Why Evolution Favours Beauty Over Survival - Matt Ridley
发布时间 2025-04-03 15:00:48 来源
摘要
Matt Ridley is a science writer, journalist, and author.
Evolution is a strange theory. If survival is all that matters, why do we find things beautiful? Why does beauty exist at all? And if aesthetics are so important, how do some species thrive without it?
Expect to learn what Darwin’s strangest ideas were, the fundamental mystery of sexual selection, why females choose certain males based on beauty and performance rather than obvious survival traits, if females actually have as much agency in mate selection as we assume, or if other forces dictate choice, the alternative explanations for beauty and why aesthetics are so important and much more…
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00:00 Darwin's Sexual Selection Theory
03:58 What Is The Fundamental Mystery When It Comes To Sexual Selection?
16:16 Why Were Birds Useful For This Study?
19:42 Do Females Choose Males Based On Beauty Rather Than Survival Skills?
22:24 Is Maximised Survival Seen As Sexiness?
27:11 Conventional Explanation For The Great Snipe
31:59 What Is The Lek Paradox?
34:47 Why Sexual Selection Could Be A Maladaptive Force
40:14 How Extreme Can These Traits Become?
44:58 Tiny Traits That We Could Overlook As Sexual Selection
47:37 Could Sexual Selection Have Shaped The Human Mind?
54:21 How Does This All Fit Together?
59:17 Parallels Between Bird Mating Behaviours And Human Romantic Displays
1:06:06 What We Should Learn About Biases In Interpreting Our Nature
1:09:53 Where To Find Matt
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GPT-4正在为你翻译摘要中......
中英文字稿 
What was Darwin's strangest idea? Sexual selection by mate choice is the idea that Darwin had alongside natural selection, and which he maintained was a very different process. Almost nobody agreed with him in his lifetime. It was a failure in the sense that, you know, he couldn't persuade people that this was an important thing. And when people did agree with him, they thought, wow, yeah, but it's just a small niche thing in the corner of biology. And I don't think that's right. I think he was onto something that actually, when mates are selective, which they are in many species, it drives a huge amount of evolution in the other sex, and it's a very different process from natural selection. I call it the fun version of evolution, because it produces rock songs and things like that. It's less utilitarian.
达尔文最奇怪的想法是什么？性选择是达尔文与自然选择一起提出的观点，他认为这是一个完全不同的过程。几乎没有人在他有生之年同意他的观点。从某种意义上说，这是个失败，因为他没能说服人们认为这是件重要的事情。当人们同意他时，他们觉得这只是生物学一个小角落里的小众问题。我不这样认为，我觉得他发现了一些东西。实际上，很多物种在配偶选择上是很挑剔的，这推动了另一性别的巨大进化过程，这和自然选择是完全不同的。我称之为进化的有趣版本，因为它产生了摇滚歌曲之类的东西，实用性较低。
What was the reaction when Darwin first proposed sexual selection? Well, he mentioned the idea in the origin of species very briefly, and he said, I think that he had a friend called Sir John C. Bright, who had been breeding rather beautiful banter, new varieties of banter. And he said, if a man can produce a beautiful banter in a short time, then why can't a female produce a beautiful male in over a thousand generations? And he was ridiculed for it. And by the time of the fourth edition of the origin of species, he felt it necessary to put in a sentence saying, yeah, look, they are beautiful, these male birds, to us, but that doesn't mean they were put on earth to please us. They could have been put on earth to please females.
当达尔文首次提出性选择的概念时，人们有什么反应呢？在《物种起源》中，他非常简短地提到了这个想法。他提到一个朋友，约翰·C·布赖特爵士，他培育出了一些非常美丽的长尾小鸡品种。他说，如果人类可以在短时间内培育出漂亮的小鸡，那么为什么雌性不能在一千多个世代里孕育出美丽的雄性呢？他因为这个观点受到了嘲笑。在《物种起源》第四版时，达尔文觉得有必要加上一句解释：这些雄性鸟类对我们来说确实很美丽，但这并不意味着它们被创造出来是为了取悦我们。它们可能是为了取悦雌性才出现的。
And this made things worse, because everyone else said, I'm sorry, suggesting that female birds are capable of aesthetic discrimination. Give me a break. And Wallace, in particular, deserted him on this topic. So did Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, all his normal defenders were not prepared to defend this idea. Partly, these crusty old Victorians were a bit uncomfortable with the idea of women having sexual agency at all, of course, let alone lust. So one has to take into account that. But I'm very fond of a person who features in my book called Edmund Saluce, who is an amateur naturalist who watched the same species as me, the Black Grouse, as well as a number of other species.
这让情况更加糟糕，因为其他人都说“抱歉”，暗示雌性鸟类具有审美辨别能力。真是搞笑。尤其是华莱士在这个问题上抛弃了他。同时，托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎、赫伯特·斯宾塞等所有平时支持他的人都不愿支持这个观点。部分原因是这些古板的维多利亚时期的人对于女性拥有任何性自主权这个想法感到不舒服，更不用说欲望了。这一点当然需要考虑在内。但我很喜欢我的书中提到的一个人，叫做爱德蒙·萨卢斯，他是一位业余博物学家，观察的物种和我一样，包括黑琴鸡以及其他许多物种。
And he said, Darwin was right. The evidence speaks trumpet tongue in his favor, which is such a nice phrase, I think, because it's clear when you watch some of these birds, that the females are being very selective and are in charge of whether or not mating happens. Yeah, I can imagine that Victorian England wasn't superbly keen on the idea of flipping the gender hierarchy upside down and saying, well, maybe the males were shaped by female preferences. And that also sort of has in it a sense of almost sort of promiscuity in a way, a degree of female sexual agency, which again, Victorian England, probably not superbly popular.
他说，达尔文是对的。证据有力地支持了他的观点，我觉得这个说法很好，因为当你观察这些鸟类时，很明显是雌鸟在挑挑拣拣，并决定是否进行交配。我可以想象在维多利亚时代的英国，人们并不是特别愿意接受这种颠覆性别等级的观点，也就是说，可能雄性是受到雌性偏好的影响而演变的。这种观点还隐含了一定程度的雌性性行为主动性，在当时的英国可能也不太被接受。
Yeah, and we don't need to be all that smug about Victorian, because we too tend to say, well, hang on, isn't female beauty to males more important than male beauty to females in our species? Anybody will be the case. I mean, that's true in some bird species, but actually in our species, both sexes are highly selective when they choose long term partners. And so there's going to be, you know, different criteria, but similarly choosing, similar choosingness in both sexes. But yeah, now people find it instinctively odd that women should be choosing, female should be choosing males on the basis of appearance.
好的，我们不应该对维多利亚时代过于自满，因为在我们这个物种中，我们也常常认为女性的美貌对男性更重要，而男性的外表对女性则不那么重要。虽然这在某些鸟类中确实如此，但实际上在我们人类中，男女在选择长期伴侣时都很挑剔。双方会有不同的标准，但选择的严格程度是相似的。不过，现在人们本能地觉得奇怪，认为女性不应该根据外貌来选择男性。
What is the fundamental mystery when it comes to sexual selection? The fundamental mystery is why so many species indulge in growing and displaying features that hinder their own survival, take a lot of energy, and can be amazingly flamboyant. You know, if you look at some of the birds of paradise that do a sort of shape-shifting display where they disappear into a sort of black hole and projector iridescent smiley face on it, you know, it's what on earth is going on? It's such an eccentric outcome to come from evolutionary biology that it still doesn't. Where's the rhyme or reason? Is another way of putting it? And actually I see evolutionary biology as arguments over the last 150 years as being a series of lush, last ditch attempts to put rhyme or reason back into this process.
当涉及到性选择时，主要的谜团是什么呢？这个谜团在于为什么那么多物种会选择培育和展示一些对自身生存不利的特征，而这些特征耗费大量能量，还常常显得异常华丽。如果你看看一些极乐鸟，它们会进行一种变形展示，使自己看起来消失在如同黑洞中，并在其表面投射出五光十色的笑脸，这究竟是怎么回事呢？这样的结果在进化生物学中显得非常古怪，不禁让人疑惑：这其中到底有什么道理吗？事实上，我认为在过去的150年里，进化生物学一直在努力试图为这个过程找出合理解释，这就如同在进行一系列奢华但最后的尝试去赋予它韵律或道理。
And there might not be rhyme or reason. It might be just being extravagant for your own sake because females are going to go for the most extravagant thing you can do. And I'll explain why I think that works as a technique. Yeah, I can imagine. I can see especially in a civilization which still has the sort of conceptual inertia of intelligent design, of beauty being sort of divinely bestowed from above that you observe these birds doing crazy dances and making themselves into smiley faces and hopping around and pecking and doing all this stuff. And think, well, how lovely that God has made these birds do this dance for our benefit. This is beauty incarnate. I get to observe and enjoy. You go, ah, maybe he wasn't for you. Right.
这可能没有什么道理可循。可能只是在为自己而奢华，因为雌性会被你能做到的最奢华的行为所吸引。我会解释为什么我认为这有效。是的，我可以想象，特别是在一个仍然怀有智能设计理念的文明中，人们认为美是自上而下的神圣恩赐。在这样的文化里，你看见这些鸟做出一些疯狂的舞蹈，把自己打扮得像笑脸一样，跳来跳去，啄个不停，做各种事情。然后人们可能会想，多么可爱啊，上帝让这些鸟为我们跳这样的舞蹈。这就是美的化身，我可以欣赏和享受。你会说，啊，也许这并不是为了你。对。
And the bird that Wallace and Darwin ended up arguing about most in 1868 when they dispute over this came to a head was a bird called the Argus Fesent, which is a sort of peacox sized bird in the jungles of Southeast Asia newly discovered at the time, which is enormous wings, very, very long wing feathers. And these wing feathers have a series of objects depicted on them that are clearly intended to be three-dimensional optical illusions. In other words, they look like little spheres because they've got highlights at the top and shading at the bottom. So somebody's gone to great trouble to make these things look as if they're actually three-dimensional. You know, they're sticking out of the feather like a sort of pebble or a jewel.
1868年，当华莱士和达尔文之间的争论达到高潮时，他们争论最多的一种鸟是叫做孔雀雉。孔雀雉是一种生活在东南亚丛林中的鸟，当时刚刚被发现，体型如孔雀般大小，翅膀巨大，羽毛非常长。这些羽毛上描绘了一系列图案，显然是为了制造出三维立体的视觉效果。换句话说，这些图案看起来像小球体，因为它们在顶部有高光和底部有阴影。有人花费了极大的精力让这些图案看起来就像真实的立体物体，仿佛它们是从羽毛中突出的鹅卵石或珠宝。
And, ah, genuinely Darwin's critics, including a guy called Wood, who was doing the pictures, actually, for his book, said, look, I'm sorry. For this to be created by females, female birds, you've then got to posit that females have an aesthetic sense. But the idea that a bird with a brain-size-of-a-wallnut is capable of appreciating and enjoying three-dimensional optical illusions is for the birds. Ah, I mean, it didn't use that phrase, but that was the implication of what he said. So there's real, you know, people like Sir Joshua Reynolds have been writing books about aesthetics at this stage and saying, you need to have been to Oxford to really understand aesthetics.
