可爱、性感、甜蜜、有趣：进化的奥秘（视频）
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.
我在世界各地与大家讨论达尔文而最常提及的是他特殊的逆向推理这个词出自一位早期评论家我把最爱的一段评论分享给各位。
"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."
「据此理论，『无知』为万物之始此一基本原则，为系统之基石举例而言，『要制造一台完美的机器其实并不需要了解制造方法。』 达尔文经由缜密思虑得此论点且以锤炼之字句表明其主旨简单明了地传达其意其逆向推理独到之处在于肯定『无知』，视其为难得之物可取代『全知』，辅创新之念于大成」
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."
的确这个理论确实背离一般常理神造世界论者的传单上可能会问测验二有建筑不出自建筑者之手吗？有画作不出自创作者之手吗？有车子不出自制造者之手吗？如果你都回答「有」，请举例详细说明。
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！这就是我所谓违常的逆向推理你可能一向认为每个设计都需要厉害的设计师达尔文却认为这样才不合理。
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.
不过今天解释的是其他逆向推理乍听时一样难懂，不过同等重要我们喜欢蛋糕，因为它是甜的男人都爱辣妹，因为她们性感我们喜欢婴儿，因为他们很可爱还有，笑话引人发噱是因为好笑。
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.
达尔文解释这些推论都倒果为因喜爱甜食是因为人对糖分很敏感我们需要糖的高能量因此人脑才将糖设定为我们喜欢的物质蜂蜜会甜是因为我们喜欢蜂蜜蜂蜜在本质上没有甜的成分即使你死盯着葡萄糖的分子结构你还是不知道为什么它是甜的原因其实就藏在我们的大脑里如果你先假定，甜食中有甜的成分我们的大脑演化成喜欢这种成分那就错了应该要倒过来才对甜味是随着大脑的演化而诞生。
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.
这些女生其实跟性感毫无关系幸好没有，因为如果有的话自然界会有大麻烦黑猩猩怎么愿意跟伴侣交配呢？你可能说解决之道是：幻想这是一个方法；但还有一个更快的就是改变黑猩猩的脑回路让它们喜欢那种长相的伴侣奥秘说穿了就是这样演化至今，人跟黑猩猩已大不相同我们全身的毛发退化但出于某些原因它们的却没有若我们也没有，那或许这才是性感。
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.
我们喜欢甜食，是因为它的高能量跟巧克力蛋糕本身无关巧克力蛋糕是种超乎寻常的刺激诺贝尔生物学奖得主丁柏格做过一个有名的海鸥实验他发现海鸥嘴上那个橘色的点如果变大一点或颜色更鲜艳一点小海鸥啄食它时会更用力它对小海鸥而言是个强烈的刺激实验的意义是超乎寻常的刺激像是巧克力蛋糕会改变天性还有很多东西是超乎寻常的刺激有些会引发性感的感觉。
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.
有些会引发可爱的感觉举个例子婴儿必须讨喜，所以即使弄脏尿布我们也不会因为这样就不爱他们顺道一提，最近一个研究指出妈妈喜欢闻自己宝宝的脏尿布看来大自然的影响无处不及呢但是如果婴儿现在是长成这样我们就会觉得这是可爱的你可能会想「天啊！我才不要抱他」 这就是逆向推里。
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.
最后好笑的感觉其实原理一样不过难解释、也不明显，所以放最后而且我所知有限，能说的也不多但从进化的角度思考，什么该先做打桩的工作一定最难但非做不可因为一旦成功贡献是超乎想像的现在，我与几个同事已经有了答案脑部的神经系统已经预设完成麻烦工作后应给予自己奖励我们对于这种反应的标准解释是这是解决麻烦的快乐我在这里只简单说明一下只有解决某些问题会觉得快乐我们把幽默感当成神经探测针用来衡量一个笑话好不好笑现在不好笑....噢！现在好笑多了！如果转回来一点...现在又不好笑了透过这样的解释比较容易理解大脑的构造就是能让大脑发挥功用的构造。
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.
赫利贡献最大，研究成果以他命名另外还有心理学家亚当斯和我我们正在整理研究成果准备出版谢谢大家！
