 불리는 체계의 새로운 사람들에 의해 뒤집어지고 있다. 경제적 결단에 직면한 개개인들이 전통적인 경제학자들이 생각하는 합리적인 방법- 그들의 미래부를 극대화 하는-것으로 그들자신을 편안케 하리라고 가정하기 보다 행동 경제학자들은 실제 사람들이 어떻게 행동하는지 연구하려고 노력하고 있다.

What is surprising is the degree to which human beings are not rational, and how the reasons for this are likely to involve Darwinian explanations. Take, for example, a phenomenon called the endowment effect, which is the tendency most people have to value objects they already own more highly than similar ones they have never owned—and, consequently, to be more reluctant to trade them than a classical economist would predict.

Because this effect has been observed in three primate species, most recently in a study of chimpanzees, it suggests this effect has evolutionary roots. Its strength seems to relate to the evolutionary salience of the item in question. People may be reluctant to trade goods related to food and mating because in the recent evolutionary past it meant parting with a known object in exchange for an uncertain proposition.

헥.. 나머지는 담에. 바빠서..^^

Another example of economic behaviour that may have deep evolutionary roots is the “herd” mentality that contributes to financial bubbles. In the past, copying the neighbours would have been helpful—in order to avoid danger or to find food. In today’s financial systems, however, it can create instability. The instinct to follow the herd can be rationalised as rational, so to speak, since everybody benefits in the short term by forcing the price up. But it does not look so rational when the instability is exposed by an external shock and the market crashes. In fact, at least part of what seems to be going on is that everyone instinctively feels compelled to copy the others, rather than making an independent assessment of the situation.

Whether the mystery is why people are so averse to risk, unable to estimate the time needed for a given task, or give different answers to the same question depending on how it is framed, there is a fair chance that the explanation will, at some point, involve evolution. To understand human behaviour properly, the world needs Darwin. Some have said it is the best idea that anyone ever had. If it isn’t, it certainly comes close.

Despite so much evidence, evolution remains difficult to accept because it implies everything living is largely accidental. Stephen Jay Gould, an American evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002, argued that misunderstandings about Darwinism were rife not because the theory is difficult to understand but because people actively avoid trying to understand it. He thought a misunderstanding about progress was the problem.

Completing the revolution

People are comforted by the idea of a designed and harmonious natural world, with themselves at the top. It is hard to accept that such harmony has arisen as an accidental consequence of a brutal system with no principles beside the one that every individual is striving for reproductive success. It is depressing to think that life is purposeless and that evolution has no higher destination.

This criticism applies to many believers in evolution who are not actually workers in the field, as well as those who reject the theory. It is a commonly held view that evolution implies progress, even among those who believe in natural selection.

Most biologists disagree. They argue, along with Gould, that evolution has no fixed direction. A creature can become fitter by getting more complex. But it can also become fitter by getting simpler. It all depends on the circumstances. The undoubted increase in average complexity in the fossil record is, according to this view, an accident of the fact that life started simple and therefore had only one direction to go in. Changes that lead to complexity are more obvious than those that lead to simplicity, since they create something that was not there before. This does not mean, however, that they are more numerous.

Gould’s view was thus that the evolution of human intelligence while not exactly an accident, since it was a response to a long series of circumstances, was certainly not a foregone conclusion. If that series of circumstances had been even slightly different, there would have been no egg-headed Homo sapiens.

That view is being questioned. For example, in a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a group of researchers looked at crustaceans (crabs, shrimps, woodlice and so on) over the past 550m years and found far more examples of groups of species evolving towards complexity than in the other direction. Matthew Wills of the University of Bath, in England, commented at the time that it was the “nearest thing to a pervasive evolutionary rule that’s been found.” In this study, the only crustaceans that became simpler were either parasites or those living in remote habitats, such as isolated marine caves.

Simon Conway-Morris, a palaeontologist at Cambridge University, in England, is the champion of a new interpretation of evolution—one that challenges the view that it is largely governed by the accident of circumstances. Unlike Gould, he thinks that if evolution were replayed from the beginning, a lot of things would turn out the same.

Dr Conway-Morris has arrived at this view from a detailed study of what is known as convergent evolution. Darwin himself was intrigued by this phenomenon, in which different groups of organisms independently evolve similar solutions to similar problems, whether these solutions are teeth, eyes, brains, ecosystems or societies. Where other biologists have noted such convergences as “remarkable”, Dr Conway-Morris believes they actually tell a broader story.

His argument is that, given the nature of physics and chemistry, there may be only a limited number of ways in which things can work. Evolution will be channelled into these successful paths, and thus does have trends. Two of these, he thinks, are towards complexity and intelligence. He adds that things “don’t just happen in chemistry”. They happen because of pre-existing causes. Whether it is the molecules of crystallin that are used to build an eye or the haemoglobin that makes blood carry oxygen, the nature of molecules themselves means that evolution is more likely to follow a path determined by their basic structure. Evolution is a mechanism, and it works within rules.

Dr Conway-Morris’s view of the world may or may not turn out to be correct. If it is, it may prove more palatable to some people than the current interpretation of the biological world as ultimately materialist and purposeless.

Darwin himself was deeply troubled by his materialist thoughts and what they meant. He considered how thoughts and emotions were simply secretions of the brain. From his correspondence it seems his religious beliefs never reached a fixed position, but he was sensitive to the extent to which his ideas could upset others. He even devised a diplomatic answer that avoided challenging the existence of God. When asked about the origins of emotions, instincts and degrees of talent, he noted, “say only they are so because brain of child resembles parent’s stock”.

More to know

Dr Conway-Morris is not convinced by Gould’s arguments. He thinks there is unfinished business to deal with. On the source of moral systems and consciousness, he says, “we are nowhere near an answer”. In his world, science can explain the beetle, the lotus leaf and the spider’s web, but not why they appear beautiful to people. Others think that the explanation is memes, the cultural equivalent of genes in which ideas replicate through the human desire to imitate.

In some ways, though, it does not matter whether humanity’s evolution was entirely random or was predictable in its general form. For people do, now, have a united evolutionary common purpose: to halt that natural selection in its tracks. The species has evolved to the point where it understands itself, and can seek to escape the brutal handcuffs of nature and end the struggle for existence. The beginning of that understanding was provided by Darwin, and the application of Darwinism will be an important part of the process. That gives people every reason to celebrate his 200th birthday.