达尔文的批评者中，包括一个叫伍德的人，他实际上负责为达尔文的书绘制插图。他表示，为了让雌性鸟类能够创造这种东西，就必须假设雌性鸟类具有审美意识。但是，他认为，一只鸟的大脑只有核桃那么大，居然能够欣赏和享受三维光学幻觉的想法是非常不可思议的。虽然他并没有直接使用这种说法，但这就是他话中的暗示。当时，真的有像约书亚·雷诺兹爵士这样的人在写关于美学的书，并声称，理解美学需要有像在牛津大学接受过教育的背景。
Sorry, can I go back to one thing you said, which intrigues me, and that's the idea of intelligent design. Because in some ways, Darwin is flirting with something that looks a bit more like intelligent design here. And it's been pointed out by Everly and Richards and others, who's a historian of this period, that his interest in natural selection almost seems to dry out after the origin of species. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it. His next books are about things like the domestication of animals. Well, that's not natural selection, that's artificial selection. And then sexual selection, which again is females driving the selective process.
对不起，我能回到你刚才说的一点吗？这让我很感兴趣，那就是智能设计的概念。因为在某些方面，达尔文似乎在轻触一些看起来更像智能设计的东西。据历史学家埃弗利和理查兹等人指出，他对自然选择的兴趣似乎在《物种起源》之后就减弱了。他没有花太多时间讨论这个话题。他接下来的书更关注诸如动物驯化之类的问题。那不是自然选择，而是人工选择。还有性选择，其实是雌性在驱动选择过程。
And Wallace, his friend and rival, reacts against this in exactly the way that you might, where he sort of says, look, I'm now more Catholic than the Pope. I really believe in this bottom up natural selection survival and the fittest thing. And I think bird beauty is just for some reason something that helps the species survival, the individual survive. And it's a part of natural selection. And I don't like the way Darwin is flirting with conscious beings, which female birds are, choosing what males should look like. Now Darwin isn't going that far. He's not literally saying that females are sitting down and planning what they want peacocks to look like. But there is a little bit of, he's prepared to accept that evolution can be directed in a way that looks a little dangerous to people like Wallace.
华莱士，他既是达尔文的朋友又是竞争对手，对于达尔文的观点持有不同的看法。华莱士的反应可能和你的一样，他说：“看，我现在比教皇还要天主教徒。我真的相信自下而上的自然选择和适者生存的理论。我认为鸟类的美丽只是某种帮助物种生存或个体生存的东西，是自然选择的一部分。我不喜欢达尔文那种与有意识生物（比如雌鸟）‘调情’的方式，让它们去选择雄鸟的外观。”达尔文并没有走得那么远，他并不是在字面上说雌鸟坐下来计划孔雀应该长什么样。但他有一点点准备去接受演化可以在某种程度上被引导，这让像华莱士这样的人觉得有些危险。
Isn't it interesting that Darwin, someone whose proposals were recently heretical to the previous dominant ideology inside of his own new ideology becomes a heretic? You know what I mean? That's a lovely way of putting it. Thank you. Yes. Absolutely. And there's a plaintiff quotation from him, one of his last meetings at the Linne Society before he died, where he says, I still think I'm right. I know all you guys tell me I'm wrong. By this point, he's pleading with them. Exactly. As he's being, I mean, again, look, maybe he doesn't have the spear in the side and the crown of thorns on the head. But it does feel a little bit like a guy who's being like prostrated a little bit sort of begging for a bit of like guys. Please, like it's ultimately this is going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt me on judgment day.
有趣的是，达尔文这个曾经在旧有主流意识形态中被视为异端的人，在他自己的新理论中却变成了一个异端分子。你懂我的意思吗？这描述得很好。谢谢你，确实如此。而达尔文在临终前的最后一次林奈学会会议上有一句令人心碎的话，他说：“我仍然认为我是对的，我知道你们都说我错了。”此时，他几乎是在请求他们的认同。虽然没有拿着矛和戴上荆棘冠，但感觉他就像个被迫低头请求宽恕的人。他似乎在说：“请你们相信我，最终在审判日上，这对你们的伤害会比对我的更大。”
You know, like he does have this like Messiah thing going on. Although, I read Robert Wright's book was the first one, moral animals, what got me into evolutionary psychology again for one book. I mean, that's that book is 30 years old now more than 30 years old. It's like 92 or something. It came out and for anyone that wants a good sign kind of half biographical look at Darwin's life with framing of evolutionary psychology. There's some stuff in there that's a little outdated. Obviously, it's three decades of a relatively new field. So some stuff's moved on, but it's so great.
你知道，他确实有一种救世主的感觉。不过，我读过罗伯特·赖特的书，这是他第一本关于道德动物的书，它让我重新对进化心理学感兴趣，虽然只是一段时间。这本书大概已有30多年的历史了，出版于大约1992年。对于那些想要了解达尔文生活的朋友来说，这本书是一个很好的选择，它融合了进化心理学的视角进行探索。虽然书中的一些内容现在看来有些过时，毕竟进化心理学作为一个比较新的领域已经发展了三十年，但它仍然是一本很出色的书。
But in that Darwin seemed to be pretty sort of racked by self doubt uncertainty. He had a like a little bit of a disposition toward low mood sometimes. And I imagine he doesn't have the he doesn't get mad. He gets sad and he doesn't have the big sort of fuck you energy that a renegade rebellious anarchist thinker would have. I think he's actually kind of an unlikely individual to go so hard against the dominant sort of mainstream hegemon that was what whatever came before him.
但在那种情况下，达尔文似乎被自我怀疑和不确定感所困扰。他有时会有点情绪低落。我想象他不是生气，而是感到悲伤，他也没有那种叛逆的无畏能量。对于一个去挑战主流霸权思想的叛逆思想者而言，他其实是个不太可能的个体。
And I do wonder what would have happened. How much further his work could have got if he didn't have to get over not only himself, but then the additional pressure of everybody else saying he was wrong. And his own self doubt being reinforced by what people were saying from outside of him. It must have been really tough for him to navigate because he didn't have I think I'm right and saying this by the time that he died. He still didn't have a fully perfect explanation of the peacock's tale. It was this sort of is kind of there. And I think I've got this inclination, but I don't have something that concrete.
我确实在想，如果他不用克服自身的问题，也不用面对大家都说他错了的额外压力，他的工作本可以进展到什么程度。他的自我怀疑被外界的声音不断地强化，这一定让他很难以应对。我认为，在他去世时，他仍然没有一种完全完善的方式来解释孔雀的尾巴。他似乎有一些想法，有一些倾向，但还没有找到一个非常具体的答案。
And then for all of your peers are saying, yeah, I mean, you hit the lottery once with that thing, but you don't get to run it. You can't wheel it up and run it back another time. It's just isn't going to work. Yeah, that's all true. I mean, he is a cautious conservative establishment figure. He's, you know, he's wealthy and mixes in upper middle class circles and. And, you know, he's not a boat rocker in the sense, I mean, Wallace is a socialist and a feminist and all sorts of, and you know, man of humble background and things like that. So in that sense, Darwin is an unlikely revolutionary.
翻译如下：
然后，所有你的同行都会说，是啊，我是说，你靠那个东西中了大奖一次，但你不能再用它再试一次。这是行不通的。没错，确实如此。我是说，他是个谨慎的保守派建制人物。他很富有，生活在中上层社会中。而且，他不是那种会打破常规的人。比如说，华莱士是个社会主义者和女权主义者，他的背景很谦卑，诸如此类。所以，从这个意义上来说，达尔文是不太可能成为革命者的。
But in another sense, I don't think you're right to say that the self doubt held him back once he'd committed to writing the origin of species, which was a took a big leap and took 20 years of angst, as you say, before he did. Once he did, he very rarely gave an inch. Well, no, that's not true. He compromised actually the later editions of the origin species are much less convincing than the early ones, because he is trying to compromise with his critics. And he's obviously, you know, feeling the pain of some of the criticisms.
但从另一个角度来看，我认为你说他因为自我怀疑而被阻碍是不对的，尤其是在他决定写《物种起源》之后。这是一个巨大的突破，正如你所说，这在他最终开始写作之前，花了20年的时间挣扎。但一旦他开始写作，他几乎不曾退缩。不过，这也不完全正确。他实际上做了妥协，后来版本的《物种起源》不如早期的有说服力，因为他试图与批评者妥协。他显然感受到了一些批评带来的压力。
But he, you know, he then plows on finding all these stories about animals and plants and details that can buttress his ideas. And, you know, he, there's no sense in which he, he sort of wants a quiet life. Well, he does. He doesn't want to get involved in the controversy himself, but he wants to keep pushing the ideas out there. So he's a magnificent person. But Robert Wright was the one who pointed out, and I'd never, never thought this before until I read Robert's point on it, that the way in which Wallace's letter from Papua Nagini or from Nagini was handled was quite cunning on Darwin's part.
但是你知道，他继续努力寻找关于动物和植物的各种故事和细节来支持他的观点。而且，你知道，他并不想过安静的生活。确实，他自己不想卷入争议，但他希望继续传播这些观点，所以他是个了不起的人物。然而，罗伯特·赖特指出了一点，我之前从未想到过，直到我读了罗伯特的看法，达尔文处理华莱士从巴布亚新几内亚或新几内亚寄来的信的方式相当巧妙。
And that quite selfish actually, we tend to think of him as being magnificently generous and saying, look, this chap is scooped me. But why don't we both present our ideas at the Linaean society together? Yeah, but when it came to it, Wallace was off in New Guinea, didn't know this was going on. They didn't have time to tell him. Lyle says, look, look, you poor chap, Darwin, don't get too head-up about it. We'll have a meeting and we'll present your paper first, and then Wallace is and you'll get the credit.
其实这样做有些自私。我们往往认为他非常慷慨，说，“看，这位家伙领先了我。但是为什么我们不一起在林奈学会上展示我们的想法呢？”是的，但实际上，当时华莱士正在新几内亚，他不知道正在发生的事情，他们也没时间通知他。莱尔说，“看看，达尔文，你别太担心。我们会先开个会议，先展示你的论文，然后是华莱士的，这样你就能得到荣誉。”
And so in a sense, Wallace does get shafted by this process. And Darwin for all his politeness, he's got a ruthless streak in him. He's got a ruthless streak and he wants his priority on this topic. But back to sexual selection, Wallace wins the argument in their lifetimes. And continues to really, in many ways, up till today, actually, there are versions of Wallace's theory of still pretty popular. We can come back to the details of that, if you like.
在某种意义上，华莱士确实在这个过程中吃了亏。而达尔文虽然很有礼貌，但他也有冷酷的一面。他有这样的性格，并且想在这个话题上争取优先权。不过回到性选择的问题，华莱士在他们的有生之年赢得了这场辩论。直到今天，华莱士的理论在很多方面依然相当受欢迎。如果你感兴趣，我们可以回头详细谈谈这部分内容。
And some of the things Darwin says in his dispute with Wallace are quite stupid, actually. For example, Wallace said, look, female birds are mottled brown because they want protection on the nest. They don't use the word camouflage because it hasn't been coined yet, but that's what they mean. And the reason I know that is because female birds that breed in holes are often quite brightly colored, things like parrots or kingfishers or woodpeckers. And Darwin says, no, no, no, no, I don't believe that females are camouflaged. And why not? And it's because he's desperate not to give an inch on the idea that sexual selection is driving bird color.
在与华莱士的争论中，达尔文说的一些话实际上有点愚蠢。比如，华莱士说，雌鸟之所以呈现斑驳的棕色，是因为它们需要在巢中获得保护。他们没有使用“伪装”这个词，因为这个词还没有被创造出来，但他们所表达的就是这个意思。我之所以知道这一点，是因为在洞穴中繁殖的雌鸟通常颜色鲜艳，比如鹦鹉、翠鸟或啄木鸟。而达尔文却说，不，我不相信雌鸟是为了伪装。为什么呢？因为他不愿意让步，坚持认为鸟类的颜色是由性选择推动的。
Why are birds so useful to use for this study? What is it about? Why is it not dogs? Why is it not cows? Why are we not using sheep for this study? Birds are a bit more like us than many mammals. They like song, they like color, they like visual things. We are, we've got pretty good color vision for mammals. Most mammals have only got two color channels. We've got three as have other primates. So we see a much more colorful world, rather like the world of birds, see not nearly as colorful as they see. They've got least four channels. They've got a trichromatic vision, call sorts of things.
为什么鸟类对于这项研究如此有用？这项研究是关于什么的？为什么不用狗？为什么不用牛？为什么我们不使用羊进行这项研究？鸟类在某些方面比很多哺乳动物更像我们。它们喜欢歌声、喜欢颜色、喜欢视觉的事物。我们人类作为哺乳动物，色觉能力相对较好。大多数哺乳动物只有两个色彩通道，而我们和其他灵长类动物有三个，所以我们看到的世界更加多彩，类似于鸟类看到的世界，但不像它们看到的那样色彩斑斓。鸟类至少有四个色彩通道，有三色视觉等等。
So to some extent, we can sort of empathize with birds. But in terms of the study of sexual selection, birds really do stand out because there has been an explosion of dramatic shapes, crests, plumes, colors. There's displays, dances, and songs in the birds that dwarf other species. So we just take song, for example, I was out this morning when the sun came up and the bird song was fantastic at springtime. There was no mammal, no, it's at all. Maybe I heard a sheep at some point. Maybe it's a dog bark in the distance, but that was it. If we didn't have birds, think how silent it would be. And song is quite a useful thing to study, actually, if you want to understand what's going on here.
在某种程度上，我们可以说能够理解鸟类的感受。但在性选择的研究方面，鸟类确实显得与众不同，因为它们展现了大量引人注目的形态变化，如羽冠、羽饰、色彩等等。还有那些展示、舞蹈和歌声，这些都远超其他物种。就拿鸟类的歌声来说吧，今早阳光初升时，我外出时听到的鸟鸣在春天里显得格外动听。周围没有哺乳动物的叫声，没听到一点响动。也许我在某个时刻听到了绵羊的叫声，可能远处传来了狗吠声，但就是这样而已。如果没有鸟类，想想四周会有多么寂静。而且，如果你想了解这里正在发生什么，研究鸟鸣是个非常有用的方法。
So without birds, well, also, bird watching gets a lot of human beings into natural history and then into biological sciences. I was a bird watcher before I ever thought of being a scientist. And that's true of a lot of people. Jim Watson, who discovered the co-discovered the structure of DNA. He was a bird watcher as a teenager. And that's what got him interested in biology, et cetera. So I think, now you could say butterflies, dragonflies, lots of sexual ornamented colors, fish, lots of bright colors, but they're not as easy to study. They're either too small or they're harder to observe or they're underwater or something.
那么，如果没有鸟类，很多人就不会因为观鸟而对自然历史以及生物科学产生兴趣。我自己在成为科学家之前就是一个观鸟爱好者。对于很多人来说都是如此。比如吉姆·沃森，他与人共同发现了DNA的结构。他在少年时期就是个观鸟爱好者，这也是他对生物学产生兴趣的原因之一。当然，你可能会说蝴蝶、蜻蜓、许多具有鲜艳颜色的鱼类等同样具有吸引力，但它们不如鸟类那么容易研究。因为要么太小，要么难以观察，要么生活在水下等。
Birds are the obvious ones to go for. Mammals, mammals are brown with very few exceptions. I mean, there's a black one and a gray one and a few monkeys have colorful faces. But apart from that, they're really grim to look at. And the noises, they make a terrible really. And also, they do a lot more sexual coercion than birds. There's another way in which we're similar to birds and that is forming pair bonds to bring up offspring. Birds do a lot of that. Most birds, black, grey, certain exceptions, peacocks, and exceptions, but most birds and male and female collaborate to rear the young.
鸟类是显而易见的选择。哺乳动物，大多数哺乳动物是棕色的，几乎没有例外。我的意思是，有的哺乳动物是黑色或灰色的，还有一些猴子有色彩斑斓的脸。但除此之外，它们看起来真的很黯淡。它们发出的声音也很糟糕。此外，它们的性行为通常比鸟类更具强迫性。在另一个方面，我们跟鸟类很相似，那就是我们都会形成配对关系来抚养后代。大多数鸟类也是如此，当然黑色、灰色以及一些例外，比如孔雀。但大多数鸟类中，雄鸟和雌鸟会合作抚养幼鸟。
And again, we empathize with that in an awful lot of mammals. All the work is done by the mother, both gestating and lactating, obviously, and nurturing the offspring. So there's a sense in which we are honorary birds. Okay, okay. So getting into the meat of it, why do females choose certain males based on beauty and performance rather than obvious survival traits? Right. So why not just choose a strong male who will give you strong children? And the answer is that there's a seduction going on. It's a charm, it's a persuasion, it's not a coercion. That's the first point.
好的，我们对许多哺乳动物都有共鸣。显然，所有的工作都由母亲完成，包括怀孕、哺乳和抚养后代。所以在某种意义上，我们可以算作“名誉鸟类”。好的，好的。那么进入主题，为什么雌性会选择基于美丽和表现的雄性，而不是明显的生存特性呢？对，为什么不只是选择一个强壮的雄性来提供强壮的后代呢？答案在于这是一种吸引。这是一种魅力，一种说服，而不是强迫。这是第一点。
The second point is, yes, but why let yourself be charmed by a plumboyant tail or bright colors or whatever. And the argument that Wallace raised and that has reverberated since through the topic is that it's a proxy for fitness of some kind. It's a pro it's telling you if you can grow that peacock's tail and keep it in good neck and display it frequently, then you must be quite healthy. You must have good disease resistance genes or something like that. And that's the kind of version of sexual selection. We always hear from natural history programs and that is generally pursued by most biologists.
第二个观点是：是的，但是为何会被华丽的尾巴或鲜艳的颜色等所吸引呢？华莱士提出的论点以及随后的讨论表明，这些特征实际上是某种健康状态的象征。它是在告诉你，如果一只孔雀能够长出这样的尾巴，并保持在良好状态中经常展示出来，那么它一定相当健康，可能拥有良好的疾病抵抗基因之类的东西。这种说法是性选择的一种版本，我们经常在自然历史节目中听到这个观点，并且大多数生物学家通常都支持这一观点。
And it's probably not wrong. But there's another thing going on that is I think usually more important, particularly when you get these exaggerated flamboyant plumages. And that is the idea that Ronald Fisher first thought of in 1930 and was later mathematically proved by Russell Lande and Mark Patrick in 1980. And that is that the fitness the females are after may not be just whether their offspring survive, but whether their offspring seduce. That the thing that really matters to them may be having offspring that can persuade members of the opposite sex to mate, particularly male offspring.
这可能没有错。但还有另一件事更为重要，特别是在出现这些夸张炫耀的羽毛时。这是由罗纳德·费雪在1930年首次提出的，并在1980年被拉塞尔·兰德和马克·帕特里克通过数学证明的观点。这个观点是，雌性的选择可能不仅仅关注它们的后代是否能够生存，而是关注它们的后代是否能够吸引异性。对它们来说，真正重要的可能是拥有能够说服异性与之交配的后代，尤其是那些具有吸引力的雄性后代。
And that it's no use choosing an ugly male partner that is particularly strong and disease resistant so that you can have strong and disease resistant sons. If those sons can't persuade other females to mate with them because they haven't got flamboyant tails. Otherwise known as the sexy sun hypothesis. The sexy sun hypothesis and that's a sort of runaway effect. Seduction of the hottest versus survival of the fittest is another way I put it. I didn't think of that till after I'd finished the book. I want to share it. That was good. That's good.
没有必要选择一个虽然强壮且抗病能力强但外貌丑陋的男性伴侣，因为这样的伴侣可能不会帮助你生出吸引其他雌性交配的儿子。原因是，如果这些儿子没有华丽的尾巴，就很难吸引其他雌性。这就是所谓的“性感儿子假说”，一种类似于失控效应的理论。我的另一种说法是：诱惑最迷人的，还是选择最具生存能力的。这是在我写完书之后才想到的，我想分享一下这个想法。很不错的想法。
Okay, so we have this sort of fishery and runaway selection thing going on that traits that are sexually attractive are selected over time that causes sons to become sexier. But eventually you end up with a risk in a trade-off for the males. Even before we get on to risk in trade-offs, why is it that there is such a thing as sexiness that isn't just utility of survival? Why is it not that maximized survival is sexiness? Why is this other pathway, this other attribute?
好的，我们有这样一种渔业和失控选择的现象，指的是那些具有性吸引力的特征会随着时间的推移被选择，从而使得后代的男性变得更具吸引力。但是，最终这会导致雄性在某种风险与利益之间的权衡。即便在我们讨论风险和权衡之前，为什么会存在除了生存实用性之外的吸引力？为什么最大化生存本身不是吸引力？为什么还有另一种途径或属性存在？
Well, the answer to that, I think, the clue to it and I can't prove this. This is the problem with this version of sexual sexiness. There is very hard to devise experiments that prove it. I will mention one in a minute. The answer, I think, is that the smallest bias in the females in a random direction will get exaggerated and it doesn't really matter which direction it's in. It will run away. You can't stop it. The clue is the fact that you get such extraordinary diversity of sexually selected ornaments in birds and other animals.
我认为，答案在于这个线索，尽管我无法证明这一点。这就是这个版本的性别吸引力的问题所在：很难设计出能够证明它的实验。不过，我马上会提到一个。我认为，答案是，雌性在随机方向上的最微小的偏好都会被放大，至于偏向哪个方向其实无关紧要。它会无限发展，你无法阻止。线索在于，你会在鸟类和其他动物中看到如此非凡多样的性选择装饰物。
In other words, there is no pattern. There is no general practice that they tend to have eyes. It's not always the biggest tales. It's not always the brightest. It's not always the tail, it's not always the wings, it's not always the crest, it's not always the breast, it's not always the back, it's not always rare, it's not always yellow. Do you see what I mean? And once you start looking at the extraordinary diversity of ways in which sexual selection has gone mad in the birds of paradise, in the fesins, in the mannequins, in species like that, why do puffins have red and blue stripes on their beak?
换句话说，没有固定的模式。通常没有统一的特征，比如它们的眼睛，并不总是最大的故事，也不总是最鲜艳的颜色。有时候不是尾巴，也不一定是翅膀、羽冠、胸部、背部，也不总是稀有的品种或黄色。你明白我的意思吗？一旦你开始观察像极乐鸟、雉类、小舞雀等物种中性选择的多样性，情况就很不一样了。为什么海鹦的喙上有红色和蓝色的条纹呢？
That's a completely different way of doing things. There's a bird called the Trager Pan, which pops out from behind a log when he's trying to seduce a female and lowers from his throat an electric blue apron with red patterns on it. Of skin. Why? So it's the very arbitrary nature of the features that I think argues for this process. Now, you can still say, yeah, but why would it matter? And of course, probably what's going on is that to start with being a bit brighter than another male does mean your immune systems in better order or you haven't been infected malaria or something like that.
那是一种完全不同的方式。 有一种鸟叫Trager Pan，当它试图吸引雌鸟时，会从原木后面跳出来，并从喉咙处展开一块带有红色花纹的电蓝色皮肤"围裙"。 为什么会这样呢？我认为正是这种特征的随意性支持了这一过程。 现在，你可能会想，为什么这很重要呢？ 当然，实际上可能是因为相较于其他雄鸟，颜色更鲜艳一点意味着你的免疫系统更好，或者没有被疟疾等传染。
So the probably, you know, in the end of the book, I say hang on what we're constantly trying to choose between these two theories fitness and hotness, if you like, and we shouldn't have to. They're obviously both going to end up assisting each other. Well, if you assume that the reason that you have fitness is to survive in order to be able to reproduce and hotness allows you to reproduce more quickly, they end up netting out at the same outcome, even if they sort of get there in different, different paths.
在书的末尾，我提到，我们经常在努力选择两个理论之间，也就是“健康”和“吸引力”，其实我们不必非得在它们之间做选择。这两个因素显然最终都会互相促进。如果你认为健康是为了生存，从而有机会繁殖，而吸引力则能够加快繁殖的速度，那么即便它们达到目标的路径不同，最终也会得出相同的结果。
Yes, but it might be worth mentioning that what I think is the best experiment I describe in my book, it doesn't feature birds. Unfortunately, it features a small insect. And it was done by Andrew Balfour, one of his students, and on a sort of Brazilian fly. And what he did was he, he took the, he allowed them to mate. And in the laboratory, this is, and the she actually was she, he did the work and I can't remember her name, but Andrew's student.
好的，但可能值得一提的是，我认为我在书中描述的最好的实验并没有涉及到鸟类。遗憾的是，它涉及到一种小昆虫。这项实验是由安德鲁·巴尔弗和他的一个学生完成的，研究对象是一种巴西的苍蝇。他们在实验室中让这些苍蝇进行交配。这项工作实际上是由他的学生完成的，但遗憾的是我不记得她的名字了。
And he chose, he bred from the, he took the unsuccessful males and put them on one side in the successful males and he bred a lineage from one and he bred a lineage from the other. So he's now got the failures and the successes, fathering the next generation. And he does that for several generations. And then he says, what's the difference between these flies at the end of several generations? Are they less able to survive because they've been bred from the failures? And the answer is no. Are they less able to persuade other flies to mate with them? Yes.
他选择了昆虫进行繁殖，把不成功的雄性放在一边，把成功的雄性放在另一边，分别繁育它们的后代。这样一来，他就得到了 "失败者" 和 "成功者" 作为下一代的父亲。他这样持续了好几代。然后他问，经过几代之后，这些昆虫有什么不同？它们因为来自"失败者"而较难生存吗？答案是否定的。它们较难说服其他昆虫与之交配吗？是的。
So that's quite a nice, that's the best experiment for teasing out these two hypotheses that I've come across. That's really cool to understand that there is one dial for fitness and one dial for hotness and there may be interrelated upstream before them. There is something that causes them both to happen and maybe they do on average tend to happen sort of synchronously that fit a tend to be hotter. I would also imagine that that's the case. But that they are distinct and they are interpreted in different ways. So that's, that's cool.
这真是一个很好的实验，是我遇到的最能够理清这两个假设的方法。这太酷了，了解到有一个控制健身的调节器和一个控制吸引力的调节器，并且这两个可能在更上游的地方有相互关联的原因。有某种东西导致这两者发生，并且它们可能平均来说倾向于同步发生，也就是说，健身好的人往往看起来更有吸引力。我也觉得情况可能就是这样。不过，它们是不同的概念，并且被以不同的方式解读。这真是太有趣了。
So just to kind of round out the fishery and runaway thing. Any minor advantage in terms of sexual selection trait display that a male has. If it's even, you know, 51, 49 over time, that will be selected for sufficiently that it continues to get more and it continues to get brighter and it continues to get more elaborate. And that's where you end up with after a few million years of evolution. You just end up with these sort of very, very extravagant displays. Yes.
好的，为了完整解释一下渔业和"失控"现象。任何雄性在性选择特征展示方面的微小优势，即便只是51:49的优势，随着时间的推移也会被足够地选择出来，以至于这种特征会变得越来越明显，越来越亮丽，越来越复杂。经过数百万年的进化，你会看到非常夸张的展示。是的。
Although if the runaway process is as accelerating as Fisher thought, then it might not be a million years. It might be one of these things that happens really very quickly in a few thousand years. And, you know, the peacock might have gone from having a short tail to having a huge tail in the sort of blink of an evolutionary eye. And one of the ideas I tie with in the book is, can we, can we catch a species in the moment when it suddenly starts having a runaway selection? And come back in a thousand years and see what's happened. I don't know.
虽然如果这种失控过程像费舍尔认为的那样加速发展，那么可能不需要一百万年。这种情况可能在几千年内迅速发生。比如，孔雀可能在进化的瞬间，就从短尾巴变成了大尾巴。在书中，我思考的一个观点是：我们能否在某个物种突然开始出现失控选择的瞬间抓住它，然后在一千年后回来看看会发生什么。我不确定。
I feel like you need to sew the seeds with girly daytime magazines. You know, they've got the new trend. What to look for in this summer's new boyfriend or whatever. And that's how you sort of inject it socially and from there the runaway begins. Well, this is why I went to and sat for two nights running on top of a mountain in Norway, not allowed out of my little canvas blind from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. watching a bird that displays at midnight, through the middle of the night called the Great Snipe. Of course, it's not dark in Norway that tone of the year.
我觉得你需要通过那些白天女生看的杂志来种下种子。你知道的，杂志里有最新的潮流，比如“今夏新男友应该具备的条件”之类的。这就是你将这些观念注入到社会中的方式，然后事情就开始发酵。这就是为什么我去挪威，在山顶的一个小帐篷里连续两晚坐着，看一种叫做大沙锥的鸟午夜时分的展示。从晚上8点到早上8点，我都不能离开帐篷。当然，那时候挪威的天并不黑。
And the Great Snipe looks like any other Snipe. There are 17 species of Snipe on the planet and they are all sort of really well camouflaged in marsh vegetation, including this one doesn't look much different. But this one does this lacking males gather together and competitively display. And at the height of its display, it flashes the white feathers in its tail. And it's like turning on the light. It's very bright little flash, very brief. But the tail feathers are not very exaggerated and they're not much wider in the male than the female a little bit.
大杓鹬看起来和其他杓鹬差不多。地球上有17种杓鹬，它们都很好地伪装在沼泽植被中，这种鸟也不例外。不过，这种鸟有个特别的习性：雄鸟会聚集在一起进行竞争性的展示。当展示达到高潮时，它会亮出尾巴上的白色羽毛，就像打开了灯一样，闪出一个明亮但很短暂的光。不过，它的尾羽并没有特别夸张，雄鸟的尾羽比雌鸟的虽然稍微宽一点，但差别不大。
And if you tipx some of the males tails, so they're young people don't know what tipx is, but you know, if you put white paint on some of the males tails, you can improve their mating success according to some Scandinavian biologists who are very ingenious. Oh, it's like a it's like a Snipe S tradition giving them some aug beauty beautification augmenting. So it's a boob job. It's a boob job for Snipe. Exactly. Exactly.
如果你在一些雄性鸟的尾巴上涂上一些白色颜料，对于年轻人来说，他们可能不知道“tipx”是什么，不过就是在尾巴上涂白色颜料，根据一些非常聪明的斯堪的纳维亚生物学家的说法，可以提高它们的交配成功率。这就像是一种对于沙锥鸟的传统美化，就像是给沙锥鸟做美体手术。对，没错，完全是一样的意思。
And so, but my point is, males, Snipe and female Snipe look almost identical. In fact, you can't really tell the difference and the tail is a bit different, but you can't see it very well most of the time. So, so maybe this is a species that's only just started having highly skewed sexual mating success so that one male gets to mate with 10 females, which is roughly what happens. And that it hasn't had time for the tail to get huge and white and dramatic and that might be about to happen.
我的意思是，雄性和雌性沙锥鸟看起来几乎一模一样。实际上，你很难分辨它们的不同，尾巴稍微有些差别，但大部分时间也不太明显。所以，也许这个物种刚开始出现严重偏向的交配成功现象，也就是说，一个雄性可以和大约十个雌性交配。这可能是因为它们的尾巴还没来得及进化得又大又显眼，但这种变化可能即将发生。
The conventional explanation for the great Snipe is that it it because it's often displaying in very poor light. There's no point in being brightly colored and a lot of the display involves making clicking noises and maybe it's an auditory lack rather than a visual lack. But other birds make noises of the leg too. So I quite like my idea best that this is a species that's only just begun to lack.
对于大沙锥的传统解释是，它常常在光线很差的环境中展示自己，因此无需拥有鲜亮的颜色。大部分展示行为都涉及发出点击声，可能这是由于听觉上的差异，而不是视觉上的差异。但其他鸟类也会用腿部发出声音。因此，我更倾向于自己的观点，即这个物种可能才刚开始经历这种变化。
And there's another bird called a buffbreasted sandpiper which sort of legs but sort of doesn't. And I'd like to watch that species for a thousand years and see what happens. What's the leg paradox? The leg paradox is that the black grass which leg live next door to the red grass which don't they pair up. So one male, one female and they both bring up the kids. Therefore because the one male gets to mate with 10 to 20 females in the black grass but the other 19 or 9 or 19 males on his leg don't get to mate at all that year.
有一种鸟叫做棕胸滨鹬，它有点像有腿，又有点像没有腿。我要是能观察这种鸟一千年，看看到底会发生什么变化，那该多好。什么是腿的悖论呢？腿的悖论在于：黑草旁边是红草，这两者的腿并不是一样的颜色，但它们配对了。所以，一个雄性和一个雌性一起抚育后代。然而在黑草中，一个雄性可以与10到20只雌性交配，而他腿上的其他9到19个雄性那年却完全没有交配的机会。
The bird will have less genetic diversity in its population than the red grass. It will be more genetically monotonous. It will be more inbred. Not to the stage where it's a sort of health problem because the males usually only get one year at the top and the females disperse. So the species is fine in that sense. But it must be the case that there is less genetic diversity in a lacking species like the black grass than a monogamous species like the red grass. In which case there's less point in being choosy because the genes are going to be more similar. I mean when you go on to a leg you're bound to be looking at some half brothers because they tend to recruit to a leg near where they were born and if they were born in the same year then the chances are they had the same father even though they might have had different mothers.
鸟类的种群基因多样性会比红草少，基因上会更加单一和近亲繁殖。不过，这种情况并不会影响健康，因为雄性通常只在顶尖位置待一年，雌性则会四处扩散。所以从这个角度来看，这个物种是没问题的。但比较之下，像黑草这样缺乏多样性的物种，其基因多样性肯定不如像红草这种单配偶制的物种。在这种情况下，选择配偶的时候就没有必要太挑剔了，因为基因相似度较高。也就是说，当你去一个栖息地时，你很可能会看到一些同父异母的兄弟，因为它们通常会选择在出生地附近定居，如果它们是同一年出生的，那么很可能有相同的父亲，即使母亲不同。
So if they're half brothers and they look the same and by the way they do look very similar to us then what's the point of being so choosy? The species that are most choosy about making sure you get the very very best male and not settling for second best which the red grass do all the time. They say look I just want to blow because I'm going to look after the kids I don't care what he looks like. I'm anthropomorphizing but you get the point. The species that are most choosy have least reason to be choosy that is the leg paradox. I think the Fisher theory shows you a way out of it. It doesn't matter how little variation there is you still got to follow the fashion. But it's not really I mean I'm struggling with it too so it is a paradox and it's an intriguing one.
因此，如果他们是同父异母的兄弟，并且看起来很相像，顺便说一下，他们在我们眼里确实非常相似，那么为何还要如此挑剔呢？有些物种在选择配偶时非常挑剔，务必要找到最优秀的雄性，而不是仅仅满意于次优选择，就像红草总是这样做的。红草似乎会说：“我只想繁殖，因为我要照顾孩子，我不在乎伴侣长什么样。”我这样说是给它们拟人化，但你明白我的意思。那些最挑剔的物种反而没有理由去挑剔，这就是所谓的“腿悖论”。我认为费舍尔理论提供了一个解决之道。即便变异再小，你依然需要跟随潮流。不过，这不是很简单，我也在努力理解，所以这确实是个悖论，并且是个很有趣的悖论。
Right so birds that have these speed dating which is kind of bird speed dating is what sort of lack the lacking is in a way. Yeah but speed dating where they all end up mating with the same male remember. Yeah yeah okay good not happens to you and me. Non monogamous speed dating birds. In those situations you have a lot of the reproductive rewards are crewing to a few at the top. Yeah you also have to assume that that would mean the more sexually selective the women are being the more that they're skewing toward that single male or small number of males at the top. So there's going to be less of a chance of survival for that next generation that comes along just due to some of the inevitable reduced genetic diversity.
好的，所以某些鸟类会进行类似快速约会的行为，这种快速约会是指它们在短时间内做出配偶选择。然而，问题在于这样的快速约会最终往往让多数鸟和同一个雄性配对。幸好这不适用于你我。非一夫一妻制的鸟类快速约会。在这种情况下，大部分生殖回报都会集中到少数位于“顶尖”的个体手中。同时，这也意味着雌性越是挑剔，她们越倾向于选择那个单一的雄性或少数几个雄性。这种情况可能导致下一代的生存几率降低，因为必然会出现的遗传多样性减少问题。
So you think okay these two things kind of do come into conflict a little bit with each other the hotness and the fitness can actually start to it feels like they can fight against each other. Well the conspicuous plumage for a start is a threat to survival and the dancing and fighting that you do for months on end is a threat to your survival. So yeah males are putting themselves at risk to present themselves. But one way of looking at it is that the black grass and the red grows the males are putting in an awful lot of effort in both species. But the red grows the effort is going into escorting the female defending the territory escorting the chicks helping the chicks sheltering the chicks keeping a being vigilant over the family and things like that.
因此，你会觉得这两者确实有些冲突：外表的吸引力和体能之间似乎会互相对立。比如，显眼的羽毛首先是对生存的威胁，而长时间的舞蹈和打斗也是对生存的挑战。所以，雄性为了展示自己，确实在冒险。从另一个角度来看，在黑耳䴗和红松鸡这两种鸟中，雄性都付出了大量努力。但在红松鸡中，雄性的努力主要用于陪伴雌性、保护领地、护送幼鸟、帮助幼鸟寻找庇护以及时刻警惕以保障家庭安全等等。
Whereas the black grass the effort is going into endless displays fights competitive dances and so on. So you end up deciding which way to push your effort and when you push all your male effort into display you are wasting it as far as the lineage is concerned as far as the chicks are concerned in the sense that you know so if I go out in June in the panines I can find a pair of red grows in which the male is standing in the back of the tree. The male is standing up looking around and the female is down in the heather with the chicks and and he's got his eyes out and if he sees a hawk coming he gives an alarm call and they all hide.
黑草的一大精力消耗在于无休止的展示、争斗、竞争性舞蹈等活动。所以你最终需要决定如何分配你的精力，而如果你把所有雄性的精力都投入到展示中，就如同浪费掉了一样，对血统的延续以及幼鸟都没有帮助。我的意思是，当我在六月走进高山地区时，我可以看到一对红松鸡，其中雄鸟站在树的后方，它站着环顾四周，而雌鸟则和幼鸟在一旁低矮的灌木丛中。雄鸟保持警惕，如果发现有鹰接近，它便发出警报信号，让所有的鸟都隐藏起来。
He's very valuable in that sense if I find a black grass with chicks there's no sign of the male he's miles away he's had his two seconds of fun two months ago or whatever. The female is entirely on her own and having a one parent looking after the offspring as opposed to two is bound to be a disadvantage and sure enough black grass seem to have lower chicks survival through that period of where chicks are small and indeed they they have smaller brews actually so the species as a whole is not going to do as well and that's a rather intriguing thought I think that sometimes these sexual selection arms races end up making a species more like a chicken.
在这方面，他非常有价值。如果我发现一只黑草鸟和它的小鸟，而雄鸟却踪影全无，可能已经在几英里之外了，他享受了两秒钟的乐趣，那都是两个月前的事情了。通常情况下，雌鸟完全得独立承担养育小鸟的责任，这相比双亲一起抚育会明显处于劣势。而事实证明，黑草鸟一旦进入小鸟还很小的时期，小鸟的存活率就会较低，孵出的鸟也更少。因此，这个物种整体上表现不佳。我认为，这让人觉得很有趣，有时候这种性选择的“军备竞赛”反而使得一个物种变得更像鸡。
That's fascinating so sexual selection could actually be a maladaptive force sort of that pushes species towards an unsustainable extreme. I mean this idea has been around for a long time and there was a sort of rather cartoonish version of it that was invoked for a while. Do you remember the ancient Irish elk this species that went extinct at the end of the ice age which was an enormous deer bigger than a moose and with huge antlers much bigger than a moose is atlas but similar in shape to a moose is atlas and how on earth these poor deer managed to carry these vast antlers around is sort of bit of a mystery.
这很有趣，性选择实际上可能是一种不适应的力量，它把物种推向不可持续的极端。我是说，这个观点已经存在很长时间了，而且曾经有一种相当夸张的版本被提出过。你还记得古代的爱尔兰麋鹿吗？这个物种在冰河时代末期灭绝，是比驼鹿还大的巨大鹿，长着比驼鹿更大的鹿角，但形状与驼鹿的鹿角相似。这些可怜的鹿究竟是如何设法带着这样巨大的鹿角四处生活的，实在是有点神秘。
And what were they for where they were fighting or where they were displaying and actually there's some quite good evidence that they might have been more about display than fighting based on how could they would have been as weapons if you like. But the question of why that species went extinct used to be dominated by the theory that the antlers got too big and the deer couldn't fit between the tits between the trees when you're in my ancestor was running after them with a spear and so they caught them.
他们到底是在战斗还是在展示呢？其实，有相当好的证据表明，相比于战斗，它们更可能是用来展示的，这基于这些东西如果当武器用的话，效果可能并不好。不过为什么这个物种会灭绝的问题，以前主要是由一个理论主导：它们的鹿角越长越大，以至于无法在树木之间穿行。当时人类的祖先拿着长矛追逐它们，因此抓住了它们。
Now nobody thinks that's why it went extinct it was a large animal our ancestors were very good at wiping out large animals which were slow breeding and easy to find you know they wiped out mammals and woolly rhinoceros and step bison and things as well. So at the end of the ice age it was doomed because it got predated by human beings not because or because climate changed or something not because they were the antlers were too big and besides if you look in some of the best bogs in Ireland that have lots of these animals in them where they got stuck in the mud there was higher mortality among young than old deer as you'd expect in any species.
现在没有人认为它是因为这个原因而灭绝的。这是一种大型动物，而我们的祖先非常擅长消灭那些繁殖缓慢且容易找到的大型动物。比如他们消灭了许多哺乳动物、披毛犀牛和草原野牛等等。所以在冰河时代结束时，这种动物注定要灭绝，因为它受到了人类的捕杀，而不是因为气候变化或其他原因，更不是因为它们的鹿角太大。而且，如果你查看爱尔兰某些最好保存的泥炭沼泽，那些地方常常能发现这些动物的遗骸，其中，年幼鹿的死亡率高于年长鹿，这符合任何物种的自然规律。
So to that you know the the the you can take these arguments about section selection being a handicap a little too far if you're trying to use them to explain the extension of a species but but maybe it does play some role how extreme can these traits become then. Well if you the there's a little bird called the club wing mannequin which has a display in which it makes a sort of. Resonant twanging noise with its wings which carries a long way through the Ecuadorian cloud forest where it lives and in order to make this noise the bird has had to redesign.
所以，为了让你知道这一点，你可以说关于特征选择是某种障碍的这些论点，如果你试图用它们来解释物种的扩展，就有些过头了。不过，这些论点可能确实在一些程度上发挥了作用。那么，这些特征可以变得多极端呢？嗯，有一种叫做棒翅伞鸟的小鸟，它在展示时会用翅膀发出一种共鸣的"嗡嗡"声，这种声音可以在它生活的厄瓜多尔云雾森林中传播得很远。为了发出这种声音，鸟儿必须重新设计其翅膀。
Not just the feathers of its wings which are. Contorted in a sort of strange way but the wing bones themselves wing bones are generally the same in all birds I mean obviously there's a scale difference big birds and small birds but but the shape of a wing bone is generally. Pretty well defined as being you know the best strength to weight ratio and things like that not in this species it's got a sort of weird heavy club shape wing bone in its body I mean in its wing which is there purely to enable it to make a twanging noise in the spring time or the breeding system they don't have spring in the equator.
不仅仅是它翅膀上的羽毛呈现出一种奇怪的扭曲形状，其翅骨本身也与众不同。一般来说，鸟类的翅骨形状大致相同，除了大小比例上的差异，大鸟和小鸟有尺寸上的区别，但翅骨的形状通常是明确的，以达到最佳的强度与重量比例等效果。然而，这个物种的翅骨形状却异常古怪，像一个沉重的棍子，这种结构纯粹是为了在繁殖季节发出“嗡嗡”的声音。要注意的是，在赤道附近是没有春季的。
And and Richard problem was written about this in his book the evolution of beauty and it's it's quite a it's quite any good example of just the length I mean this must make it harder to fly for a start the length to which actual selection can go a peacock's tail a the the the there are. There's a bird called the bull was present which lives in Borneo where the male when he displays disappears into an enormous sort of white. Disc which actually comes from his tail and his head is then hidden by Fleshy. Inflated blue tubes that stretch before and after head so he looks like a sort of plate with a.
安德和理查德的问题在他的书《美的进化》中有所描述，这是一个相当好的例子，说明实际选择可以达到的极限。想想孔雀的尾巴，这种尺寸必定会让飞行变得更加困难。在婆罗洲有一种鸟叫做沙锥鸟，当雄鸟展示时，它会变成一个巨大的白色圆盘，这个圆盘实际上是由它的尾巴形成的。它的头部被蓝色的充气肉质管隐藏，这些管子在头的前后延伸，所以看起来就像一个盘子。
Blue knife on it that's not a very good description but do you see what I mean and you get to think. Poor creature you know what have the females done to this species to make it. To submit it to these all deals but that gets to another point which I'm intrigued by which is that sexual selection can be possibly a more creative force the natural selection. Because instead of just saying in a utilitarian way I just want to enable you to survive it says let's try something really wacky and see what we end up with and Richard problem has this theory is the guy who worked out what color the feathers were on dinosaurs by the way and he has a theory that that feathers were invented for display before they were ever used for flight and that we wouldn't have had flight if we hadn't heard sexual display.
蓝色刀子在上面，这不是一个很好的描述，但你明白我是什么意思，你可以思考一下。可怜的生物，你知道女性对这个物种做了什么来让它屈从于这些交易。不过，这又引出了另一个让我感兴趣的观点，那就是性选择可能是比自然选择更具创造力的力量。因为性选择不仅仅是以实用的方式说“我只是想让你生存下来”，而是说“让我们尝试一些非常疯狂的事情，看看我们会得到什么结果”。理查德·普鲁姆有个理论，他是那个研究出恐龙羽毛颜色的人，他认为羽毛最初是为了展示而发明的，然后才用于飞行，如果没有性展示，我们可能就不会有飞行。
Wow that is cool yeah I suppose if you're just rolling the dice in so many ways it's like hey they might be attracted to this tried on you know his new outfit his new fashion have a crack exactly yeah and I haven't mentioned the power birds but I've got to get them in at some point. Australia New Zealand sorry Australia New Guinea where power birds live these are birds that have basically invented art. They build complicated structures not to nest in but to seduce females in it's the male to build them and they decorate them with colorful objects arranged in ways to enhance perspective and ways to look decorative and sorted by color.
哇，真不错！是啊，我想如果你在很多方面冒险试试，就像是“嘿，他们可能会对这个感兴趣”，试穿一下他的新衣服和新时尚，试试看，没错！我还没有提到极乐鸟，但我迟早得提一下。极乐鸟生活在澳大利亚和新几内亚。这些鸟简直就像是发明了艺术一样。它们搭建复杂的结构，不是为了筑巢，而是为了吸引雌鸟，这些结构是由雄鸟建造的，并且用各种颜色鲜艳的物品装饰，以增强立体效果，看起来更具装饰性，并按颜色分类。
And all sorts of things and I watched a great power bird at his power trying to seduce a female with a red chili pepper which he was displaying to her on the edge of a cemetery in Queensland in Australia but his main art installation was a huge patch of grey and white objects which snails cells and birds. Bones and things like that but also bits of plastic and bottle tops and bits of broken glass etc because we were in the edge of a town and this this art installation included not only a plastic hand grenade but a tiara a toy tiara I think it was a toy maybe it was a real diamond tiara.
在澳大利亚昆士兰，我观察到一只强壮的求偶鸟，它努力地用一根红辣椒在墓地边缘展示，试图吸引一只雌鸟。它的主要艺术装置是一个巨大的灰白色物品堆，其中包括蜗牛壳、鸟骨等东西，但也夹杂着塑料片、瓶盖和碎玻璃，因为我们就在一个小镇的边缘。这件艺术装置里不仅有一个塑料手榴弹，还有一个玩具皇冠——我觉得是玩具皇冠，也许真的是钻石做的皇冠。
What about seemingly tiny traits very sort of minuscule things that for us to look at we wouldn't realize that it was actually a different but that that is something that's actually selected for as well. Yes. I mean some of the some of the song things are very very obscure. A lot of the a lot of sea birds things like puffins the male and female look identical you really can't tell the difference between them they can but we can't and they're both brightly colored so there's a bird called a crested Auckland which is a cousin of the puffing which lives in the Pacific Ocean and there was a very neat experiment done.
对于那些看似微小的特征，我们可能不会意识到它们实际上有区别，但这些特征也是被选择的。是的，我的意思是，一些特征确实很难察觉。比如许多海鸟，例如海鹦，雄性和雌性看起来完全一样，我们无法分辨它们的区别，但它们自己能够分辨，而且它们都拥有鲜艳的颜色。有一种叫做簇绒海鹦的鸟，是海鹦的近亲，它们生活在太平洋地区，并且有一个非常巧妙的实验对其进行了研究。
There was a lot of fun on that in the 1990s where they said they grow just a tiny little black sort of forward pointing crest on the top of the head and their beak gets much redder in the breeding season. They took some birds caught some birds and they lengthened the top not on the head or shortened it and then measured how long it took for that bird to acquire a mate and by lengthening the top not you shorten the time that the bird takes to acquire a mate the bird is more attractive and that was true for both sexes.
在1990年代，人们发现了一件有趣的事：在繁殖季节，某些鸟类的头顶会长出一个小小的黑色向前指的冠，而它们的喙也会变得更加红。在研究中，他们抓来一些鸟，把它们头顶的冠加长或缩短，然后测量这些鸟找到配偶所需的时间。结果显示，通过加长头顶的冠，可以缩短鸟找到配偶的时间，因为这样会让它们更具吸引力，而且这一发现对雄鸟和雌鸟都是一样的。
So that's rather intriguing that proved what we had suspected for a long time that that you can get mutual sexual selection you can get choosing is in both sexes in some species for the same criterion and then there's a bird in New Zealand called the paradise shell duck where the male and female are both smart but they look very different male has a black head and a grey pattern body and white wings female has an orange body and a white head that both striking birds. But they look quite different now clearly you know the females are saying I want the male the blackest head and the male to say I want the female with the whiteest head.
这段文字是说，这一现象非常有趣，它证实了我们长久以来的怀疑，即在某些物种中，可能会出现两性都根据同样标准进行选择配偶的情况。在新西兰，有一种鸟叫做天堂翅斑鸭，这种鸟的雄性和雌性都很聪明，但外观却差别很大。雄鸟有一个黑色的头、灰色花纹的身体和白色的翅膀，而雌鸟则有一个橙色的身体和白色的头部。它们都是引人注目的鸟类，但外表明显不同。显然，雌鸟在选择头部最黑的雄鸟，而雄鸟在选择头部最白的雌鸟。
Does that ring a bell to human beings have mutual sexual selection yes were both very choosy when we pick long term partners. But we don't have the same criteria do we you know male beauty and female beauty are different things both on the outside of the body and possibly on the inside of the brain. Okay so. Could sexual selection have shaped the human mind we talk a lot about birds so far let's bring in a little bit closer to home for what it could have done to us.
这是否让你想起一些事？人类是否存在互相的性选择？是的，我们在选择长期伴侣时都非常挑剔。但我们的标准并不相同，对吧？男性美和女性美是不同的，无论是外在还是可能存在于大脑中的内在。那么，性选择是否会影响人类的心理呢？我们常常谈论鸟类，接下来让我们更贴近地讨论一下性选择对我们自身可能产生的影响。
Yeah my book isn't about one ugly African ape but inevitably you know one feels obliged to put a chapter in at the end. Let's talk about this and I'm absolutely sure that sexual selection is going on in our species. I'm also pretty sure it's mutual and not not like the black grass in the in which you know it's female selectivity that's driving male appearance. I think in our both sexes are very selective where a manogamous species at least socially manogamous that doesn't mean we're necessarily faithful and we can be much less select much less choosy when it comes to short term sexual encounters but for long term pervons both sexes are pretty damn choosy about who they settle down with that after all is the plot of every romantic comedy ever made.
是的，我的书并不是关于某种丑陋的非洲猿类，但不可避免地，我觉得有必要在最后加上一章。让我们来谈谈这个问题，我完全相信性选择在我们这个物种中是存在的。我也很确定这种选择是相互的，而不像黑草中那样只有雌性的选择性在影响雄性的外观。我认为在我们这个物种中，双方都非常挑剔。虽然我们在社会上至少是相对一夫一妻的，这并不意味着我们一定很忠诚。对于短期的性接触，我们可能不那么挑剔，但对于长期伴侣关系，双方在选择定居对象时都相当挑剔。毕竟，这就是每一部浪漫喜剧的主题。
So what's going on in human beings what are we selecting for well clearly there are you know sexually selected features of bodies like breasts or beards or something that may be involved in beauty but I think it's more interesting to look at inside the inside of the head. Because the human brain did something very odd it exploded in size over a relatively short period of about a million two million years. Maybe three I don't know but the not a very long period it accelerated the increase in brain size was very steady until around homo erectus it suddenly takes off and actually it's got slightly smaller again in the last 50,000 years we think it reached its maximum size about 50,000 years ago on average and that might be something to do with. You know agriculture enabling us to live on me more meager diets or something like that but it was very costly I mean the human brain is a huge.
人类正在经历什么，我们在选择什么呢？显然，有一些身体特征是通过性选择来的，比如胸部或胡须，这些可能与美有关。不过，我觉得更有趣的是看头脑内部的变化。人类的大脑经历了一件非常奇特的事情，它在约一百万到两百万年的相对短时间内迅速增大。也许是三百万年，我不确定，但总之这不是一个很长的时间。在此期间，大脑体积的增加一直很稳定，直到直立人时期，突然加速增长。实际上，在过去的五万年里，大脑又稍微变小了一些。我们认为，大约五万年前大脑达到了最大尺寸，这可能与农业的发展有关，因为农业使我们能够在更贫乏的饮食条件下生存。然而，这是非常昂贵的，因为人类的大脑消耗很大。
User of energy it takes a lot of energy to build it takes a lot of energy to run it. Why what what's the purpose of growing such a big brain no other species needed it to survive on the savannah and if you say right will it help to get through the ice age on the savannah when the climate was very variable. Well plenty of other species managed to survive on the savannah you know buffaloes and gazelles and baboons and chimpanzees in similar habitats and so on. They didn't need 1200 cc brains so maybe it wasn't all about survival maybe it was about something else now there's two other possibilities one is that it was a social thing that we needed big brains to understand the groups of people we were living in we lived in big groups we were plotting and scheming and deceiving each other so we needed big brains to figure out what other people were up to.
能量的利用 建造和维持消耗大量的能量。为什么要发展这么大的大脑呢？其他物种在草原上生存并不需要它。你可能会说，这有助于在气候多变的冰河时期存活下来，但很多其他物种也成功在草原上生存了，比如水牛、羚羊、狒狒和黑猩猩等等。它们并不需要1200立方厘米的大脑，所以也许这不全是为了生存，可能还有其他原因。有两种可能性：一种是社交原因。我们需要大脑来理解我们生活在其中的人群，因为我们生活在大型群体中，需要策划、计谋和识破彼此的诡计，这样我们才需要大脑去弄清楚其他人在做什么。
And that kind of thing and that's a very popular thing called the social brain hypothesis and that's obviously to some extent true as well. But there's a third possibility which almost never gets discussed but which was laid out in a very good book by Jeffrey Miller 25 years ago called the mating mind in which he says actually this looks awfully like a select a sexually selected feature it's a mental peacock's tail the sudden take off the fact that it didn't happen to others. Species and the fact that the things we use it for are not just solving practical problems or understanding how to get on with each other in society we also use it very conspicuously for things like wit and humor music and song verbal dexterity poetry all these kinds of things.
这种观点通常被称为社会大脑假说，这显然在某种程度上是正确的。但还有第三种可能性，这种可能性几乎从未被讨论过。25年前，杰弗里·米勒在一本非常优秀的书《求偶心智》中提出了这个观点。他认为这实际上类似于一种性选择的特征，像是精神上的孔雀尾巴。这种现象的突然出现，以及它没有在其他物种中发生的事实，再加上我们使用它的方式不仅仅是为了解决实际问题或理解如何在社会中相处，我们还非常明显地用于展示机智和幽默、音乐和歌曲、语言技巧、诗歌等各种活动。
Tool making as well you know in practical things as well some of which looks awfully like showing off to the members of the opposite sex so maybe it and you know it's it's not at all difficult to see that people with great minds are attractive to members of the opposite sex in human beings people you know with the verbal dexterity of George Cluj. The singularity of George Clooney or the singing ability of Mick Jagger you know these guys don't do badly in the attractiveness stakes. I've chosen male examples but I genuinely want to keep stressing that I think in our species is going both ways. Humor is a very good example if you ask people in hell in fisher did this how important is humor to you in choosing a sexual partner. It scores very highly and you know the personal columns the the where people advertise for well I guess they don't do it anybody do it on on on on live but you know good sense of humor GS oh is is a very important part of it.
在工具制作和实际操作方面，人们有时会表现得像是在吸引异性。例如，具有非凡智慧的人往往对异性具有很大的吸引力。比如，像乔治·克鲁尼那样具备语言表达能力，或者像米克·贾格尔那样的歌唱才能，这些特质在吸引力方面的表现都不差。我用了男性的例子，但我想强调的是，这种情况在我们物种中是双向的。幽默感就是一个很好的例子。如果你问人们（正如海伦·费舍尔所做的），在选择性伴侣时幽默感有多重要，它的得分非常高。在个人广告栏目中也经常看到幽默感被列为重要条件之一。因此，幽默感在择偶中占有很重要的地位。
And what what's the point of who humor otherwise you know and watch what people do with humor they show off with it you know they're not doing it to find out information from other people they're doing it to impress other people and that looks awfully like sexual display and so.
这段话的意思是：幽默的目的是什么呢？人们使用幽默的方式是为了炫耀，而不是为了从其他人那里获取信息。他们用幽默来给别人留下深刻印象，这看起来很像是某种性吸引的展示。
Miller says and I think he's right that this isn't a slam dunk this isn't a proven idea but to spend a whole of the 20th century thinking about fried and Marx and Piaget and you know all the other sort of theories of mind behaviorism and and all these things without taking into account that the organ were doing all this behavior with was probably subject to sexual selection.
米勒说，我认为他是对的，这并不是一个必然正确的理论，也不是一个被证明的想法。但是，在整个20世纪，我们花了大量时间研究弗洛伊德、马克思、皮亚杰以及其他各种心智理论、行为主义等，却没有考虑到我们用来进行这些行为的大脑，可能是受到了性选择的影响。
And was probably being used to seduce as well as to survive to do all that without taking that into account is a mistake and we might have left an enormous hole within a lot of our social science within psychology and sociology and economics and all these other disciplines the whole being sex and we need to put it back in there.
这句话的中文翻译和易读表达如下：
"很可能性行为不仅被用来生存，也被用来引诱。如果在研究时没有考虑到这一点，那就是一个错误。这可能在我们的社会科学中，特别是在心理学、社会学和经济学等多个学科中留下了一个巨大的空白。这个空白就是性，我们需要把它重新纳入研究中。"
It's mating all the way down it was always mating. It's turtles all the way down it is. So you know one of the things that you've mentioned there is this I guess by directional sexual selection that traits happen both not just male to female but female to male as well what determines whether it is unit directional or by directional and yeah what does that sort of say about the environment and the child rearing and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a little bit of a sense of humor.
整句话的意思是涉及交配和性选择的话题，表达了一种反复发生、代代相传的现象。就像用“乌龟叠罗汉”来形容不断重复的情形一样，后半段讨论了一种双向的性选择——不仅仅是从雄性到雌性的特征选择，也包括雌性到雄性的特征选择。问题在于是什么决定了这种性选择是单向的还是双向的，这反映了环境和育儿的状况。理解这个问题有时候加上一点幽默感会更容易。
And I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a sense of humor and I think that's the most important and the expectations of that particular species how does that all fit together?
我认为最重要的是培养幽默感。这对个人来说是至关重要的。然而，当谈到一个特定物种的期望和特性时，这一切又是如何结合在一起的呢？
Yes and the person who solved that problem was a brilliant evolutionary psychologist called Robert Trivers who said something that's blinding the obvious but none of us had thought of it before and he said it in the early 70s he said the species where the sex that invests most in rearing the offence of the spring will be competed for by the sex that invests least so it's called parental investment.
好的，这句话可以翻译为：
是的，解决这个问题的那个人是一位出色的进化心理学家，名叫罗伯特·特里弗斯。他在20世纪70年代早期说了一件显而易见但当时我们都没有想到的事情。他指出，在一个物种中，那些在抚养后代上投入最多的性别，会受到在这方面投入最少的性别的追求。这就是所谓的“父母投资理论”。
But it's a vicious circle because as I say the redgrass they both invest a lot in looking after the kids, the blackgrass they don't, the female does it all, so the blackgrass you get huge amount of male-male competition to try to mate with females and a lot of sexual selection less in the rose grows, but which came first, the chicken or the egg, you know, was that did the parental investment come first or the or the sexual selection come first.
这就像一个恶性循环。正如我所说，红草（redgrass）在照顾孩子方面投入很大，而黑草（blackgrass）则不同，都是由雌性来负担照料工作。所以在黑草中，雄性之间为了与雌性交配，会有大量的竞争，并且性选择现象非常显著。而在红草中，这种现象则较少。但问题是，究竟是先有的父母投资（即照顾孩子的精力和资源）呢，还是先有的性选择？这就像“先有鸡还是先有蛋”的难题。
And the sort of exception that proves the rule here is those species of birds where it's reversed, where the brightly colored forward and aggressive females compete for dull colored males because the males sit on the eggs. And I studied one of these species, it's called the grey fallorope, it lives in the Arctic, fallorope, jacanas, dachralls, there's a number of species that do this. It's not very common, but it's not all that rare either.
在这里，“例外证明规则”的一个例子是某些鸟类，它们的情况正好相反。在这些鸟类中，颜色鲜艳、性格积极的雌鸟会竞争颜色暗淡的雄鸟，因为雄鸟负责孵蛋。我研究过这种鸟类中的一种，叫做灰瓣蹼（也称为灰瓣漂鹬），它们生活在北极。还有一些其他的鸟类，如瓣蹼、飞蓬、鸭科鸟类等，也有这种现象。这种情况虽然不常见，但也并不是特别罕见。
And it's, you know, the female is much more conspicuous, much boldly colored, much more spent, much more time displaying and much more inclined to fight with other females. So that kind of proves Trivver's parental investment theory right. Now in human beings, you can say that women do more of the work and of course they do, they do gestation and lactation, which men can't contribute to at all.
可以这样翻译成中文：而且你知道，雌性更加显眼，颜色更鲜艳，花更多时间展示自己，也更倾向于与其他雌性争斗。这些现象验证了特里弗斯的亲代投资理论。在人类中，你可以说女性做的工作更多，她们确实做得更多，比如怀孕和哺乳，这些都是男性完全无法参与的。
But compared with gorillas or chimpanzees, males do contribute an awful lot more parenting than most other grey apes. And we are, we have less sexual dimorphism than most other grey dapes. I mean, you know, male gorilla weighs twice as much, if not more, three times as much as a female gorilla. And he has a hurry of six or seven females.
相比于大猩猩或黑猩猩，人类男性在育儿方面的参与比大多数其他类人猿多得多。而且我们的人类性别二态性比大多数其他类人猿要小得多。比如，一个雄性大猩猩的体重大约是雌性大猩猩的两倍甚至三倍，并且通常拥有六到七只雌性组成的后宫。
In chimpanzees, they have a multi-male system where each female mates with lots of males, partly to frustrate the tendency of males to commit infanticide, which they do in a lot of mammals to bring females back into fertility, probably in human beings too. Look at the number of stepchildren that get killed compared with biological children. The murder rate is much higher.
在黑猩猩社会中，它们拥有一种多雄性制度，每只雌性会与多只雄性交配，这在一定程度上是为了阻止雄性杀婴的行为。在许多哺乳动物中，雄性会通过杀婴使雌性更快地恢复生育能力，人类中可能也存在这种情况。看看被杀的继子女与亲生子女的数量，继子女的被杀率要高得多。
That's the Cinderella effect, as it's known. The Cinderella effect, exactly. So it's unfortunate that there's only four grey dapes, Sarangatang's chimpanzees, gorillas and us, plus the Gibbons are similar species. Because if there were 30 or 40 species of apes, then we could really do some good comparative analysis and see how we ended up with the mating system that we did.
这就是所谓的灰姑娘效应。没错，就是灰姑娘效应。遗憾的是，目前只有四种大型类人猿：猩猩、长臂猿、大猩猩和人类，再加上长臂猿是相似的物种。如果有30或40种猿类，那么我们就可以进行更好的对比分析，从而了解我们是如何演变出现在的交配系统的。
But I would argue that the need for fathers to be involved in provisioning and protecting offspring as well as mothers has been a feature of hunter-gatherer life for a very long time. And it has made us into a species in which females are going to be pretty choosy about males, as well as males being pretty choosy about females.
但是，我认为在很长时间以来的狩猎采集者的生活中，父亲参与抚养和保护后代与母亲一样重要。这使得我们这个物种中的女性对男性会非常挑剔，同样，男性对女性也会非常挑剔。
Are there any parallels between bird mating behaviors or whatever, and human romantic displays or social structures? Well, it's hard not to watch some of these bird displays and not draw parallels with nightclubs and other things. There's a strutting that both species do, I suppose. But I think that's mostly anthropomorphism.
鸟类的求偶行为或其他习性与人类的浪漫表现或社会结构之间是否有相似之处？看到一些鸟类的表现，很难不联想到夜总会等场所的情景。两者都有炫耀自己的行为。不过，我觉得这主要是人类的拟人化解释。
We human beings, I think song is actually the most intriguing one, because there's no other mammal that is as interested in singing as we are with the possible exception of Gibbons. And maybe Halemonkees. But we, song and language, are very unique and remarkable human features, and they feature heavily in seduction and display. That's true of many birds as well.
我认为，对我们人类来说，歌曲是一种非常迷人的事物。因为除了长臂猿之外，没有其他哺乳动物像我们一样对唱歌如此感兴趣。也许吼猴也算在内。但是，我们的歌曲和语言是非常独特和了不起的人类特征，它们在求偶和展示中占有很重要的地位。这一点在许多鸟类中也同样适用。
And the complexity of song in birds is truly extraordinary, the number of different phrases and different motifs. Oh, sorry, I've left out whales, I've not wails really, seeing as much as we do, so there are another example. But I think, you know, we, when you, when you try and teach a chimpanzee to speak, it's really tough, and you can get up to a few hundred words, you can't get grandma, you can't get syntax, really, to speak of, same for a gorilla.
鸟类的歌声复杂程度非常惊人，它们有多种不同的乐句和主题。我差点忘了鲸鱼，尽管我们没法像对待鸟类那样亲眼观察它们的交流，它们也是一个很好的例子。不过，当你尝试教一只黑猩猩说话时，你会发现这非常困难。尽管它们能学会几百个词汇，但它们无法掌握复杂的语法结构，这对大猩猩来说也是一样的。
When you try and teach a parrot to speak, and this has been done, there was a famous African parrot called Alex, who was an enormous vocabulary, and really seemed to understand grammar in a way that any other, most other animals can't, you know, the word order or whatever matters, you know, in terms of what it means. In that sense, there are similarities to us and birds.
当你尝试教一只鹦鹉说话时，这是可以做到的。曾经有一只著名的非洲鹦鹉叫做亚历克斯，它的词汇量非常大，而且似乎真的理解语法，程度上比大多数其他动物都高。它能理解词语顺序或其他规则在表达意义时的重要性。从这个角度来看，我们和鸟类之间有一些相似之处。
Okay, another similarity question, I guess, do birds and humans have an innate appreciation for beauty? Is the drive for aesthetic pleasure some evolutionary force? There's a, there's a rather good quote from Darwin on this, which I'm, I'm rather fond of, which is birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, accepting, of course, man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.
好吧，我想再问一个关于相似性的问题，鸟类和人类是否天生就能欣赏美呢？对美的追求是否是一种进化力量？我特别喜欢达尔文的一句话，他说，除了人类之外，鸟类似乎是所有动物中最具有审美能力的，它们对美的品味几乎和我们一样。
And, you know, he's really flirting with a dangerous idea there that, you know, there's something uncannily similar about us and birds here because there's no reason why, you know, he's, it's convergent evolution if, if we and birds have this similar taste for the beautiful. And one of the things that I've been thinking about is it's unlikely to have been inherited from a common ancestor, there's taste for the beautiful, because our common ancestor with birds, we now know, lived about 400 million years ago. That's an awfully long time ago. And we know what that common ancestor looked like, roughly, it was a lumbering reptile that lived in a swamp. It gave rise to both the dinosaurs, which gave rise to the birds and to the so-called mammal-like reptiles, which gave rise to the mammals. So, we're not close cousins descended from a creature that had a sense of the beautiful, probably, maybe we are, but it doesn't seem likely.
他在那里真的在玩一个危险的想法，就是我们和鸟类之间有某种神秘的相似之处，因为实在没有理由说明我们和鸟类如果都有对美的相似品味，那就是趋同演化。我一直在想的一件事是，这种对美的品味不太可能是从共同祖先那里继承下来的，因为我们与鸟类的共同祖先大约生活在4亿年前。那是非常久远的时期，我们大致知道那个共同祖先的样子，它是生活在沼泽地的一种笨拙的爬行动物，后来演化出恐龙，恐龙又进化成鸟类，同时这种爬行动物也演化出所谓的类哺乳动物的爬行动物，最终进化成哺乳动物。因此，我们并不是来自一个对美有感觉的生物的近亲后代，可能我们是，但这似乎不太可能。
It seems more likely that we have ended up with an appreciation of colour and tune and song and melody and fashion and all these kind of things. And so have quite a lot of bird species. And it just so happens that those have ended up with similar outcomes. Now, why might that be? Well, notice that on the whole section selection goes for pure colours, not browns and grays. So, it goes for limited number of wavelengths, limited number of frequencies, pure hues. If you've got every hue, you can think of, then you end up looking brown. And it's the same with song. If you just want to make a noise, a click or a roar or something, it's got every sort of frequency in it. But if you go for just specific frequencies, you get a whistle or a tone or a tune. And that's, of course, much harder to do.
看起来，我们对颜色、音调、歌曲、旋律、时尚以及类似事物的欣赏很可能是这样发展的。而许多鸟类也有类似的特点。那为什么会这样呢？要注意，总体上来说，自然选择倾向于纯色，而不是棕色和灰色。也就是说，它偏好有限的波长、有限的频率和纯色调。如果你拥有所有可以想到的色调，那么最终看起来就会是棕色的。对于歌曲也是如此。如果你只是想发出一种噪声，比如咔嗒声或者吼叫声，那其中包含了各种频率。但如果你只选择特定的频率，就能得到口哨声、音调或曲子。当然，这要困难得多。
I mean, you can make a boring noise by dropping a rock or you can paint something brown just by mixing lots of materials together. But to actually create something that has a pure colour or a pure sound is much more improbable, much more unlikely, much more conspicuous, much rarer. And that's why we find it. That's why we use it in our sexual displays. And that's why birds use it in their sexual displays. And so there's a sort of almost a thermodynamic idea at the root of this. But as you can see, I'm beginning to wave my hands a bit and I haven't thought this one through properly. I like it. I mean, definitely the refined nature of it not being everything suggests that you're purposefully doing this one thing. If you're brown, this, you didn't mean to be brown, you just are brown.
我的意思是，你可以通过扔下石头制造出无聊的声音，或者通过混合许多材料来调成棕色。但是，要真正创造出纯粹的颜色或声音要困难得多，不太可能，更加显眼，也更加罕见。这就是为什么我们会被它吸引，这也是为什么我们会在我们的求偶展示中使用它，鸟儿们也是如此。这背后有一种几乎是热力学的观点。不过，正如你所看到的，我有些描述得意大利语手势表达（有些笼统），还没完全想清楚这一点。我喜欢这个概念，它的精致在于它排除了其他可能性，意味着你在有意地做这件事。如果你是棕色的，这并不是你刻意为之，你只是恰好是棕色的。
But if you're such a pure colour, if you're such a pure note or tone or sound or whatever, that suggests that there's been some thought put into it, some pressure selected for it. Yes, there's a sort of watchmaker aspect to it. What do you think, so taking a broader picture here, lots of past failures in evolutionary theory, trying to work out why things were the way that they were? What do you think we should learn about biases in interpreting our nature, what we should consider, where things come from, given the replete history of us putting off both of our feet in our mouths and getting stuff wrong all the time?
如果你真的是如此纯粹的颜色、音符、音调或声音，通常意味着背后经过深思熟虑，甚至可能是某种压力促成的。可以说，这其中带有一种“钟表匠”的意味。那么，从一个更广泛的角度来看，演化理论中过去有很多失败的尝试，一直试图弄清楚事物为什么会是现在的样子。基于我们常常判断失误的丰富历史，你认为我们在理解人类本性时应该学习和注意哪些偏见？我们应该考虑哪些因素，去探究这些现象的起源？
Well, for me, the history of science always teaches the importance of humility. Overconfident rejection of maverick ideas is the constant theme of all science. But that doesn't mean that every maverick who comes along waving a new theory is Galileo. Quite a lot of the time he's not. Or she's not. For me, that's the big puzzle of my life, is how do I know when to listen to a maverick and when to tell them to get lost? Because there are many, many scientific debates where you just want to say, oh, for God's sake, get real, that idea can't be right. And 95% of the time, your right to have that attitude. But 5% of the time, you're being like Catholics and being dogmatic and telling a perfectly sensible chap to get lost when you shouldn't.
对我来说，科学史一直教导我们谦逊的重要性。过于自信地拒绝特立独行的想法是科学中反复出现的主题。但这并不意味着每个带着新理论出现的特立独行者都是伽利略。大多数时候，他们并不是。对我来说，人生中的一个大难题是，我如何知道什么时候该倾听特立独行者，什么时候该让他们走开。因为在很多科学争论中，你常常会想说，拜托，现实点，这个想法不可能是正确的。而在95%的时间里，你有理由持这种态度。但在5%的时间里，你可能像那些顽固的宗教人士一样，固执己见，把一个非常合理的人拒之门外，而这是你不该做的。
And this was true of Darwin generally, isn't he? He was a maverick and a heretic and he had to work really hard to get taken seriously. An evolution was rejected and still is by many people. And it's true of his sexual selection idea where he was rejected as a nut case in his lifetime and for quite a long time afterwards. And wrongly so. But you know, since then, lots of people have put forward fresh ideas about why birds are colourful, for example, to go back to this. There was a theory in the 1980s that it was all about warning predators that you were in good health and therefore there was no point in chasing you.
达尔文的情况确实如此，不是吗？他是个特立独行者和异端分子，他必须非常努力才能被人们认真对待。发展进化论遭到了许多人的否定，至今仍有不少人不接受。同样，他关于性选择的理论在他在世时以及之后很长一段时间内都被当作疯子言论而被拒绝，这种看法是错误的。不过，自那时以来，已有很多人提出了新的观点。例如，有人想解释为什么鸟类色彩斑斓。在20世纪80年代，有一种理论认为，鸟类鲜艳的颜色是为了警告捕食者它们身体健康，所以捕食者没有必要去追赶它们。
Well, I don't really see why a kingfisher needs to do that more than a sparrow. But you know, maybe there's an idea there. And in general, I'm more frustrated by science being too dogmatic than being too open to new ideas. Yes, if you're too open to new ideas, if you open your mind too much, your brain falls out for someone once put it. But I would like generally to teach the lesson that we need to be more tolerant of disagreement, of heresy, of mavericks and give them at least the privilege of testing their ideas.
好的，我不太理解为什么翠鸟比麻雀更需要这样做。但是，你知道的，这其中可能有个想法。总体来说，我对科学过于教条主义比对其过于开放更感到沮丧。是的，如果你过于开放接受新想法，就像有人说的那样，脑袋会掉出来。但总体上，我希望能传达这样一个信息：我们需要更加包容不同意见、异端思想和特立独行的人，至少应该给他们测试自己想法的机会。
And that said, you often get told by people, I've got this new theory and the line I always come back with was, how are you going to test it? And that often shuts people up. So it's lazy to come up with an idea. It takes work to test it. Awesome. Matt Ridley, ladies and gentlemen, Matt, I'm a massive fan of your work. I think this is really, really interesting. I didn't realize I was going to become such a garage-oran-athologist for the afternoon.
在中文中，这段话可以表达为：
"话虽如此，经常会有人跟你说，他们有一个新理论，我总是回应说：你打算怎么验证这个理论呢？这通常就能让他们哑口无言。所以，仅仅提出一个想法是懒惰的，验证它才需要努力。太棒了。女士们先生们，这是马特·雷德利。马特，我非常喜欢你的作品。我觉得这真的很有趣。我没想到今天下午我会变成一个‘车库鸟类学家’。"
Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with your work and what you've got coming out? Well, I have a website which I mostly keep up to date. It's called matriddly.co.uk. I'm just about to get on the sub-stack, I think, too. I can turn my stuff out there. But I'm on Twitter, not very active on Facebook and LinkedIn, but I try and be. And I write books and journalism as well.
人们应该去哪里关注你的动态呢？你想要让大家了解你的工作和即将发布的内容吗？我有一个网站，基本上会保持更新，网址是matriddly.co.uk。我也准备试着用Substack发布我的作品。同时我也在Twitter上，虽然在Facebook和LinkedIn上不太活跃，但我会努力活跃一些。另外，我也写书和新闻报道。
And the book is called, I should say, Bird, Sex and Beauty, the strain, what's the sub-stack? The implications of Charles Darwin's Strangers' idea. Heck yeah. Matt, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on and allowing me to rabid on at such length.
这本书的名字，我应该说是《鸟类、性与美——是什么让人们感到为难？》它探讨了查尔斯·达尔文陌生观点的影响。太好了。马特，我很感谢你。非常感谢你邀请我，让我能如此详细地畅所欲言。
Do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a god is able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself? Well, the YouTube gods have selected this episode, specifically for you, bespoke. So, gone. Don't check it out.
你是否觉得YouTube的算法有点像一个无所不知的神，能了解一些连你自己都不知道的事情？好吧，YouTube大神为你专门挑选了这一集。所以，不要错过，去看看吧。